Law Commons^™

Everything Is Connected, Kembrew Mcleod

Kembrew McLeod

The article discusses U.S. copyright law and the copyright clearance system, focusing on the author's documentary film "Copyright Criminals," which aired on Public Broadcasting System (PBS). It explores sampling and collage in audiovisual media, commenting on use of the practice by hip-hop group Public Enemy. Other topics include the Washington, D.C. Center for Social Media, intellectual property, and fair use. The author also examines his book "Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property" and a prank in which he successfully copyrighted the phrase "Freedom of Expression"

From Music Tracks To Google Maps: Who Owns Computer-Generated Works?, Mark Perry, Thomas Margoni

Mark Perry

Increasingly the digital content used in everyday life has little or no human intervention in its creation. Typically, when such content is delivered to consumers it comes with attached claims of copyright. However, depending on the jurisdiction, approaches to ownership of computer-generated works vary from legislated to uncertain. In this paper we look at the various approaches taken by the common law, such as in Canada, and the legislative approach taken in the United Kingdom. The options for how computer-generated works may be treated and suggestions for their best placement in copyright are discussed.

Copyright And The First Amendment: Comrades, Combatants Or Uneasy Allies?, Joseph P. Bauer

Joseph P. Bauer

The copyright regime and the First Amendment seek to promote the same goals. Both seek the creation and dissemination of more, better and more diverse literary, pictorial, musical and other works. But, they use significantly different means to achieve those goals. The copyright laws afford to the creator of a work the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, transform and perform that work for a extended period of time. The First Amendment, on the other hand, proclaims that Congress “shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press,” thus at least nominally indicating that limitations on …

Social Semiotics In The Fair Use Analysis, H Brian Holland

H Brian Holland

Social Semiotics in the Fair Use Analysis

34,314 words (including 380 footnotes)

This article presents an alternate theory of fair use, employing social semiotics as a process theory of meaning-making to frame the transformativeness inquiry. It is an argument for an expansion of fair use based not on theories of authorship or rights of autonomy, but rather a theory of the audience linked to social practice. The article asks, in essence, whether audiences determine the meaning, purpose, function, or social benefit of an allegedly infringing work, often regardless of what the work’s creator did or intended. If so, does this …

Social Semiotics In The Fair Use Analysis, H. Brian Holland

H. Brian Holland

Social Semiotics In The Fair Use Analysis, H. Brian Holland

H. Brian Holland

The Protection Of Rights Management Information: Modernization Or Cup Half Full?, Mark Perry

Mark Perry

Many papers in this collection discuss the history and development of Bill C-32, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, introduced into the Canadian Parliament on 2 June 2010, so that analysis will not be duplicated here. Among the failures of copyright reform has been the lack of addressing the required “balancing” of proprietary rights on the one hand, with user rights and the public domain on the other. Rights Management Information (RMI) can aid in this balancing. The RMI of a work is simply data that provide iden- tification of rights related to that work, either directly or indirectly. …

Los Derechos De Autor Y El Dominio Público, Rodolfo C. Rivas Rea Esq.

Rodolfo C. Rivas

The author discusses the subtle differences between Copyright and Author's Rights. Then he goes into analyzing the different ways a work can become part of the public domain and how it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from time to time.////////////////////////////////////////////////////El autor analiza las sutiles diferencias entre los derechos de autor y el copyright. Posteriormente se adentra en el análisis de las formas en las que una obra entra dentro del dominio público, y como estas varían dependiendo del territorio y de la época.

Technology & Copyright Law-The Nfl’S Ability To Protect Its Copyrights In Game Broadcasts, Sonali P. Chitre

Sonali P Chitre

Copyright is critical to protecting sports broadcasts and new technology has evolved to disseminate these broadcasts to the many people that enjoy professional sports. Because of new digital rights in the copyright statute, the NFL has very strong copyright protections that cover Internet, satellite, television, and radio licensing of its broadcasts. This article analyzes the NFL’s “blackout” rule in the context of growing technology and increased copyright protection.

