Law Commons^™

A New Weapon Against Piracy: Patent Protection As An Alternative Strategy For Enforcement Of Digital Rights, Dennis S. Fernandez, Matthew Chivvis, Mengfei Huang

ExpressO

This article illustrates how patents and copyrights complement each other to provide a better defense for creative works. Copyrights protect expression, and patents protect underlying functions. Currently, the one-time strengths of copyrights are being eroded as courts allow new technologies to flourish which enable digital reproduction and piracy. This has encouraged companies and industries to move increasingly to patent protection and any company that fails to pursue this trend may be left behind. In sum, patents are a worthwhile strategy because they assist copyright owners in controlling the technology that enables infringement while copyrights alone would leave a company vulnerable …

Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler

ExpressO

The Digital Age has spawned major legal battles over the fundamental principles of intellectual property law and antitrust law. These diverse struggles can best be analyzed using the basic norm of "value added" from neo-classical normative economics. This analysis suggests that current intellectual property doctirnes provide excessive protection and current antitrust doctrines remain awkward in dealing with the cross-market leveraging of monopoly power in the presence of "natural monopolies" created by network effects.

Harry Potter And The Three-Second Crime: Are We Vanishing The De Minimis Defense From Copyright Law?, Julie Cromer

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Digital Wars -- Legal Battles And Economic Bottlenecks In The Digital Information Industries, Curt A. Hessler

ExpressO

The Digital Revolution has created the apparent anomaly that information, though very cheap to create and near costless to share, is managed by industries that are increasingly concentrated and roiled by endless legal warfare. This paper surveys the major legal battles by subjecting all of them to the familiar norm of "maximizing economic value added", as defined by neo-classical "welfare economics". The various legal wars are traced to defects and confusions in current legal approaches to intellectual property (the "property wars") and to antitrust doctrines (the "monopoly wars").

Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda For Copyright Reform , Hannibal B. Travis

ExpressO

This article proposes a series of copyright reforms to pave the way for digital library projects like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Print, which promise to make much of the world’s knowledge easily searchable and accessible from anywhere. Existing law frustrates digital library growth and development by granting overlapping, overbroad, and near-perpetual copyrights in books, art, audiovisual works, and digital content. Digital libraries would benefit from an expanded public domain, revitalized fair use doctrine and originality requirement, rationalized systems for copyright registration and transfer, and a new framework for compensating copyright owners for online infringement without imposing derivative …

The Role Of Levies In Canada's Digital Music Marketplace, Jeremy F. Debeer

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

This paper considers whether such initiatives are a desirable alternative to the current system of exclusive proprietary copyrights. My goal is not to evaluate the nuances of any particular levy scheme or proposal, but to consider the implications of the concept from a specifically Canadian perspective. Despite the generality of the analysis, many of the observations and conclusions about the viability of levy schemes relate to Canada’s actual experiences with its existing private copying levy.

The paper concludes that tariffs or levies on the products and services of third parties are not the best method to support the Canadian music …

Intellectual Property Rights In Digital Media: A Comparative Analysis Of Legal Protection, Technological Measures And New Business Models Under E.U. And U.S. Law, Nicola Lucchi

ExpressO

The production of digital content is a phenomenon which has completely changed the conditions of access to knowledge. Within this framework it becomes even more important to find and to formulate a new settlement for intellectual property rights balancing contrasted rights. Owners of the old technology and policy makers have found two different solutions and remedies for intellectual property rights: legal and technological. When both remedies work together any rights that a consumer may have under copyright law could be replaced by a unilaterally defined contractual term and condition. To balance this inequity this article analyses different solutions under U.S. …

The Drm Dilemma: Re-Aligning Rights Under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Jacqueline D. Lipton

ExpressO

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (‘DMCA’) prevents unauthorized copying and distribution of digital copyright works by regulating devices that can be used to circumvent Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) measures that are used to restrict access to those works. A significant problem is that those devices, like many new technologies, have the potential to be used for both socially harmful and socially beneficial purposes. There is no obvious way for Congress to regulate circumvention devices to prevent the social harms, while at the same time facilitating the social benefits they might provide. Recent judicial interpretations of the DMCA have unsurprisingly erred …

