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Full-Text Articles in Law
Copyright's Communications Policy, Timothy Wu
Copyright's Communications Policy, Timothy Wu
Michigan Law Review
There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it too easy to be a pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright gives content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms …
Some Historical Matter Concerning Literary Property, Edward S. Rogers
Some Historical Matter Concerning Literary Property, Edward S. Rogers
Michigan Law Review
The notion of property in published literary works was of gradual development. One may search in vain through classical literature and Roman law to find anything in the nature of copyright. Hearty condemnation of plagiarism is to be found. Stealing another man's labor and passing it off as one's own was a literary crime, but neither that nor open piracy seems to have been a matter of which the law took cognizance. Before the invention of printing, making manuscript copies of a book was such a laborious and time-consuming task that an ancient author must have felt sufficiently repaid if …