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Full-Text Articles in Law
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
Articles
For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which …
Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane
Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …
Upstream Patents = Downstream Bottlenecks, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Michael A. Heller
Upstream Patents = Downstream Bottlenecks, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Michael A. Heller
Articles
Thirty years ago in Science, Garrett Hardin introduced the metaphor "tragedy of the commons" to help explain overpopulation, air pollution, and species extinction. People often overuse resources they own in common because they have no incentive to conserve. Today, Hardin's metaphor is central to debates in economics, law, and science and powerful justification for privatizing commons property. While the metaphor highlights the cost of overuse when governments allow too many people to use a scarce resource, it misses the possibility of underuse when governments give too many people rights to exclude others. Privatization can solve one tragedy, but cause another.
The Patentability Of A Principle Of Nature, John B. Waite
The Patentability Of A Principle Of Nature, John B. Waite
Articles
The extent to which courts will go in conceding patentability to a natural law, or principle of nature, is evidenced in the case of Minerals Separation Co. v. Hyde, 37 Sup. Ct. -, decided by the Supreme Court, December 11, 1916. It has always been more or less an axiom of patent law that the discovery of a principle of nature does not entitle the discoverer to a patent for it. The case usually thought of first as authority therefor, is that of Morton v. New York Eye Infirmary, 5 Blatch. 116, 2 Fisher 320. The patentees in that case …
Limitations Upon The Use, After Sale, Of Patented Articles, John B. Waite
Limitations Upon The Use, After Sale, Of Patented Articles, John B. Waite
Articles
In the case of Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Co., 37 Sup. Ct. 416, the Supreme Court has just rendered a decision which reverses the much discussed case of Henry v. Dick Co., 224 U. S. 1. The opinion was by a divided court, however, as three of the justices dissented, and Justice McREYNOLDS "concurred in the result" only. It can, therefore, hardly be said to settle the ultimate rule as in contradiction to that followed in Henry v. Dick Co., and discussion of the case is of something more than mere academic value. The facts were that …
The Patentability Of A Mental Process, John B. Waite
The Patentability Of A Mental Process, John B. Waite
Articles
The fact of possession has been so correlated with the theory of property that it is difficult to dissociate ownership from the possibility of physical possession. One finds that the average lawyer, even though he may defind a right in rem as a right enforcible against any person, is extremely apt, unless after especial thought, to explain that it is enforcible against anyone because it pertains to a thing capable of physical possession and control, a thing that could be actually sequestered, from all other persons. Not at all infrequently the term property has been judicially stripped even of its …