Keeping Score: The Struggle For Music Copyright, Michael W. Carroll

ExpressO

Inspired by the passionate contemporary debates about music copyright, this Article investigates how, when, and why music first came within copyright's domain. Although music publishers and recording companies are among the most aggressive advocates for strong copyright protection today, when copyright law was first invented in eighteenth-century England, music publishers resisted its extension to music. This Article sheds light on a series of early legal disputes concerning printed music that yield important insights into original understandings of copyright law and music's role in society. By focusing attention on this understudied episode, this Article demonstrates that the concept of copyright was …

Davidson & Associates, Inc. V. Internet Gateway, Inc. ("Bnetd"), Eighth Circuit, Brief Of Amici Curiae Consumers Union And Public Knowledge In Support Of Internet Gateway, Inc., Tim Jung, Ross Combs And Rob Crittenden, Laura Quilter, Jennifer Urban, Deirdre Mulligan

Laura Quilter

Amicus brief to the Eighth Circuit.

Davidson & Associates, Inc. V. Internet Gateway, Inc. ("Bnetd"), Eighth Circuit, Brief Of Amici Curiae Consumers Union And Public Knowledge In Support Of Internet Gateway, Inc., Tim Jung, Ross Combs And Rob Crittenden, Laura Quilter, Jennifer Urban, Deirdre Mulligan

Jennifer M. Urban

Yours For Keeps: Mgm V. Grokster, Max Oppenheimer

All Faculty Scholarship

In MGM v. Grokster, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, all parties have made the assumption that most P2P file transfers infringe copyrights. Two theories contradict that assumption: a significant number of individuals who transfer files over P2P networks may have a license to do so, and the Copyright Act itself may exempt the transfer of certain categories of entertainment files over P2P networks from the definition of infringement.

Reconsidering The Dmca, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

patents, Law and economics, prosecution history estoppel, doctrine of equivalents, ex ante, ex post, default rules, PTO, Federal Circuit, patent prosecution, patent litigation, intellectual property, patent reform, patent administration, patent office

The Future Of Copyright, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Review of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig (2004).

Sometimes technological change is so profound that it rocks the foundations of an entire body of law. Peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing systems--Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, Grokster, and Freenet3--are mere symptoms of a set of technological innovations that have set in motion an ongoing process of fundamental changes in the nature of copyright law. The video tape recorder begat the Sony substantial noninfringing use defense. The digital cassette recorder begat the Audio Home Recording Act. The internet begat the Digital …

The Purpose Of Copyright Law In Canada, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

IN THREE RECENT CASES, the Supreme Court of Canada provided several pieces of the Canadian copyright policy puzzle. We now know that the economic purpose of copyright law is instrumentalist in nature, namely, to ensure the orderly production and distribution of, and access to, works of art and intellect. The Court added that copyright can not enter carelessly into the private sphere of individual users. By targeting end-users in recent lawsuits, copyright holders have also found out that it is difficult to enforce a right that has not been properly internalized. After reviewing the Supreme Court trilogy of cases, the …

Solving The Digital Piracy Puzzle: Disaggregating Fair Use From The Dmca's Anti-Device Provisions, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Copyright law has always involved balancing creative pursuits against innovations in copying, distribution and, more recently, encryption technologies. A significant problem for copyright law is that many such technologies can be utilized for both socially useful and socially harmful purposes. It is difficult to regulate such technologies in a way that prevents social harms while at the same time facilitating social benefits. The most recent example of this dynamic is evident in the 2005 United States Supreme Court decision in MGM v Grokster - dealing with digital file-sharing technologies. This article draws from the file sharing debate in considering another …

Rewriting Fair Use And The Future Of Copyright Reform, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Essay describes a social practices approach to the production of creative expression, as a construct to guide reform of copyright law. Specifically, it reimagines copyright's fair use doctrine by basing its statutory text explicitly on social practices. It argues that the social practices approach is consistent with the historical development of the fair use doctrine and with the policy goals of copyright law, and that the approach should be recognized in the text of the statute as well as in judicial applications of fair use.