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Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Book Chapters
Our copyright laws encourage authors to create new works and communicate them to the public, because we hope that people will read the books, listen to the music, see the art, watch the films, run the software, and build and inhabit the buildings. That is the way that copyright promotes the Progress of Science. Recently, that not-very-controversial principle has collided with copyright owners’ conviction that they should be able to control, or at least collect royalties from, all uses of their works. A particularly ill-considered manifestation of this conviction is what I have decided to call copy-fetish. This is the …
The Story Of Sony V. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets The Boston Strangler., Jessica Litman
The Story Of Sony V. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets The Boston Strangler., Jessica Litman
Book Chapters
Sony v. Universal Studios may be the most famous of all copyright cases. People who know nothing about copyright know that the Sony-Betamax case held that home videotaping of television programs is fair use. Paradoxically, although the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case to decide whether the copyright law permitted consumers to engage in private home copying of television programs, the majority ended up crafting its analysis to avoid answering that question definitively. Instead, it ruled that even if consumers sometimes violated the copyright law when they taped television programs off the air, that violation did not make the …