Law Commons^™

Copyright 101, Jay M. Nadlman

Learning Exchange Networks

This presentation gives a brief overview of copyright, Fair Use, and other issues of intellectual property.

Draft For Harmless Use: Gleaning From Fields Of Copyrighted Works - 2008, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

My inquiry is into whether harmless uses of property should give the property owner a right to sue. Under current law, harmless trespasses to land and to copyrights and patents do indeed give rise to liability. Should they? Neither moral philosophy, political science nor economics deals well with the harmless free-rider. The possibility I'm exploring-- just exploring at this stage-- is the following: that where inexhaustible products like information become a primary source of value, our institutions might serve us better if instead of mandating payment for harmless use via legal compulsion, payment for harmless use be left to the …

Copyright And Permissions: Sometimes They're The Same, Kopana Terry

Library Presentations

No abstract provided.

Vol. Vi, Tab 38 - Ex. 21 - Email From Christina Aguilar, Christina Aguilar

Rosetta Stone v. Google (Joint Appendix)

Exhibits from the un-sealed joint appendix for Rosetta Stone Ltd., v. Google Inc., No. 10-2007, on appeal to the 4th Circuit. Issue presented: Under the Lanham Act, does the use of trademarked terms in keyword advertising result in infringement when there is evidence of actual confusion?

Copyright, Clickers, And Consensus, Jonathan Bacon

SIDLIT Conference Proceedings

A discussion about classroom copyright issues and integrating technology.

Complying With The National Institutes Of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations And Options, Michael Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This White Paper is written primarily for policymaking staff in universities and other institutional recipients of NIH support responsible for ensuring compliance with the Public Access Policy. The January 11, 2008, Public Access Policy imposes two new compliance mandates. First, the grantee must ensure proper manuscript submission. The version of the article to be submitted is the final version over which the author has control, which must include all revisions made after peer review. The statutory command directs that the manuscript be submitted to PMC “upon acceptance for publication.” That is, the author’s final manuscript should be submitted to PMC …

Code Of Best Practices In Fair Use For Online Video, Peter A. Jaszi, Patricia Aufderheide

Copyright, Fair Use & Open Access

Until the release of these best practices, anyone uploading a video ran the risk of becoming inadvertently entangled in an industry skirmish, as media companies struggle to keep their programs from circulating on the internet. This document is a code of best practices created by a collaborative team of media scholars and lawyers, to help creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video, interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use in online video. The code identifies, among other things, six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain …

The Dangers Of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Much Ado About Nothing?, Steve P. Calandrillo, Ewa A. Davison

Articles

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a landmark piece of legislation aimed at protecting copyright holders from those who might manufacture or traffic technology capable of allowing users to evade piracy protections on the underlying work. At its core, the DMCA flatly prohibits the circumvention of “technological protection measures” in order to gain access to copyrighted works, but provides no safety valve for any traditionally protected uses.

While hailed as a victory by the software and entertainment industries, the academic and scientific communities ties have been far less enthusiastic. The DMCA’s goal of combating piracy is …

Email To Bob Bone Re: Idea Expression Dichotomy, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

This is to recap our discussion, to make sure we're on the same page, and carry this a bit further. I'm very excited.

Making Copyright Whole: A Principled Approach To Copyright Exceptions And Limitations, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Article suggests a path to develop a principled conceptualization for copyright of limitations and exceptions at the international level. The paper argues that, normatively, copyright has always sought to reflect a balance between protection and access. It demonstrates that this balance was present to the minds of the negotiators of the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and may have been somewhat overlooked in revisions of the Convention. It was ultimately replaced by a three-step test designed to restrict the ability of individual legislators to create limitations and exceptions. The article also considers the …

Pornography, Coercion, And Copyright Law 2.0, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The lack of regulation of the production of pornography in the United States leaves pornography performers exposed to substantial risks. Producers of pornography typically respond to attempts to regulate pornography as infringements upon free speech. At the same time, large corporations involved in the production and sale of pornography rely on copyright law's complex regulatory framework to protect their pornographic content from copying and unauthorized distribution. Web 2.0 also facilitates the production and distribution of pornography by individuals. These user-generators produce their own pornography, often looking to monetize their productions themselves via advertising revenues and subscription models. Much like their …

Copyright Law And Pornography: Reconsidering Incentives To Create And Distribute Pornography, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

As it moved into the mainstream in the 1970s and early 1980s, pornography obtained copyright protections through judicial fiat, rather than as a result of legislative action. This essay explains how pornography came to be eligible for copyright protections, discusses the social and legal effects of this change, and raises questions about the propriety of according pornography the full benefits of copyright law without taking into account the harms that pornography production can inflict on subordinated or coerced "performers."

When Bias Is Bipartisan: Teaching About The Democratic Process In An Intellectual Property Law Republic, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Introduction]: Intellectual property law courses offer law professors the opportunity to teach a subject area rich with complicated statutory and court-made doctrines about which students do not usually have strong or extensively delineated moral views. I It also gives everyone in the classroom a refreshing break from the traditional partisanship of political party politics. Identification as a Democrat or Republican does not provide too much guidance or create too many expectations about a person's views of intellectual property issues, freeing classroom debates from the constrictions that political loyalties impose in so many other contexts.

