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The Dangers Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Much Ado About Nothing?, Steve P. Calandrillo, Ewa M. Davison
The Dangers Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Much Ado About Nothing?, Steve P. Calandrillo, Ewa M. Davison
William & Mary Law Review
In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at protecting copyright holders from those who might manufacture or traffic technology capable of allowing users to evade piracy protections on the underlying work. At its core, the DMCA flatly prohibits the circumvention of "technological protection measures "in order to gain access to copyrighted works, but provides no safety valve for any traditionally protected uses. While hailed as a victory by the software and entertainment industries, the academic and scientific communities have been far less enthusiastic. The DMCA's goal of combating piracy is a …
Contractual Expansion Of The Scope Of Patent Infringement Through Field-Of-Use Licensing, Mark R. Patterson
Contractual Expansion Of The Scope Of Patent Infringement Through Field-Of-Use Licensing, Mark R. Patterson
William & Mary Law Review
Patentees sometimes employ field-of-use licenses, under which they grant the right to use their inventions, but only in specified ways. Field-of-use licensing is often procompetitive, because the ability to provide different licensing terms for different users can encourage broader licensing of inventions. But in recent cases, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and several district courts have upheld field-of-use licenses that prohibited activities that would otherwise have been permitted by patent law, such as the repair and resale of patented products. By treating any violation of a license agreement as patent infringement, and by upholding license provisions that …
A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
William & Mary Law Review
More than 150 years into development of the doctrine of "fair use" in American copyright law, there is no end to legislative, judicial, and academic efforts to rationalize the doctrine. Its codification in the 1976 Copyright Act appears to have contributed to its fragmentation, rather than to its coherence. As did much of copyright law, fair use originated as a judicially unacknowledged effort via the law to validate certain favored practices and patterns. In the main, it has continued to be applied as such, though too often courts mask their implicit validation of these patterns in the now-conventional "caseby- case" …