Law Commons^™

Google The Gozerian And Fair Use Slimed: Copyright Again In The Technocrat's Den, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the fair use doctrine as it applies to Google's Library Search Project and both predicts and advocates for a finding of fair use. Part I briefly reviews the past by considering the pertinent history of the fair use doctrine. It also explains the details of the current suit over Google's Library Project. Part II moves on to consider the current state of fair use analysis by reviewing 110 fair use cases and conducting simple statistical analyses. It then explains and applies the fair use doctrine to Google's project. Part III considers cases frequently compared to Google's and …

Digital Rights Management And The Process Of Fair Use, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Producers of digital media works increasingly employ technological protection measures, commonly referred to as "digital rights management" (or "DRM") technologies, that prevent the works from being accessed or used except upon conditions the producers themselves specify. These technologies have come under criticism for interfering with the rights users enjoy under copyright law, including the right to engage in fair uses of the DRM-protected works. Most DRM mechanisms are not engineered to include exceptions for fair use, and user circumvention of the DRM may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act even if the use for which the circumvention occurs is itself …

Beyond Abstraction: The Law And Economics Of Copyright Scope And Doctrinal Efficiency, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

Uncertainty as to the optimum extent of protection generally limits the capacity of law and economics to translate economic theory into coherent doctrinal recommendations in the realm of copyright. This Article explores the relationship between copyright scope, doctrinal efficiency, and welfare from a theoretical perspective to develop a framework for evaluating specific doctrinal recommendations in copyright law.

The usefulness of applying this framework in either rejecting or improving doctrinal recommendations is illustrated with reference to the predominant law and economics theories of fair use. The metric-driven analysis adopted in this Article demonstrates the general robustness of the market-failure approach to …

War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica D. Litman

Other Publications

I'd like to thank the Copyright Society and the Brace committee for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I am honored that you invited me to give this lecture. I want to talk a little bit about war - copyright war - and then I want to talk a little bit about peace. It's become conventional that we're in the middle of a copyright war.' I tried to track down who started calling it that, and what I can tell you is that about ten years ago, about the time that copyright lawyers everywhere were arguing about the …

Legal Protocols And Practices For Managing Copyright In Electronic Theses, Mark Perry, Paula Callan

Law Publications

At Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia, PhD and Masters by Research candidates are required to deposit both print and digital copies of their theses and dissertations. The fulltext of these digital theses is then made freely available online via the Australian Digital Thesis (ADT) collection. Management of copyright issues has been a major headache and workload problem for the Library: there are many parties involved in the deposit process, and the lack of a common understanding about the rights and responsibilities of the various stakeholders has made the process very complex and time consuming. The response of …

Bound By Law? Trapped In A Struggle She Didn't Understand, By Day A Filmmaker, By Night She Fought For Fair Use! [Tales From The Public Domain], Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

A graphic novel about fair use with respect to United States copyright law.

Synopsis:

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the "Rocky" theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights for the song. Can this be true? "Eyes on the Prize," the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers' rights to music and footage had expired.

What's going on here? It's the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it's the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akika as she films her …

Performance, Property, And The Slashing Of Gender In Fan Fiction , Sonia K. Katyal

Faculty Scholarship

Today, it is no secret that the regime of copyright law, once an often-overlooked footnote to our legal system of property, now occupies a central position in modern debates surrounding the relationship between freedom of expression, language, and ownership. Curiously, however, while contemporary scholarship on copyright now embraces a wide range of political and economic approaches, it has often failed to consider how intellectual property law - as it is owned, constituted, created, and enforced - both benefits and disadvantages segments of the population in divergent ways. This absence is both vexing and fascinating. While issues of distributive justice have …