Law Commons^™

The Machine As Author, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Machines are increasingly good at emulating humans and laying siege to what has been a strictly human outpost: intellectual creativity.

At this juncture, we cannot know with certainty how high machines will reach on the creativity ladder when compared to, or measured against, their human counterparts, but we do know this. They are far enough already to force us to ask a genuinely hard and complex question, one that intellectual property (“IP”) scholars and courts will need to answer soon; namely, whether copyrights should be granted to productions made not by humans but by machines.

This Article’s specific objective is …

Improvising Intellectual Property In Saigon, David A. Bergan

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

How does intellectual property become part of the structure of social practice? The traditional answers are enforcement, education, and incentivized self-interest. This Article challenges that understanding by examining the social field of young engineers in Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, intellectual production is not only about producing the legal commodity we call intellectual property. For many young engineers working with multinational companies, it is not about producing a product at all. It is about improving their position in society. Relying on over a year of qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork from 2012 to 2014, this Article develops a critique of …