Law Commons^™

What Is The Relationship Between Language And Thought?: Linguistic Relativity And Its Implications For Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

To date, copyright scholarship has almost completely overlooked the linguistics and cognitive psychology literature exploring the connection between language and thought. An exploration of the two major strains of this literature, known as universal grammar (associated with Noam Chomsky) and linguistic relativity (centered around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), offers insights into the copyrightability of constructed languages and of the type of software packages at issue in Google v. Oracle recently decided by the Supreme Court. It turns to modularity theory as the key idea unifying the analysis of both languages and software in ways that suggest that the information filtering associated …

What's News?, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This review of Will Slauter’s Who Owns the News? (2019) highlights three ways in which its history of copyright in news tracks and illustrates key themes in the history of cultural policy. One is how copyright law and journalistic style co-evolved, confirming the attributes of modern journalism itself and deploying style as a device for defining the scope of news producers’ legitimate copyright claims. In the news, as elsewhere in copyright, exclusivity and genre largely co-created each other. Two is how the labor and skill of individual human producers of knowledge are often hidden amid prominent debates about relationships between …

Copyright’S Private Ordering And The 'Next Great Copyright Act', Jennifer E. Rothman

All Faculty Scholarship

Private ordering plays a significant role in the application of intellectual property laws, especially in the context of copyright law. In this Article, I highlight some of the dominant modes of private ordering and consider what formal copyright law should do, if anything, to engage with private ordering in the copyright space. I conclude that there is not one single approach that copyright law should take with regard to private ordering, but instead several different approaches. In some instances, the best option is for the law to get out of the way and simply continue to provide room for various …

Toward A Closer Integration Of Law And Computer Science, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Legal issues increasingly arise in increasingly complex technological contexts. Prominent recent examples include the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), network neutrality, the increasing availability of location information, and the NSA’s surveillance program. Other emerging issues include data privacy, online video distribution, patent policy, and spectrum policy. In short, the rapid rate of technological change has increasingly shown that law and engineering can no longer remain compartmentalized into separate spheres. The logical response would be to embed the interaction between law and policy deeper into the fabric of both fields. An essential step would …

Unauthorized Televised Debate Footage In Political Campaign Advertising: Fair Use And The Dmca, Susan Park

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Objections To The Proposed Access Copyright Post-Secondary Tariff And Its Progeny Licenses: A Working Paper, Samuel Trosow, Scott Armstrong, Brent Harasym

FIMS Publications

On March 31, 2010, Access Copyright applied to the Copyright Board to certify a tariff that would govern the relationship between the organization and the members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and the Association of Community Colleges of Canada (ACCC). Previously, the relationship had been governed by a series of license agreements between the organizations which had been periodically renewed. But Access Copyright chose not to seek renewal of the licenses, and applied to the Board to certify a general tariff that would cover all post-secondary institutions for the period of 2011 through 2013.

Access …

Tolerance Is Law: Remixing Homage Parodying Plagiarism, Mathias Klang, Jan Nolin

Mathias Klang

Three centuries have passed since copyright law was developed to stimulate creativity and promote learning. The fundamental principles still apply, despite radical developments in the technology of production and distribution of cultural material. In particular the last decades’ developments and adoption of ICTs have drastically lowered barriers, which previously prevented entry into the production and distribution side of the cultural marketplace, and led to a widening of the base at which cultural production occurs and is disseminated. Additionally, digitalisation has made it economically and technically feasible for users to appropriate and manipulate earlier works as method of production. The renegotiation …

Minecraft As Web 2.0: Amateur Creativity In Digital Games, Greg Lastowka

Greg Lastowka

This book chapter considers how the digital game Minecraft has both enabled and benefited from various Web 2.0 practices. I begin with an explanation of the concept of Web 2.0 and then consider how that concept applies to the space of digital games.

Towards A Pedagogy Of Fair Use For Multimedia Composition, Renee Hobbs, Katie E. Donnelly

Renee Hobbs

No abstract provided.

Space Age Love Song: The Mix Tape In A Digital Universe, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Music sharing is one of the most controversial topics in copyright law. And mix tapes have been the classic, iconic form of music sharing for the last 30 years. Even in the face of technological development so rapid and far-reaching as to remove the literal “tape” from “mix tape,” there are nonetheless modern incarnations that crop up on a regular basis, from mix CDs to mix-sharing websites. Social norms permit and even encourage the creation of these modern mix tapes for such diverse reasons as wedding favors and birthday gifts.

If copyright law is meant to promote creativity and proscribe …

Wikipedia And The European Union Database Directive, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

“Web 2.0" and "User Generated Content (UGC)" are the new buzzwords in cyberspace. In recent years, law and policy makers have struggled to keep pace with the needs of digital natives in terms of online content control in the new participatory web culture. Much of the discourse about intellectual property rights in this context revolves around copyright law: for example, who owns copyright in works generated by multiple people, and what happens when these joint authored works borrow from existing copyright works in terms of derivative works rights and the fair use defense. Many works compiled by groups are subject …

Fair Use Harbors, Gideon Parchomovsky, Kevin A. Goldman

All Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of fair use was originally intended to facilitate those socially optimal uses of copyrighted material that would otherwise constitute infringement. Yet the application of the law has become so unpredictable that would-be fair-users can rarely rely on the doctrine with any significant level of confidence. Moreover, the doctrine provides no defense for those seeking to make fair uses of material protected by anti-circumvention measures. As a result, artists working in media both new and old are unable to derive from copyrighted works the full value to which the public is entitled. In this Essay, we propose a solution …

Information Wants To Be Free: Intellectual Property And The Mythologies Of Control, R. Polk Wagner

All Faculty Scholarship

This article challenges a central tenet of the recent criticism of intellectual property rights: the suggestion that the control conferred by such rights is detrimental to the continued flourishing of a public domain of ideas and information. I argue that such theories understate the significance of the intangible nature of information, and thus overlook the contribution that even perfectly controlled intellectual creations make to the public domain. In addition, I show that perfect control of propertized information - an animating assumption in much of the contemporary criticism - is both counterfactual and likely to remain so. These findings suggest that …