Law Commons^™

Copyright And The Creative Process, Mark Bartholomew

Notre Dame Law Review

Copyright is typically described as a mechanism for encouraging the production of creative works. On this view, copyright protection should be granted to genuinely creative works but denied to non-creative ones. Yet that is not how the law works. Instead, almost anything—from test answer sheets to instruction manuals to replicas of items in the public domain—is deemed creative and therefore eligible for copyright protection. This is the consequence of a century of copyright doctrine assuming that artistic creativity is incapable of measurement, unaffected by personal motivation, and incomprehensible to novices and experts alike. Recent neuroscientific research contradicts these assumptions. It …

Copyright And Distributive Justice, Justin Hughes, Robert P. Merges

Notre Dame Law Review

Is our copyright system basically fair? Does it exacerbate or ameliorate

the skewed distribution of wealth in our society? Does it do anything at all

for disempowered people, people at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy?

In this Article we engage these questions. Our goal is to begin a more

comprehensive discussion of the effect the copyright system has on the allocation

of wealth in our society.