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Articles 121 - 150 of 293
Full-Text Articles in Law
Fair Use For Free, Or Permitted-But-Paid?, Jane C. Ginsburg
Fair Use For Free, Or Permitted-But-Paid?, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
The U.S. Supreme Court in Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios fended a fork in the fair use road. The Court there upset the longstanding expectation that uses would rarely, if ever, be fair when the whole of a work was copied. In the aftermath of that decision, lower courts have rendered a plethora of decisions deeming the copying of an entire work (even with no additional authorship contribution) a fair use, and therefore "free" in both senses of the word. A perceived social benefit or some market failure appears to motivate these decisions. This is because fair …
Judging Similarity, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Irina D. Manta, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Judging Similarity, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Irina D. Manta, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law’s requirement of substantial similarity requires a court to satisfy itself that a defendant’s copying, even when shown to exist as a factual matter, is quantitatively and qualitatively enough to render it actionable as infringement. By the time a jury reaches the question of substantial similarity, however, the court has usually heard and analyzed a good deal of evidence about: the plaintiff, the defendant, the creativity involved, the process through which the work was created, the reasons for which the work was produced, the defendant’s own creative efforts and behavior, and, on occasion, the market effects of the defendant’s …
The Idiosyncrasy Of Patent Examiners: Effects Of Experience And Attrition, Ronald J. Mann
The Idiosyncrasy Of Patent Examiners: Effects Of Experience And Attrition, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
In recent years, problems with the U.S. patent system have garnered attention from scholars and policymakers of all types. Concerns about the competitiveness of U.S. industry undergird worries that the Great Recession will linger as long as the 1990s downturn in Japan. It is no coincidence that a Congress that has remained at loggerheads on most aspects of economic policy could reach a consensus on the enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, by far the most important statutory reform of U.S. patent law since 1995. Yet, despite Congress's long overdue attention to patent law, it is unlikely …
Unplanned Coauthorship, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Unplanned Coauthorship, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Unplanned coauthorship refers to the process by which contributors to a creative work are treated by copyright law as coauthors of the work based entirely on their observable behavior during its creation. The process entails a court imputing the status of coauthors to the parties ex post, usually during a claim for copyright infringement. For years now, courts and scholars have struggled to identify a coherent rationale for unplanned coauthorship and situate it within copyright’s set of goals and objectives. This Article offers a novel framework for understanding the rules of unplanned coauthorship using insights from theories of shared intentionality. …
We Need To Talk About Aereo: Copyright-Avoiding Business Models, Cloud Storage And A Principled Reading Of The "Transmit" Clause, Rebecca Giblin, Jane C. Ginsburg
We Need To Talk About Aereo: Copyright-Avoiding Business Models, Cloud Storage And A Principled Reading Of The "Transmit" Clause, Rebecca Giblin, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Businesses are exploiting perceived gaps in the structure of copyright rights by ingeniously designing their technologies to fulfill demand for individual access through a structure of personalized copies and playback engineered in ways intended to implicate neither the public performance nor the reproduction rights. The archetypal example is Aereo Inc.’s system for providing online access to broadcast television. Aereo allows users to tune into individual antennae to stream TV to themselves, near-live, online. Aereo’s activities look a lot like the retransmission of broadcast signals, an activity which Congress has made very clear must result in remuneration for rightholders. However, Aereo’s …
United States Response To Questionnaire Concerning Collective Management Of Rights, June M. Besek, Philippa Loengard, Alexander T. White, Caitlin Giaimo, Idara Udofia
United States Response To Questionnaire Concerning Collective Management Of Rights, June M. Besek, Philippa Loengard, Alexander T. White, Caitlin Giaimo, Idara Udofia
Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts
ALAI-USA is the U.S. branch of ALAI (Association Littèraire et Artistique Internationale). ALAI-USA was started in the 1980's by the late Professor Melville B. Nimmer, and was later expanded by Professor John M. Kernochan.
