Law Commons^™

Control Over Contemporary Photography: A Tangle Of Copyright, Right Of Publicity, And The First Amendment, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professional photographers who make photographs of people negotiate a tense relationship between their own creative freedoms and the right of their subjects to control their images. This negotiation formally takes place over the terrain of copyright, right of publicity, and the First Amendment. Informally, photographers describe implied understandings and practice norms guiding their relationship with subjects, infrequently memorialized in short, boilerplate contractual releases. This short essay explores these formal and informal practices described by contemporary professional photographers. Although the evidence for this essay comes from professional photographic practice culled from interviews with contemporary photographers, the analysis of the evidence speaks …

The Semiotics Of Film In Us Supreme Court Cases, Jessica Silbey, Meghan Hayes Slack

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the treatment of film as a cultural object among varied legal subject matter in US Supreme Court jurisprudence. Film is significant as an object or industry well beyond its incarnation as popular media. Its role in law – even the highest level of US appellate law – is similarly varied and goes well beyond the subject of a copyright case (as a moving picture) or as an evidentiary proffer (as a video of a criminal confession). This chapter traces the discussion of film in US Supreme Court cases in order to map the wide-ranging and diverse ­relations …

The Constitutionality Of Copyright Term Extension: How Long Is Too Long, Jane C. Ginsburg, Wendy J. Gordon, Arthur R. Miller, William F. Patry

Faculty Scholarship

I am Professor William Patry of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. I will be the moderator of this star-studded debate on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

This panel will try to determine, on the great continuum of limited times that the Constitution prescribes for copyright in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, the term of protection that Congress has actually fixed. In other words: How long is too long? Sonny's bill establishes a term of protection of life plus seventy years for individual authors for works created on or after January 1, 1978. The bill retroactively …

Exploiting The Artist's Commercial Identity: The Merchandizing Of Art Images, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

"Merchandizing properties" are not a recent arrival on the copyright and trademark scene. As early as the 1930s, the Walt Disney Company foresaw the substantial economic gains from licensing the images of its animated motion picture characters in a variety of consumer media, from publications, to soft toys, clothing and household items. Most recently, the World Intellectual Property Organization has prepared a substantial comparative law study of "Character Merchandising." The merchandizing of fine arts images, however, is a more recent development, and is one that has so far received less attention from academic commentators. This article offers some preliminary observations, …