Law Commons^™

Neutral Citation, Court Web Sites, And Access To Case Law, Peter W. Martin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In 1994 the Wisconsin Bar and Judicial Council together urged the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take two dramatic steps with the combined aim of improving access to state case law: 1) adopt a new system of neutral citation and 2) establish a digital archive of decisions directly available to all publishers and the public. The recommendations set off a storm, and the Wisconsin court deferred decision on the package. In the years since those events, the background conditions have shifted dramatically. Neutral citation has been endorsed by the AALL and ABA and formally adopted in over a dozen states, including …

Creative Commons As Conversational Copyright, Michael Carroll

PIJIP Faculty Scholarship

Copyright law's default settings inhibit sharing and adaptation of creative works even though new digital technologies greatly enhance individuals' capacity to engage in creative conversation. Creative Commons licenses enable a form of conversational copyright through which creators share their works, primarily over the Internet, while asserting some limitation on user's right with respect to works in the licensed commons. More specifically, this chapter explains the problems in copyright law to which Creative Commons licenses respond, the methods chosen, and why the machine-readable and public aspects of the licenses are specific examples of a more general phenomenon in digital copyright law …

A Universal Copyright Fund: A New Way To Bridge The Copyright Divide, Kung-Chung Liu, Haochen Sun

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The ever-increasing digitization of works, along with the deployment of technical measures to protect such works and the expansive use of the Internet, further exacerbate the divide between the IP-rich and IP-poor countries in their ability to benefit from such works. It is suggested by this paper that to borrow from experiences on how the telecommunications world provides universal service to each and every household at affordable prices, and to endeavor to shed some new light on how the copyright divide can be narrowed. It is structured in three parts. The first part will examine the past and future failure …

Google The Gozerian And Fair Use Slimed: Copyright Again In The Technocrat's Den, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the fair use doctrine as it applies to Google's Library Search Project and both predicts and advocates for a finding of fair use. Part I briefly reviews the past by considering the pertinent history of the fair use doctrine. It also explains the details of the current suit over Google's Library Project. Part II moves on to consider the current state of fair use analysis by reviewing 110 fair use cases and conducting simple statistical analyses. It then explains and applies the fair use doctrine to Google's project. Part III considers cases frequently compared to Google's and …

Copyright And Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, And Thomas Jefferson, Justin Hughes

Articles

Because we learn from history, we also try to teach from history. Persuasive discourse of all kinds is replete with historical examples – some true and applicable to the issue at hand, some one but not the other, and some neither. Beginning in the 1990s, intellectual property scholars began providing descriptive accounts of a tremendous strengthening of copyright laws, expressing the normative view that this trend needs to be arrested, if not reversed. This thoughtful body of scholarly literature is sometimes bolstered with historical claims – often casual comments about the way things were. The claims about history, legal or …

The Penumbral Public Domain: Constitutional Limits On Quasi-Copyright Legislation, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

This Article attempts to reconcile the breadth of the modern Commerce Clause with the notion of meaningful and enforceable limits on Congress' copyright authority under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

The Article aims to achieve two objectives. First, it seeks to outline a general approach to identifying and resolving inter-clause conflicts, sketching a methodology that has been lacking in the courts' sparse treatment of such conflicts. Second, it applies that general framework to the copyright power in order to outline the scope of constitutional prohibitions against quasi-copyright protections. In particular, this application focuses on the federal anti-bootlegging statutes and …

The Magnificence Of The Disaster: Reconstructing The Sony Bmg Rootkit Incident, Deirdre Mulligan, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Faculty Publications

Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.

The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security …

Digital Rights Management And The Process Of Fair Use, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Producers of digital media works increasingly employ technological protection measures, commonly referred to as "digital rights management" (or "DRM") technologies, that prevent the works from being accessed or used except upon conditions the producers themselves specify. These technologies have come under criticism for interfering with the rights users enjoy under copyright law, including the right to engage in fair uses of the DRM-protected works. Most DRM mechanisms are not engineered to include exceptions for fair use, and user circumvention of the DRM may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act even if the use for which the circumvention occurs is itself …

Beyond Abstraction: The Law And Economics Of Copyright Scope And Doctrinal Efficiency, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Uncertainty as to the optimum extent of protection generally limits the capacity of law and economics to translate economic theory into coherent doctrinal recommendations in the realm of copyright. This Article explores the relationship between copyright scope, doctrinal efficiency, and welfare from a theoretical perspective to develop a framework for evaluating specific doctrinal recommendations in copyright law.