Demanding The Angels’ Share: Intellectual Property And Spiritual Organization In The Urantia Foundation, Andrew Ventimiglia
Demanding The Angels’ Share: Intellectual Property And Spiritual Organization In The Urantia Foundation, Andrew Ventimiglia
Studio for Law and Culture
This article explores the role that intellectual property plays as it shapes the circulation and use of ‘The Urantia Book,’ a divinely revealed text published in 1955 and embraced by a community of believers. For many modern spiritual communities – of which the Urantian community is a telling example – their coherence no longer lies in a centralized institution like the church but instead in a shared dedication to sacred texts and other religious media. Thus, intellectual property has become an effective means to administer the ephemeral beliefs and practices mediated by these texts. This article explores a number of …
You Can’T Go Home Again: The Righthaven Cases And Copyright Trolling On The Internet, Ian Polonsky
You Can’T Go Home Again: The Righthaven Cases And Copyright Trolling On The Internet, Ian Polonsky
Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts
In the Norwegian folktale Three Billy Goats Gruff, three goats seeking to get fat on the greener pastures of a distant hillside were stopped at the foot of a bridge by a “great ugly troll, with eyes as big as saucers, and a nose as long as a poker.” The troll allowed the first two goats to pass when they assured him of a larger goat to come. Unfortunately, the troll bit off more than he could chew: the third goat was larger than the troll and not the least bit intimidated. The goat launched himself at the troll …
Copyright 1992-2012: The Most Significant Development?, Jane C. Ginsburg
Copyright 1992-2012: The Most Significant Development?, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Fordham Intellectual Property Law & Policy Conference, its organizer, Professor Hugh Hansen, planned a session on “U.S. Copyright Law: Where Has It Been? Where Is It Going?” and asked me to look back over the twenty years since the conference’s inception in order to identify the most important development in copyright during that period. Of course, the obvious answer is “the Internet,” or “digital media,” whose effect on copyright law has been pervasive. I want to propose a less obvious response, but first acknowledge that digital media and communications have presented …
Shallow Signals, Bert I. Huang
Shallow Signals, Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
Whether in dodging taxes, violating copyrights, misstating corporate earnings, or just jaywalking, we often follow the lead of others in our choices to obey or to flout the law. Seeing others act illegally, we gather that a rule is weakly enforced or that its penalty is not serious. But we may be imitating by mistake: what others are doing might not be illegal – for them.
Whenever the law quietly permits some actors to act in a way that is usually forbidden, copycat misconduct may be erroneously inspired by the false appearance that "others are doing it too." The use …
The Uneasy Case Against Copyright Trolls, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Uneasy Case Against Copyright Trolls, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
The copyright troll and the phenomenon of copyright trolling have thus far received surprisingly little attention in discussions of copyright law and policy. A copyright troll refers to an entity that acquires a tailored interest in a copyrighted work with the sole objective of enforcing claims relating to that work against copiers in a zealous and dogmatic manner. Not being a creator, distributor, performer, or indeed user of the protected work, the copyright troll operates entirely in the market for copyright claims. With specialized skills in monitoring and enforcing copyright infringement, the troll is able to lower its litigation costs, …
The Legal Landscape: Session 1, Laura Gasaway, Jane C. Ginsburg, Maria Pallante, Shira Perlmutter, Richard Rudick
The Legal Landscape: Session 1, Laura Gasaway, Jane C. Ginsburg, Maria Pallante, Shira Perlmutter, Richard Rudick
Faculty Scholarship
Good morning everybody, and thanks for coming. I’m June Besek, the Executive Director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, and we are especially grateful to those of you who planned to come in November, and when that was postponed still came today. We really feel very grateful to you. This symposium is on copyright exceptions for libraries and section 108 reform, and we are doing this in cooperation with the U.S. Copyright Office. I thank Maria, Chris and Karen for all the work that they put into this as well. I want to thank our sponsors …
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: A Concise Introduction And Lexicon, Michael Heller
The Tragedy Of The Anticommons: A Concise Introduction And Lexicon, Michael Heller
Faculty Scholarship
This article gives a concise introduction to the ‘tragedy of the anticommons.’ The anticommons thesis is simple: when too many people own pieces of one thing, nobody can use it. Usually, private ownership creates wealth. But too much ownership has the opposite effect – it leads to wasteful underuse. This is a free market paradox that shows up all across the global economy. If too many owners control a single resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Conceptually, underuse in an anticommons mirrors the familiar problem of overuse in a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ The field of anticommons …
Copyright Infringement Markets, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Copyright Infringement Markets, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Should copyright infringement claims be treated as marketable assets? Copyright law has long emphasized the free and independent alienability of its exclusive rights. Yet, the right to sue for infringement – which copyright law grants authors in order to render its exclusive rights operational – has never been thought of as independently assignable, or indeed as the target of investments by third parties. As a result, discussions of copyright law and policy rarely consider the possibility of an acquisition or investment market emerging for actionable copyright claims and the advantages that such a market might hold for copyright’s goals, objectives, …
From Hypatia To Victor Hugo To Larry And Sergey: ‘All The World's Knowledge’ And Universal Authors’ Rights, Jane C. Ginsburg
From Hypatia To Victor Hugo To Larry And Sergey: ‘All The World's Knowledge’ And Universal Authors’ Rights, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Access to ‘all the world’s knowledge’ is an ancient aspiration; a less venerable, but equally vigorous, universalism strives for the borderless protection of authors’ rights. Late 19th-century law and politics brought us copyright universalism; 21st-century technology may bring us the universal digital library. But how can ‘all the world’s knowledge’ be delivered, on demand, to users anywhere in the world (with Internet access), if the copyrights of the creators and publishers of many of those works are supposed to be enforceable almost everywhere in the world? Does it follow that the universal digital library of the near future threatens copyright …
Technological Innovation, International Competition, And The Challenges Of International Income Taxation, Michael J. Graetz, Rachael Doud
Technological Innovation, International Competition, And The Challenges Of International Income Taxation, Michael J. Graetz, Rachael Doud
Faculty Scholarship
Because of the importance of technological innovation to economic growth, nations strive to stimulate and attract the research and development ("R&D") that leads to that innovation and to make themselves hospitable environments for the holding of intellectual property ("IP"). Tax policies have taken center stage in their efforts to accomplish these goals and to capture a share of the income from technological innovations.
