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Full-Text Articles in Law
Emotions And Intellectual Property Law, Margaret Chon
Emotions And Intellectual Property Law, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Emotions constitute an integral part of the diverse approaches that we bring to bear upon our most pressing law and policy issues. This article explores the role of emotions in intellectual property, information, and technology law (IP). Like other areas of law, IP commits to, prioritizes, and even honors, reason, logic, and facts—which can result in the sidelining of the affective components of law. Yet our affective responses to legal and other phenomena influence both cognition and reason. Part I of the article provides a general overview of the field of law and emotions, pointing out how this approach to …
Recasting Intellectual Property In Light Of The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: Toward Knowledge Governance, Margaret Chon
Recasting Intellectual Property In Light Of The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: Toward Knowledge Governance, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
No abstract provided.
Copyright’S Other Functions, Margaret Chon
Copyright’S Other Functions, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
This response to a keynote speech by Judge Margaret McKeown explores some dimensions of copyright in addition to its dominant function as a set of market-facilitating exclusive rights. The recent possible trend towards protecting privacy and other non-commercial concerns via copyright law is not necessarily inconsistent with its historical usages, does not necessarily threaten freedom of expression and may further important privacy policies. The balance of these competing policies is shifting, especially in an environment of proliferating digital content where cyber civil rights may need further development in response to cyberbullying. It examines the specific case of non-consensual pornography as …
The Taxation Of Intellectual Capital, Lily Kahng
The Taxation Of Intellectual Capital, Lily Kahng
Faculty Articles
Intellectual capital-broadly defined to include nonphysical sources of value such as patents and copyrights, computer software, organizational processes, and know-how-has a long history of being undervalued and excluded from measures of economic productivity and wealth. In recent years, however, intellectual capital has finally gained wide recognition as a central driver of economic productivity and growth. Scholars in fields such as knowledge management, financial accounting, and national accounting have produced a wealth of research that significantly advances the conceptual understanding of intellectual capital and introduces new methodologies for identifying and measuring its economic value. This article is the first to analyze …
Slow Logo: Brand Citizenship In Global Value Networks, Margaret Chon
Slow Logo: Brand Citizenship In Global Value Networks, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
This article makes a case for a theoretical departure from dominant approaches to trademark law. It explains and then connects information capitalism to new governance through the heuristic of brand citizenship. Through these suggested analytical lenses, it examines a case study of ‘Big Fashion,’ which has become a highly concentrated industry focused almost solely on maximizing shareholder profit without regard to consumer, environment, or labor impact. It then concludes with some suggestions regarding the functions of brand citizenship in increasingly globalized markets where downward pressure on prices translates into greater global public “bads” often imposed upon the most vulnerable. For …
The Romantic Collective Author, Margaret Chon
The Romantic Collective Author, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Although the romantic collective author is a much more elusive creature than its romantic individual counterpart, it can be discerned amidst the proliferation of expression on the Internet. This article first outlines the ways in which the romantic author effect operates through both its genius and its arbiter prongs within collaborative authorship practices in digital networks. It next turns to scientific collaboration, where this author effect is attenuated, to assess whether scientific authorship practices might contribute to a more realistic and less romantic understanding of expressive authorship practices. A subsequent case study of collaborative digital authorship by Wikipedia contributors uncovers …
Law Professor As Artist: Themes And Variations In Keith Aoki's Intellectual Property Scholarship, Margaret Chon
Law Professor As Artist: Themes And Variations In Keith Aoki's Intellectual Property Scholarship, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
This memorial tribute to the late Keith Aoki traces the impact of his intellectual property scholarship, particularly in the area of genetic resources.