Viewing Virtual Property Ownership Through The Lens Of Innovation, Ryan G. Vacca

Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several years scholars have wrestled with how property rights in items created in virtual worlds should be conceptualized. Regardless of how the property is conceptualized and what property theory best fits, most agree the law ought to recognize virtual property as property and vest someone with those rights.

The True Colors Of Trademark Law: Green-Lighting A Red Tide Of Anti Competition Blues, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The elevation of color to stand-alone trademark status illustrates the unbounded nature of trademarks within the judicial consciousness. The availability of color-alone marks also facilitates the commoditization of color in ways that complicate the development and distribution of products and services that use color for multiple purposes conterminously. The economic case for color-alone trademarks is severely undermined by careful observation of the ways that colors are actually deployed in commerce, which makes it clear that the trademarks of multiple goods and services can utilize the same color to telegraph the same message without confusing anyone or diluting the commercial power …

Copyright Law And Pornography: Reconsidering Incentives To Create And Distribute Pornography, Ann Bartow

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

As it moved into the mainstream in the 1970s and early 1980s, pornography obtained copyright protections through judicial fiat, rather than as a result of legislative action. This essay explains how pornography came to be eligible for copyright protections, discusses the social and legal effects of this change, and raises questions about the propriety of according pornography the full benefits of copyright law without taking into account the harms that pornography production can inflict on subordinated or coerced ―performers.

Intellectual Property For Market Experimentation, Michael B. Abramowicz, John F. Duffy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Intellectual property protects investments in the production of information, but the literature on the topic has largely neglected one type of information that intellectual property might protect: information about the market success of goods and services. A first entrant into a market often cannot prevent other firms from free-riding on information about consumer demand and market feasibility. Despite the existence of some first-mover advantages, the incentives to be the first entrant into a market may sometimes be inefficiently low, thereby giving rise to a net first-mover disadvantage and discouraging innovation. Intellectual property may counteract this inefficiency by providing market exclusivity, …

Intellectual Property Rights In An Attorney’S Work Product, Ralph D. Clifford

Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the main intellectual property consequences of practicing law and whether attorneys can prevent others from using their work-product. The article does not assume that the reader is an expert in intellectual property law; instead, it is designed to answer the types of questions practitioners have about their rights.

Moral Philosophy, Information Technology, And Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

A plethora of philosophical issues arise where copyright and patent laws intersect with information technology. Given the necessary brevity of the chapter, my strategy will be to make general observations that can be applied to illuminate one particular issue. I have chosen the issue considered in MGM v. Grokster,² a recent copyright case from the U.S. Supreme Court Grokster, Ltd., provided a decentralized peer-to-peer technology that many people, typically students, used to copy and distribute music in ways that violated copyright law. The Supreme Court addressed the extent to which Grokster and other technology providers should be held …

Innovation And The Domain Of Competition Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust policy and the IP laws are both concerned with practices that restrain competition unnecessarily by reducing the size of the public domain beyond that which the Constitution contemplates, or as Congress intended for them to be expanded. In fact, antitrust has a dual role as promoter of competition in IP intensive markets. It regulates both restraints on competition and restraints on innovation. The first line protector of the competitive process in innovation is the IP statutes themselves. The Constitutional Mandate to Congress to create intellectual property regimes in order to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts is …

Writer's Block, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on intellectual property law and business models, suggests the re-examination of the role of intellectual property law in the persistence of cultural forms of all sorts, including (but not limited to) business models. Some argue that the absence of intellectual property law inhibits the emergence of durable or persistent cultural forms; copyright and patent regimes are justified precisely because they supply foundations for durability. The essay tests that proposition via brief reviews of three persistent but very different cultural models, each of which represents a distinct form of American culture: The Rocky …

Harry Potter And The (Re)Order Of The Artists: Are We Muggles Or Goblins?, Gary Pulsinelli

Scholarly Works

In "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," author J.K. Rowling attributes to goblins a very interesting view of ownership rights in artistic works. According to Rowling, goblins believe that the maker of an artistic object maintain an ongoing ownership interest in that object even after it is sold, and is entitled to get it back when the purchaser dies. While this view may strike some as rather odd when it is applied to tangible property in the 'muggle' world, it actually has some very interesting parallels to the legal treatment of intangible property, particularly in the areas of intellectual property …

Sight, Sound And Meaning: Teaching Intellectual Property With Audiovisual Materials, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article addresses the author's experience using audiovisual materials from the Georgetown Intellectual Property Teaching Resources database. She used audiovisual materials extensively in class to allow students to see the subject matter of the cases rather than just reading verbal descriptions and enable them to apply the principles they read about to new, concrete examples. Many students in IP courses have special interests in music, film, or the visual arts, and the database allows her--and other teachers--to present materials that engage them. She found that students are more willing to speak up in class when they can see or hear …

Fair Circumvention, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Judicial decisions construing the key liability provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. - 1201, cluster around two incompatible poles. One set of decisions construes the DMCA's liability provisions broadly, emphasizing the need to prevent possible copyright infringement and limit the public availability of tools that may be used to infringe. Other cases construe the same language narrowly, stressing the avoidance of anticompetitive market distortions. Both sets of decisions insist that their interpretation is commanded by the literal text of the DMCA. A closer look, however, reveals that both sides have overstated the support they may plausibly …