In NFL v. McBee & Bruno’s, Inc., the Eighth Circuit held that defendant sports bar’s display of “blacked-out” games did not fall under an exemption regarding common use since satellite dishes were …

Rights, Privileges And Access To Information, Alina Ng

Alina Ng

Protecting property rights in creative works represent a classic institutional approach to a specific economic problem of non-rivalness and non-excludability of information. By providing the copyright owner with an enforceable right against non-paying members of society, copyright laws encourage the production and dissemination of literary and artistic works to society for the purposes of learning. Implicit in the grant of property rights is the assumption that commercial incentives foster creative activity and productivity. In recent years, literary and artistic works have increasingly become the subject matter of exclusive property rights and control, particularly as new technologies emerge to provide users …

Acta April 2010 - Analysis Of Provisions, Kimberlee G. Weatherall

Kimberlee G Weatherall

This paper analyses the potential impact of the proposed ACTA (January 2010 leaked text) on Australian law.

Good Design: A Proposal For The Proper Protection Of Market-Entry Industrial Design, Susanna Monseau

Susanna Monseau

Empirical research tells us that “[d]esign led companies have produced dramatically better share price performance for their investors.” However, in the U.S., in contrast to all European and the majority of other countries around the world, the legal system provides no specific protection for market-entry design. There is starting to be an appreciation of the importance of design to the economy and how the rise in counterfeit activity hurts designers. This paper argues that this rise in counterfeiting and piracy mean that it is important for Congress to finally create a limited protection for industrial design under U.S. law. It …

Copyrighting "Twilight": Digital Copyright Lessons From The Vampire Blogosphere, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Jacqueline D Lipton

In January of 2010 a United States District Court granted an injunction against a Twilight fan magazine for unauthorized use of copyrighted publicity stills . No surprise there. Intellectual property laws deal effectively – some would argue too effectively – with such cases. Nevertheless, recent Web 2.0 technologies, characterized by user-generated content, raise new challenges for copyright law. Online interactions involving reproductions of copyrighted works in blogs, online fan fiction, and online social networks do not comfortably fit existing copyright paradigms. It is unclear whether participants in Web 2.0 forums are creating derivative works, making legitimate fair uses of copyright …

Ip Misuse As Foreclosure, Christina Bohannan

Christina Bohannan

In an age of IP expansionism, the doctrine most explicitly concerned with limiting IP overreaching has no defensible basis in IP policy. “Misuse” relates to the IP holder’s use of licenses and other arrangements to obtain rights “beyond the scope” of a statutory IP grant, but the doctrine has not established adequate principles for identifying the practices that should be condemned. The misuse doctrine evolved in patent law and concerned the tying of patented and unpatented goods. Courts held that such tying violated federal patent policy by expanding the statutory monopoly to include a second product not covered by the …

Copyright Liability For The Playing Of 'Music On Hold': Telstra Corporation Ltd V Australasian Performing Right Association Ltd, William Van Caenegem

William Van Caenegem

Extract: This is a test case brought by the Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA), the assignee of copyright in musical and literary works for the purpose of the public performance rights (both live and mechanical), the right of transmission to subscribers to a diffusion service (the diffusion right) and the broadcast right. The question to be determined is whether Telstra (or Telecom as it was called at the outset of proceedings) by providing certain music on hold services, is liable to APRA because of a breach of their diffusion and/or broadcast rights under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). APRA sought …

Open Content Licensing Of Public Sector Information And The Risk Of Tortious Liability For Australian Governments, Cheryl Foong

Cheryl Foong

There has been an increasing interest by governments worldwide in the potential benefits of open access to public sector information (PSI). However, an important question remains: can a government incur tortious liability for incorrect information released online under an open content licence? This paper argues that the release of PSI online for free under an open content licence, specifically a Creative Commons licence, is within the bounds of an acceptable level of risk to government, especially where users are informed of the limitations of the data and appropriate information management policies and principles are in place to ensure accountability for …