Global Intellectual Property Governance (Under Construction), Margaret Chon
Global Intellectual Property Governance (Under Construction), Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Top down as well as bottom-up models of regulation are shifting to a governance paradigm characterized by the greater interaction among public, private and civil society sectors, as well as potential increased flexibility of law. As applied to intellectual property, particularly in the international context, governance literature is emerging but still episodic. This article examines the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Development Agenda, currently being implemented through its Committee on Development and Intellectual Property. WIPOs efforts to address global development goals with intellectual property can be theorized through the more participatory and dynamic legal mechanisms promised by global governance. Among the …
Sticky Knowledge In Copyright, Margaret Chon
Sticky Knowledge In Copyright, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Knowledge is sticky because it adheres to people along social routes, lodged within relational and collective modalities, as well as through copyright's proverbial fixed works that can be transacted more freely. Sticky knowledge may in fact constitute a much larger body of knowledge than we usually acknowledge in intellectual property and may intersect with copyright in unexpected ways. This Article delves into sticky knowledge, which has been referenced often outside of intellectual property and sometimes within the laws of patents and trade secrets but almost not at all within copyright law. Under what circumstances will sticky knowledge encourage robust knowledge …
Marks Of Rectitude, Margaret Chon
Marks Of Rectitude, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Trademarks and certification marks increasingly denote sustainability or social responsibility standards. These marks of rectitude are particularly noticeable in the context of global trade, where market integration is accompanied by relatively uneven integration of environmental, labor and other standards, and where consumers in the so-called global North choose how to empower producers and/or encourage development of markets in the global South. But consumer participation in these transactions is under-explored by reference to criteria such as the quality not to mention accountability and transparency of the standards embedded within the goods or services. Newer stakeholders and meaning-makers such as the largely …
Slouching Towards Development In International Intellectual Property, Margaret Chon, Denis Borges Barbosa, Andrés Moncayo Von Hase
Slouching Towards Development In International Intellectual Property, Margaret Chon, Denis Borges Barbosa, Andrés Moncayo Von Hase
Faculty Articles
An understanding of intellectual property's classic innovation mandate as only one of many cross-cutting development goals should be well-accepted by now within international intellectual property law and policy, given the pervasiveness of development rhetoric at the WTO, WIPO and other regional and bilateral fora. Yet development "walk" lags behind development "talk" on both international and domestic levels. This article focuses on how intellectual property can promote development, not only through innovation, but also by the promotion of broad-based human development implicitly underpinning global knowledge economies. First, we consider the rapidly evolving relationship of development and trade to intellectual property, and …
Intellectual Property From Below: Copyright And Capability For Education, Margaret Chon
Intellectual Property From Below: Copyright And Capability For Education, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
An approach to intellectual property from within a human development framework can contribute meaningfully to the WIPO Development Agenda, which was approved by the WIPO General Assembly in September 2007. Setting the proper regulatory balance between exclusive rights and access through exceptions and limitations to those rights is key to building national innovation capacity. A human development framework allows intellectual property norm-setters to prioritize the development of healthy and literate populations who are foundational to the functioning knowledge economies that intellectual property already assumes. Building upon an earlier piece in which Professor Chon posited that a substantive equality principle was …
Intellectual Property And The Development Divide, Margaret Chon
Intellectual Property And The Development Divide, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
This article attempts to map the challenges raised by recent encounters between intellectual property and development. It proposes a normative principle of global intellectual property - one that is responsive to development paradigms that have moved far beyond simple utilitarian measures of social welfare. Recent insights from the field of development economics suggest strongly that intellectual property should include a substantive equality principle, measuring its welfare-generating outcomes not only by economic growth but also by distributional effects. A new principle of substantive equality is a necessary corollary to the formal equality principles of national treatment and minimum standards that are …
January 1, 2003: The Birth Of The Unpublished Public Domain And Its International Implications, Elizabeth Townsend-Gard
January 1, 2003: The Birth Of The Unpublished Public Domain And Its International Implications, Elizabeth Townsend-Gard
Faculty Articles
On January 1, 2003, a small, quiet historic transformation took place throughout the United States: unpublished works in mass came into the public domain for the first time. Section 302 of the 1976 Copyright Act created a unified system of duration, whereby unpublished and published works carry a term of life of the author plus seventy years. In order to aid with a transition from a state common law perpetual system to a "limited Times" federal statutory system, the 1976 Copyright Act built two mechanisms for change in the form of Section 303(a). First, Section 303(a) guarantees that no work …
The Past, Present And Future Of Copyright Protection Of Soundalike Recordings, Kent Milunovich
The Past, Present And Future Of Copyright Protection Of Soundalike Recordings, Kent Milunovich
Faculty Articles
This article suggests that copyright law can cover soundalike musical recordings. First, the facts and holding of Midler will be discussed as well as the court's motivation for not deciding the case on a copyright infringement basis. Second, an historical background for copyright infringement of music follows. This section involves a discussion of copyright infringement, parody, and fair use as well as a summary of existing case law regarding each topic. After an illustration of the dilemma of what copyright may protect involving the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears, the focus shifts to what could have been done to …
New Wine Bursting From Old Bottles: Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works, And Entrepreneurship, Margaret Chon
New Wine Bursting From Old Bottles: Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works, And Entrepreneurship, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
Some intellectual property colleagues recently urged Professor Chon to post this article on SSRN. She wrote it circa mid-90’s when information still wanted to be free and the predominant technology was still file transfer protocol. It seems this piece has stood the test of time because it was one of the first legal academic pieces to address the copyright implications of Internet works. Today in 2010, we are still grappling with the collaborative, dynamic and entrepreneurial characteristics of digital networked content. However, now it is created and distributed through different intermediaries such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Postmodern 'Progress': Reconsidering The Copyright And Patent Power, Margaret Chon
Postmodern 'Progress': Reconsidering The Copyright And Patent Power, Margaret Chon
Faculty Articles
This article undertakes a postmodern analysis of the term ‘Progress’ in the Constitution’s Copyright Clause, finding stewarding the production of knowledge is integral to the clause. First, by deconstructing the linear, forward assumption entailing Progress. As technology concentrates, Progress entails distributional fairness and decentralized control over knowledge. Relying on the writings of the Founders and recent copyright decisions, this article does not limit postmodernism to a theory recognizing that words have multiple meanings, instead it argues that the Copyright Clause transforms the idea of knowledge to a common resource like water and air, and places knowledge into a public trust, …