The usefulness of applying this framework in either rejecting or improving doctrinal recommendations is illustrated with reference to the predominant law and economics theories of fair use. The metric-driven analysis adopted in this Article demonstrates the general robustness of the market-failure approach to …

Compulsory Licenses In Peer-To-Peer File Sharing: A Workable Solution?, Michael Botein, Edward Samuels

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Legal Protocols And Practices For Managing Copyright In Electronic Theses, Mark Perry, Paula Callan

Law Publications

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia, PhD and Masters by Research candidates are required to deposit both print and digital copies of their theses and dissertations. The fulltext of these digital theses is then made freely available online via the Australian Digital Thesis (ADT) collection. Management of copyright issues has been a major headache and workload problem for the Library: there are many parties involved in the deposit process, and the lack of a common understanding about the rights and responsibilities of the various stakeholders has made the process very complex and time consuming. The response of …

The Saga Of A Song: Authorship And Ownership In The Case Of ‘Guantanamera’, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Recasting Of Copyright & Related Rights For The Knowledge Economy, P Bernt Hugenholtz, Mireille Van Eechoud, Stef J. Van Gompel, Natali Helberger, Lucie Guibault

Reports & Public Policy Documents

In the European Union, copyright law is increasingly a matter for the European legislator. Member states retain ever less competence to regulate intellectual property rights.

This study critically examines the 'acquis communautaire' in the field of copyright and related (neighbouring) rights, focusing on the seven copyright specific directives, from the 1991 Software directive to the 2001 Information Society Directive. It also deals with distinct issues that are on the agenda of the EU: After reviewing arguments for and against the extension of the term of protection of phonograms (sound recordings), the authors conclude there is no convincing case for extending …

A Technological Theory Of The Arms Race, Lee B. Kovarsky

Faculty Scholarship

Although the 'technological arms race' has recently emerged as a vogue-ish piece of legal terminology, scholarship has quite conspicuously failed to explore the phenomenon systematically. What are 'technological' arms races? Why do they happen? Does the recent spike in scholarly attention actually reflect their novelty? Are they always inefficient? How do they differ from military ones? What role can legal institutions play in slowing them down? In this Article I seek to answer these questions. I argue that copyright enforcement and self-help represent substitutable tactics for regulating access to expressive assets, and that the efficacy of each tactic depends on …

Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …

Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

The fair use defense in copyright law shields an intellectual commons of protected uses of copyrighted material from infringement actions. In determining whether a given use is fair, courts must assess the new use's potential effect on the market for the copyrighted work. Fair use jurisprudence too often fails to address the complementary, network, and long-range effects of new technologies on the market for copyrighted works. These effects parallel the indirect, direct, and option values of biodiversity recently recognized by environmental economists. Their sophisticated methods for valuing natural resources in tangible commons can inform legal efforts to address the intellectual …

Is There A New Digital Collection In Your Future?, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

In this article, we take a look at a handful of the bigger law-related digital collections available today. We present the core elements of each collection to give readers an idea of what is out there. In addition, we look at some broad-based questions presented by acquiring access to digital collections. Finally, briefly, we look at issues of access, ownership, copyright, interlibrary lending, catalog records, and cost.

The Movement For Open Access Law, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

My claim in this contribution to this important symposium is that the law and legal scholarship should be freely available on the Internet, and copyright law and licensing should facilitate achievement of this goal. This claim reflects the combined aims of those who support the movement for open access law. This nascent movement is a natural extension of the well-developed movement for free access to primary legal materials and the equally well-developed open access movement, which seeks to make all scholarly journal articles freely available on the Internet. Legal scholars have only general familiarity with the first movement and very …

The “Rootkit Debacle”: The Latest Chapter In The Story Of The Recording Industry And The War On Music Piracy, Megan M. La Belle

Scholarly Articles

In the age of digital music, illicit copying or burning of CDs is a rampant problem that undermines the rights of copyright holders, record labels, and artists alike. The recording industry has attempted to address this problem by manufacturing and releasing CDs with various types of digital rights management (DRM) technologies. Most recently, Sony BMG introduced CDs containing DRM software that was intended, among other things, to limit the number of copies of the CD the user could make, and prevent the user from sharing the content of the CD on peer-to-peer networks. However, the manner in which this software …

Why Sell What You Can License?, Contracting Around Statutory Protection Of Intellectual Property, Elizabeth I. Winston

Scholarly Articles

Historically, the transfer of goods has been through sale, a model regulated by public legislation. Increasingly, however, the transfer of goods is occurring through licensing, a model regulated by private legislation. Privately-legislated licenses - for such chattels as musical and written works and agricultural goods - are being used to circumvent publicly-legislated restrictions on intellectual property. Private legislation should not circumvent public legislation, and intellectual property owners should not be allowed to circumvent the statutory scheme for protection of intellectual property. Licenses that augment publicly-legislated protection of intellectual property support the traditional role of contracts and should be enforced. Licenses …

Ip's Problem Child: Shifting The Paradigms For Software Protection, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Computer software is somewhat of a problem child for intellectual property law. Courts and legislatures have struggled to encourage innovations in software development while, at the same time, attempting to avoid undesirable digital information monopolies. Neither the patent nor the copyright system has provided a particularly satisfactory paradigm for software protection. Although patents have received greater attention than copyrights in the software context (consider, for example, the recent BlackBerry case), copyright law arguably creates more insidious undercurrents in today's marketplace. This is partly because we have not yet appreciated the potential impact of recent developments in programming methodology and digital …