Designing cost-effective methods of supporting technological innovations has, however, become substantially more difficult as the world economy has become more interconnected. Where R&D is performed and where income is earned change in response to the nature and …
"With Untired Spirits And Formal Constancy": Berne Compatibility Of Formal Declaratory Measures To Enhance Copyright Title-Searching, Jane C. Ginsburg
"With Untired Spirits And Formal Constancy": Berne Compatibility Of Formal Declaratory Measures To Enhance Copyright Title-Searching, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Formalities are back in fashion. Their acolytes fall into two camps, reflecting their different objectives. For formalities, which we shall define as conditions on the existence or enforcement of copyright, can divest authors of their rights, or instead enhance authors' exploitation of their works by alerting their audiences to the authors' claims. For one camp, formalities' confiscatory consequences, once perceived as barbaric, are to be celebrated. The more works from their authors' rights untimely ripped, cast into the public domain, or amputated in their enforcement, the better. Formalities can supply the cure for all copyright's ills, from over-inclusive subject matter, …
Gandhi And Copyright Pragmatism, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Gandhi And Copyright Pragmatism, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Mahatma Gandhi is revered the world over for his views on freedom and nonviolence – ideas that he deployed with great success during India’s freedom struggle. As a thinker, he is commonly considered to have been a moral idealist: anti-utilitarian in mindset and deeply skeptical of market mechanisms. Yet, when he engaged with copyright law – as a writer, editor, and publisher – he routinely abjured the idealism of his abstract thinking in favor of a lawyerly pragmatism. Characterized by a nuanced understanding of copyright law and its conflicting normative goals, Gandhi’s thinking on copyright law reveals a reasoned, contextual, …
Proto-Property In Literary And Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges, Jane C. Ginsburg
Proto-Property In Literary And Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
This Study endeavors to reconstruct the Vatican’s precursor system of copyright, and the author’s place in it, inferred from examination of over five hundred privileges and petitions and related documents – almost all unpublished – in the Vatican Secret Archives. The typical account of the precopyright world of printing privileges, particularly in Venice, France and England, portrays a system primarily designed to promote investment in the material and labor of producing and disseminating books; protecting or rewarding authorship was at most an ancillary objective.
The sixteenth-century Papal privileges found in the Archives, however, prompt some rethinking of that story because …
Comments On Alrc Discussion Paper 79, Copyright And The Digital Economy, June M. Besek, Jane C. Ginsburg, Philippa Loengard
Comments On Alrc Discussion Paper 79, Copyright And The Digital Economy, June M. Besek, Jane C. Ginsburg, Philippa Loengard
Faculty Scholarship
We provide these comments in connection with the Australian Law Reform Commission’s ongoing study of copyright and the digital economy, and in particular its request for comments on the recommendations put forth in its Discussion Paper 79 (June 2013). We focus on US law, and how the US experience bears on the possibility of an open-ended uncompensated "fair use" type exception in Australia, and other related issues.
The fair use doctrine in the US provides great flexibility, but that flexibility in many instances comes at the cost of certainty and predictability. We are not suggesting that reasonable judgments cannot be …
Stewarding The Common Law Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Stewarding The Common Law Of Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law is today perceived as principally statutory in origin. The Copyright Act of 1976 is thought to have codified most questions of copyright policy and doctrine, and delegated a fairly limited set of questions to courts for them to resolve incrementally on a case-by-case basis. This is in contrast to prior copyright enactments, which were brief and open-ended in structure, and seemingly envisaged a more active role for courts in rule- and policy-making. Judge Leval thus notes how over time, the idea of a constructive "partnership" between the legislature and courts in making and developing copyright law that once …
Alienability And Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Alienability And Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines the interaction between copyright and the concept of alienability to show that it holds important structural and normative lessons for our understanding of the nature of the copyright entitlement, and its limitations. My use of the word ‘interaction’ is deliberate here, since my focus is not just on the question of whether and how inalienability restrictions internal to copyright doctrine motivate our theoretical understanding of copyright and its allied rights (for example, moral rights), a project that others have focused on previously. The chapter will instead attempt to understand how the copyright entitlement has addressed the basic …
United States Response To Questionnaire Concerning Copyright And Related Rights In The “Cloud” Environment, June M. Besek, Philippa Loengard, Idara Udofia
United States Response To Questionnaire Concerning Copyright And Related Rights In The “Cloud” Environment, June M. Besek, Philippa Loengard, Idara Udofia
Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts
ALAI-USA is the U.S. branch of ALAI (Association Littèraire et Artistique Internationale). ALAI-USA was started in the 1980's by the late Professor Melville B. Nimmer, and was later expanded by Professor John M. Kernochan.
Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik
Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik
Faculty Scholarship
A transcribed conversation about moral rights in the digital age — in respect of some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Professor Jane Ginsburg's 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?, 19 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L. J. 9 (2001).
A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
A New Look At Patent Quality: Relating Patent Prosecution To Validity, Ronald J. Mann, Marian Underweiser
Faculty Scholarship
The article uses two hand‐collected data sets to implement a novel research design for analyzing the precursors to patent quality. Operationalizing patent “quality” as legal validity, the article analyzes the relation between Federal Circuit decisions on patent validity and three sets of data about the patents: quantitative features of the patents themselves, textual analysis of the patent documents, and data collected from the prosecution histories of the patents. The article finds large and statistically significant relations between ex post validity and both textual features of the patents and ex ante aspects of the prosecution history (especially prior art submissions and …
Moral Rights In The U.S.: Still In Need Of A Guardian Ad Litem, Jane C. Ginsburg
Moral Rights In The U.S.: Still In Need Of A Guardian Ad Litem, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Over ten years ago, in the pages of this Journal, I inquired whether authors’ “moral rights” had come of (digital) age in the U.S. Ever-hopeful at that time, I suggested that then-recent legislation enacted to enable the copyright law to respond to the challenges of digital media might, in addition to its principal goal of securing digital markets for works of authorship, also provide new means to protect authors’ interests in receiving attribution for their works and in safeguarding their integrity. The intervening years’ developments, however, indicate that, far from achieving their majority, U.S. authors’ moral rights remain in their …
Duration Of Copyright In Audiovisual Works Under Us Copyright Law, Jane C. Ginsburg
Duration Of Copyright In Audiovisual Works Under Us Copyright Law, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Calculating the duration of US copyright in audiovisual works can be a daunting task, complicated by issues of transitional law spanning the US Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976 and the latter’s subsequent amendments. Readers with an inclination for complexity will find their tastes amply satisfied when inquiry turns to the questions of private international law that also come into play when foreign audiovisual works are at issue. Gluttons for punishment will further relish addressing the relationship of the duration of copyright in an audiovisual work to the duration of copyright in the underlying literary work on which the film …
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Normativity Of Copying In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Not all copying constitutes copyright infringement. Quite independent of fair use, copyright law requires that an act of copying be qualitatively and quantitatively significant enough – or “substantially similar” – for it to be actionable. Originating in the nineteenth century, and entirely the creation of courts, copyright’s requirement of “substantial similarity” has thus far received little attention as an independently meaningful normative dimension of the copyright entitlement. This Article offers a novel theory for copyright’s substantial-similarity requirement by placing it firmly at the center of the institution and its various goals and purposes. As a common-law-style device that mirrors the …
The Uncertain Future Of "Hot News" Misappropriation After Barclays Capital V. Theflyonthewall.Com, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Uncertain Future Of "Hot News" Misappropriation After Barclays Capital V. Theflyonthewall.Com, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
In this Essay, I attempt to disaggregate the Second Circuit’s decision in Barclays Capital to show that while the court may have reached the right conclusion in the end (a position I have argued for previously), its reasoning to reach that conclusion is rather confusing, while at the same time a rich source of information about the future of hot news doctrine. At every stage of its analysis, the Second Circuit went to significant lengths to cabin the reach of the doctrine quite considerably, despite reiterating that it was not abrogating it altogether. In analyzing the opinion, I thus consider …
The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
Courts and scholars today understand and discuss the institution of copyright in wholly instrumental terms. Indeed, given the forms of analysis that they routinely employ, one might be forgiven for thinking that copyright is nothing more than a comprehensive government-administered scheme for encouraging the production of creative expression and is therefore quite legitimately the subject matter of public law. While this instrumental focus may have the beneficial effect of limiting copyright’s unending expansion, it also serves as a source of distraction. It directs attention away from the reality that copyright is fundamentally a creation of the law and is thus …