Calibrating Copyright Statutory Damages To Promote Speech, Alan Garfield

Alan E Garfield

Copyright and the First Amendment exist in tension. The Supreme Court acknowledges this tension but says that copyright law resolves it with two built-in free speech safeguards: (1) by protecting only the expression of ideas and not the ideas themselves (the idea/expression dichotomy); and (2) by allowing the use of expression under certain circumstances (the fair use doctrine). The problem is that these doctrines are notoriously vague, so users often cannot know ex ante whether their uses will be immune from liability. This unpredictably might be tolerable if users could be confident that, if they were subject to liability, any …

Trade Secret Law And Information Development Incentives, Michael Risch

Michael Risch

Trade secrets differ from other forms of intellectual property in many subtle ways that affect incentives to invest in information development. These differences relate not only to the types of information protected, but also to the requirements one must meet to protect that type of information. The various divergences and intersections of trade secret laws with other intellectual property laws lead to differences in the amount and types of investments companies make in developing information. This chapter explores five types of differential incentives associated with trade secret law: - Trade secret law v. no trade secret law - Trade secret …

Property In Law: Government Rights In Legal Innovations, Stephen Clowney

Stephen Clowney

When Users Are Authors: Authorship In The Age Of Digital Media, Alina Ng

Alina Ng

This Article explores what authorship and creative production means in the digital age. Notions of the author as the creator of the work provided a point of reference for recognizing ownership rights in literary and artistic works in conventional copyright jurisprudence. The role of the author, as the creator and producer of a work, has been seen as distinct and separate from that of the publisher and user. Copyright laws and customary norms protect the author’s rights in his creation to provide the incentive to create and allow him to appropriate the social value generated by his creativity as recognition …

Bloodsucking Copyrights, Ann Bartow

Ann Bartow

Some bloodsuckers live off the life-sustaining fluids of involuntary hosts and leave behind diseases or venom. Fleas, ticks, bedbugs, and mosquitoes are all bloodsuckers that are best avoided. Others, like the leech, suck blood in ways that can be very helpful to a host, promoting blood flow and healing. Vampires are fictional, sentient bloodsuckers that have populated various entertainment genres for centuries. Copyrights, too, can suck blood metaphorically in productive and destructive ways, or simply suck, period, when they senselessly impede free-flowing veins of information. And though they are not (yet) immortal, copyrights last a very long time.

In Copyright’s …

Blues Lives: Promise And Perils Of Musical Copyright, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

The application of copyright law to music has long been fraught with complexities and continuing problems. Problems in the application of copyright to blues music have come to pass, in part, as a result of the peculiar ways in which copyright has been applied to nonvisual technologies of musical creation and reproduction. In the nineteenth century, music creation and reproduction reflected a live performance tradition, within a commercial context in which sheet music was the dominant form of fixed musical reproduction. Although copyright has been an inexact fit for music generally, in a world in which sheet music was the …

Chapter 7 - Restricting Fair Use To Save The News, Ryan T. Holte

Prof. Ryan T. Holte

Ryan T. Holte in “Restricting Fair Use to Save the News: A Proposed Change in Copyright Law to Bring More Profit to News Reporting” examines the present condition of the media and the economic and public policies behind protecting news. He further discusses current means of protecting information through copyright and misappropriation law, before proposing a change in the Copyright Act to better allow the news industry to reap profits from news reporting.

In Defense Of Intellectual Property Anxiety: A Response To Professor Fagundes, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Aaron K. Perzanowski

In this Response to Professor Fagundes’s Property Rhetoric and the Public Domain, Professor Perzanowski expresses skepticism about two assumptions underlying the argument for embracing property rhetoric to promote the public domain. This argument assumes, first, public recognition of social discourse theory as an account of property and, second, rhetorical advantages of social discourse theory that are comparable to those of more familiar notions of private property. Perzanowski concludes that the simple intuitive appeal of Blackstonian property cautions against styling the struggle for balanced copyright and patent policy as a debate over competing property interests.