Open Access, Law, Knowledge, Copyrights, Dominance And Subordination, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The concept of open access to legal knowledge is at the surface a very appealing one. A citizenry that is well informed about the law may be more likely to comply with legal dictates and proscriptions, or at a minimum, will be aware of the consequences for not doing so. What is less apparent, however, is whether an open access approach to legal knowledge is realistically attainable without fundamental changes to the copyright laws that would recalibrate the power balance between content owners and citizens desiring access to interpretive legal resources. A truly useful application of open access principles would …

Fair Use And The Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, And Copyright Law, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largely unexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyright protections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when …

The Secret Life Of Legal Doctrine: The Divergent Evolution Of Secondary Liability In Trademark And Copyright Law, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian

Journal Articles

The recent explosion in intellectual property litigation has witnessed increasing recourse to secondary liability theories. The courts have responded favorably to plaintiffs by enunciating substantial reinterpretations of extant principles, thereby precipitating a veritable secondary liability revolution. Numerous commentators have bemoaned this trend, contending that judicial recasting of liability rules expands intellectual property rights beyond their intended scope, thereby resulting in an overprotective regime that stifles innovation. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the secondary liability revolution has been all but ignored in the literature: While the courts have broadened the scope of secondary liability principles with respect to …

Copyright Lochnerism, Raymond Shih Ray Ku

Faculty Publications

Part I of this essay outlines the conflict between copyright and the First amendment as well as, the complementary argument for reconciling copyright and free speech, as it has been formulated by scholars and the Supreme Court. Part II discusses what I have referred to as the Framers' copyright and the extent to which arguments based upon the Framers' intent in this area may reconcile copyright and free speech. Lastly, Part III argues that reliance upon the complementary argument to deny any role for heightened First Amendment review in copyright cases is subject to two interrelated criticisms of Lochner. By …

Unravelling The Myth Around Open Source Licences - An Analysis From A Dutch And European Law Perspective, Lucie Guibault, Ot Van Daalen

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Open source software licences are based on two fundamental principles: the possibility for users to use the software for any purpose and the possibility to modify and redistribute it without prior authorisation from the initial developer. Some open source software licences, like the General Public Licence (GPL), also impose a corollary obligation on the licensee: to make the source code available to other developers. The idea behind this form of licensing is that when programmers can read, redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. A number of legal challenges need to be addressed …

Creative Commons And The New Intermediaries, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This symposium contribution examines the disintermediating and reintermediating roles played by Creative Commons licenses on the Internet. Creative Commons licenses act as a disintermediating force because they enable end-to-end transactions in copyrighted works. The licenses have reintermediating force by enabling new services and new online communities to form around content licensed under a Creative Commons license. Intermediaries focused on the copyright dimension have begun to appear online as search engines, archives, libraries, publishers, community organizers, and educators. Moreover, the growth of machine-readable copyright licenses and the new intermediaries that they enable is part of a larger movement toward a Semantic …

One For All: The Problem Of Uniformity Cost In Intellectual Property Law, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Intellectual property law protects the owner of each patented invention or copyrighted work of authorship with a largely uniform set of exclusive rights. In the modern context, it is clear that innovators' needs for intellectual property protection vary substantially across industries and among types of innovation. Applying a socially costly, uniform solution to problems of differing magnitudes means that the law necessarily imposes uniformity cost by underprotecting those who invest in certain costly innovations and overprotecting those with low innovation costs or access to alternative appropriability mechanisms.

This Article argues that reducing uniformity cost is the central problem for intellectual …

Performance, Property, And The Slashing Of Gender In Fan Fiction , Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

Today, it is no secret that the regime of copyright law, once an often-overlooked footnote to our legal system of property, now occupies a central position in modern debates surrounding the relationship between freedom of expression, language, and ownership. Curiously, however, while contemporary scholarship on copyright now embraces a wide range of political and economic approaches, it has often failed to consider how intellectual property law - as it is owned, constituted, created, and enforced - both benefits and disadvantages segments of the population in divergent ways. This absence is both vexing and fascinating. While issues of distributive justice have …

Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach To Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access, F. Scott Kieff

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Countless high profile cases like the recent patent litigation threatening to shut down the BlackBerry® service have long drawn sharp criticism; and in response, most of the intellectual property (IP) literature argues for the use of weaker, or liability rule, enforcement as a tool for solving the problems of anticompetitive effects and downstream access while still providing sufficient rewards to IP creators. This paper takes an unconventional approach under which rewards don't matter much, but coordination does matter a great deal. The paper shows how stronger, or property rule, enforcement facilitates the good type of coordination that increases competition and …