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Full-Text Articles in Law
Discipline And Nourish: On Constructing Commons, Wendy J. Gordon
Discipline And Nourish: On Constructing Commons, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Scholarship has examined many possible ways to encourage the creation and dissemination of art, works of authorship, ideas, and inventions: rights of exclusion (copyrights and patents), prizes, governmental subsidies, private subsidies (including both foundations and patronage), reputation, and so forth. Legal scholars have long recognized that copyright and patent are not the only options. And while some legal academics have mentioned the possibility of groups of users and creators interacting on a voluntary but structured basis, legal scholars did not give much sustained attention to such possibilities until fairly recently.
Acceptable Deviance And Property Rights, Mark A. Edwards
Acceptable Deviance And Property Rights, Mark A. Edwards
Faculty Scholarship
Compliance with - or deviance from - law is often dependent upon the law’s convergence with - or divergence from - normative sensibilities. Where the legality and social acceptability of behavior diverge, some deviance is socially acceptable. Property rights evolve in response to changes in normative sensibilities. Constructing a model of acceptable deviance and applying it to property rights, we can predict and actually observe the evolution of property rights in response to changes in normative sensibilities in areas as diverse as file-sharing, foreclosures, the use of public space, and fishing rights. We can also predict and observe stresses in …
Human Rights And Intellectual Property: Mapping The Global Interface, Laurence R. Helfer, Graeme W. Austin
Human Rights And Intellectual Property: Mapping The Global Interface, Laurence R. Helfer, Graeme W. Austin
Faculty Scholarship
Human Rights and Intellectual Property: Mapping the Global Interface explores the intersections between intellectual property and human rights law and policy. The relationship between these two fields has captured the attention of governments, policymakers, and activist communities in a diverse array of international and domestic political and judicial venues. These actors often raise human rights arguments as counterweights to the expansion of intellectual property in areas including freedom of expression, public health, education, privacy, agriculture, and the rights of indigenous peoples. At the same time, the creators and owners of intellectual property are asserting a human rights justification for the …
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Comparative Tales Of Origins And Access: Intellectual Property And The Rhetoric Of Social Change, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
This Article argues that the open-source and anti-expansionist rhetoric of current intellectual-property debates is a revolution of surface rhetoric but not of deep structure. What this Article terms “the Access Movements” are, by now, well-known communities devoted to providing more access to intellectual-property-protected goods, communities such as the Open Source Initiative and Access to Knowledge. This Article engages Movement actors in their critique of the balance struck by recent law (statutes and cases) and asks whether new laws that further restrict access to intellectual property “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Relying on cases, statutes and recent …
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Sprigman
Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment, Christopher Buccafusco, Christopher Sprigman
Faculty Scholarship
In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to as “endowment effects”. Traditional conceptions of the value of IP rely on assumptions about human rationality derived from classical economics. The law assumes that when people make decisions about buying, selling, and licensing IP they do so with fixed, context-independent preferences. Over the past several decades, this rational actor model of classical economics has come under attack by behavioral data showing that people do not always make strictly rational decisions. …
Collective Management Of Copyrights And Human Rights: An Uneasy Alliance Revisited, Laurence R. Helfer
Collective Management Of Copyrights And Human Rights: An Uneasy Alliance Revisited, Laurence R. Helfer
Faculty Scholarship
This essay analyzes the “creators’ rights” provisions of the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in the context of the collective administration of copyright and neighboring rights and the policies and practices of collective management organizations (CMOs). It also addresses other human rights treaties and international court rulings relevant to collective rights management. The essay begins with an overview of the ICESCR Committee’s General Comment on ICESCR Article 15(1)(c), “the right of everyone to benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the …
Current Patent Laws Cannot Claim The Backing Of Human Rights, Wendy J. Gordon
Current Patent Laws Cannot Claim The Backing Of Human Rights, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
In the dispute over the enforcement of pharmaceutical patents, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is sometimes cited as giving patent protection the status of a 'human right'. It is true that the ICESCR provides for ‘the right of everyone’ ‘[t]o benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author’. But that does not mean that patent protection is a human right. Patent fails as a human right for many reasons, one of which is the lack of fit between current patent …
The Rhetoric Of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law And The Regulation Of Digital Culture, By Jessica Reyman (Book Review), Jessica Silbey
The Rhetoric Of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law And The Regulation Of Digital Culture, By Jessica Reyman (Book Review), Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
A short book review of Jessica Reyman’s, The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture.