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Full-Text Articles in Law
Contracts Mattered As Much As Copyrights, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
Contracts Mattered As Much As Copyrights, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz
Articles
Scholars have begun to appreciate the fundamental role that contracts played in the development of copyrights. Contracts gave copyrights vitalilty. This article explores the network of book publishing contracts that formed the legal infrastructure for a pre-modern “internet” at the dawn of copyright law in Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Drawing on insights from archival research, the article shows how this network of copyright contracts advanced an important goal of copyright: the spread of ideas and information throughout all parts of society. Appreciating the historical significance of copyright contracts provides valuable context for modern debates about copyright policy. Indeed, …
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
Articles
For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which …
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman
Law & Economics Working Papers
It is becoming increasingly clear that the supposed copyright wars that copyright scholars believed we were fighting – nominally pitting the interests of authors and creators against the interests of readers and other members of the audience – were never really about that at all. Instead the real conflict has been between the publishers, record labels, movie studios, and other intermediaries who rose to market dominance in the 20th century, and the digital services and platforms that have become increasingly powerful copyright players in the 21st. In this essay, adapted from the 13th annual University of Cambridge Center for Intellectual …
What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman
What Notice Did, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
In the twenty-first century, copyright protection is automatic. It vests in eligible works the instant that those works are first embodied in a tangible format. Many Americans are unaware of that, believing instead that registration and copyright notice are required to secure a copyright. That impression is understandable. For its first 199 years, United States copyright law required authors to take affirmative steps to obtain copyright protection. The first U.S. copyright statute, enacted by Congress in 1790, required the eligible author of an eligible work to record the title of the work with the clerk of the court in the …
Silent Similarity, Jessica D. Litman
Silent Similarity, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
From 1909 to 1930, U.S. courts grappled with claims by authors of prose works claiming that works in a new art form—silent movies—had infringed their copyrights. These cases laid the groundwork for much of modern copyright law, from their broad expansion of the reproduction right, to their puzzled grappling with the question how to compare works in dissimilar media, to their confusion over what sort of evidence should be relevant to show copyrightability, copying and infringement. Some of those cases—in particular, Nichols v. Universal Pictures—are canonical today. They are not, however, well-understood. In particular, the problem at the heart of …
Remuneration Of Authors And Performers For The Use Of Their Works And The Fixations Of Their Performances, Europe Economics, Lucie Guibault, Olivia Salamanca, Directorate-General For Communications Networks, Content And Technology (European Commission)
Remuneration Of Authors And Performers For The Use Of Their Works And The Fixations Of Their Performances, Europe Economics, Lucie Guibault, Olivia Salamanca, Directorate-General For Communications Networks, Content And Technology (European Commission)
Reports & Public Policy Documents
This study analyses the current situation regarding the level of remuneration paid to authors and performers in the music and audio-visual sectors. We compare, from both a legal and economic perspective, the existing national systems of remuneration for authors and performers and identify the relative advantages and disadvantages of those systems for them. We also explore the need to harmonise mechanisms affecting the remuneration of authors and performers, and to identify which ones are the best suited to achieve this. Their potential impact on distribution models and on the functioning of the Internal Market is also examined. Finally, the study …
Ip Basics: Copyright In Written Work, Thomas G. Field Jr.
Ip Basics: Copyright In Written Work, Thomas G. Field Jr.
Law Faculty Scholarship
Written primarily for free-lance writers, this discussion addresses ownership and duration of copyrights, deposit and registration, notice, and remedies that are closely tied to prompt registration. It also discusses licensing and other matters of interest, as well as the need for counsel.
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Dissemination Must Serve Authors: How The U.S. Supreme Court Erred, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The US Congress has enacted expansions of copyright which arguably impose high social costs and generate little incentives for authorial creativity. When the two most expansive statutes were challenged as unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court rebuffed the challenges, partly on the supposed ground that copyright law could legitimately seek to promote nonauthorial interests; apparently, Congress could enact provisions aiming to support noncreative disseminative activities such as publishing, or restoring and distributing old film stock, even if authorial incentives were not served. Such an error might have arisen because of three phenomena (in economics, history, and law, respectively) that might easily …
Copyright As Property In The Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda, Julie E. Cohen
Copyright As Property In The Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda, Julie E. Cohen
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The incentives-for-authors formulation of copyright’s purpose is so deeply ingrained in our discourse and our thought processes that it is astonishingly hard to avoid invoking, even when one is consciously trying not to do so. Yet avoiding that formulation is exactly what we ought to be doing. Everything we know about creativity and creative processes suggests that copyright plays very little role in motivating creative work. In the contemporary information society, the purpose of copyright is to enable the provision of capital and organization so that creative work may be exploited. And the choice of copyright as a principal means …
Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman
Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …
The Google Book Settlement And The Fair Use Counterfactual, Matthew Sag
The Google Book Settlement And The Fair Use Counterfactual, Matthew Sag
Faculty Articles
The sprawling Google Book Search litigation began as a dispute between the search engine colossus and a variety of authors and publishers over the legality of Google’s book digitization effort, the Google Book Search project (“GBS” or “Google Book Search”), for the purpose of indexing paper collections and making them searchable on the Internet. However, through the metamorphic power of class action litigation, a dispute over mere indexing and searching has been transformed into a comprehensive agreement over the future of the book as a digital commodity. Understanding this transformation and its implications is the central ambition of this article. …
Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman
Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
Let me begin with something that Jamie Boyle wrote ten years ago in Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person's Guide:' Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without copying. The relative bundles of rights of the user and the owner achieve their balance based on a set of economic and technical assumptions about the meaning of normal use. For our purposes, I would like to generalize this as something that Boyle might have written if he had not in that …
Google's (Fair) Use Of Copyrighted Work, James Gibson
Google's (Fair) Use Of Copyrighted Work, James Gibson
Law Faculty Publications
Letters to the Editor on Google's (Fair) Use of Copyrighted Work
Rationalizing The Allocative/Distributive Relationship In Copyright, Jeffrey L. Harrison
Rationalizing The Allocative/Distributive Relationship In Copyright, Jeffrey L. Harrison
UF Law Faculty Publications
It is the position of this article that the benefits of a regime of copyright law can be maintained while shedding at least some of the wastefulness of monopolistic competition. This article cuts against the grain of modem copyright law by making the case that a more substantive approach to the issues of creativity and authorship would lower costs, streamline the system, and raise the level of socially beneficial creativity. In Section II, I will elaborate on the allocative/distributive distinction and their interconnectedness. In Section III, I will focus on an enhanced creativity standard and argue that an elevated standard …
A Brief History Of Author-Publisher Relations And The Outlook For The 21st Century, Maureen A. O'Rourke
A Brief History Of Author-Publisher Relations And The Outlook For The 21st Century, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Faculty Scholarship
The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. provides a particularly appropriate forum in which to discuss the current state of the copyright system. By some accounts, U.S. copyright law has been fabulously successful, encouraging the growth of industries whose copyrighted products both enrich American culture and contribute significant value to the economy.
The Public Domain, Jessica D. Litman
The Public Domain, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
This article examines the public domain by looking at the gulf between what authors really do and the way the law perceives them. Part I outlines the basics of copyright as a species of property and introduces the public domain's place within the copyright scheme. Copyright grants authors" ' rights modeled on real property in order to encourage authorship by providing authors with markets in which they can seek compensation for their creations. Because parcels of authorship are intangible, however, the law faces *problems in determining the ownership and boundaries of its property grants. In particular, the concept of "originality," …