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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Theory Of Copyright Authorship, Christopher Buccafusco
A Theory Of Copyright Authorship, Christopher Buccafusco
Articles
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to grant rights to “Authors” for their “Writings.” Despite the centrality of these terms to copyright jurisprudence, neither the courts nor scholars have provided coherent theories about what makes a person an author or what makes a thing a writing. This article articulates and defends a theory of copyrightable authorship. It argues that authorship involves the intentional creation of mental effects in an audience. A writing, then, is any fixed medium capable of producing mental effects. According to this theory, copyright may attach to the original, fixed, and minimally creative form or manner …
Liability Issues And 3d Printing, Mark Bartholomew, Gianni P. Servodidio, Katherine Strandburg, Felix Wu
Liability Issues And 3d Printing, Mark Bartholomew, Gianni P. Servodidio, Katherine Strandburg, Felix Wu
Articles
No abstract provided.
Innovation Heuristics: Experiments On Sequential Creativity In Intellectual Property, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Jon Sprigman
Innovation Heuristics: Experiments On Sequential Creativity In Intellectual Property, Stefan Bechtold, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Jon Sprigman
Articles
All creativity and innovation build on existing ideas. Authors and inventors copy, adapt, improve, interpret, and refine the ideas that have come before them. The central task of intellectual property (IP) law is regulating this sequential innovation to ensure that initial creators and subsequent creators receive the appropriate sets of incentives. Although many scholars have applied the tools of economic analysis to consider whether IP law is successful in encouraging cumulative innovation, that work has rested on a set of untested assumptions about creators’ behavior. This Article reports four novel creativity experiments that begin to test those assumptions. In particular, …
The Moral Psychology Of Copyright Infringement, Christopher Buccafusco, Dave Fagundes
The Moral Psychology Of Copyright Infringement, Christopher Buccafusco, Dave Fagundes
Articles
Numerous recent cases illustrate that copyright owners sue for infringement even when an unauthorized use of their work causes them no economic harm. This presents a puzzle from the perspective of copyright theory as well as a serious social problem, since infringement suits designed to remedy non-economic harms tend to stifle rather than encourage creative production. While much scholarship has critiqued copyright’s economic theory from the perspective of authors’ incentives to create, ours is the first to explore this issue from the perspective of owners’ motivations to sue for infringement. We turn to moral psychology, and in particular to moral …
Centering Education In The Next Great Copyright Act: A Response To Professor Jaszi, Deidre A. Keller, Anjali Vats
Centering Education In The Next Great Copyright Act: A Response To Professor Jaszi, Deidre A. Keller, Anjali Vats
Articles
This article engages the recent Georgia State litigation regarding uses copyrighted content by teachers and seeks to place it within the larger context of the current state of affairs in education and in copyright policy making. In a recent article, Professor Peter Jaszi argued that educators need to begin to articulate the ways in which their uses are transformative in order to increase their chances of winning copyright infringement suits on the basis of fair use. While Jaszi’s point that educators need to better articulate their rights to use copyrighted content is well-taken, we argue that the appropriate audience educators …
Authority And Authors And Codes, Michael J. Madison
Authority And Authors And Codes, Michael J. Madison
Articles
Contests over the meaning and application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) expose long-standing, complex questions about the sources and impacts of the concept of authority in law and culture. Accessing a computer network “without authorization” and by “exceeding authorized access” is forbidden by the CFAA. Courts are divided in their interpretation of this language in the statute. This Article first proposes to address the issue with an insight from social science research. Neither criminal nor civil liability under the CFAA should attach unless the alleged violator has transgressed some border or boundary that is rendered visible …
Branding Taxation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine
Branding Taxation, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine
Articles
Branding is important not only to businesses,but also to the economy. The intellectual property laws and tax laws should thus further the legitimate goals of encouraging and protecting brand investments while maintaining a sound tax base. Intellectual property protections for branding depend on advertisement and enforcement, both of which demand significant amounts of private investment by firms. Although one would expect similar tax treatments of both categories of investment, the categories are actually treated as vastly different for federal income tax purposes. Additionally, tax distinctions also exist within each category. The result is that some branding investments are expensed and …