Law Commons^™

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …

Contributory Infringers And Good Samaritans, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

The introduction of online technologies has put increased pressure on the doctrine of contributory infringement as intellectual property rights holders switch their attention from direct infringers to Internet intermediaries. The Supreme Court has instructed lower courts to evaluate contributory infringement in light of traditional tort law. The common law of aiding and abetting, however, is so inconsistent as to offer no real guidance. A better approach lies in a separate but related area of tort doctrine. In a limited number of circumstances, tort law recognizes a duty to protect third parties from the actions of others. Like aiding and abetting, …

Copyright, Trademark And Secondary Liability After Grokster, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

Even though secondary infringement doctrine in both copyright and trademark stems from the same common law starting points, the doctrines have moved in very different directions, particularly in the last decade. As copyright litigants expanded their litigation strategy to include online intermediaries, secondary copyright liability was stretched to encompass a wider array of defendants with increasingly tangential relationships to the direct infringer. Meanwhile, even though similar online threats jeopardized the ability of trademark holders to safeguard their brands' goodwill, courts refused to implement a similar expansion for secondary trademark liability. Although courts are aware of this doctrinal double standard, they …

You Can't Always Get What You Want, But If You Try Sometimes You Can Steal It And Call It Fair Use: A Proposal To Abolish The Fair Use Defense For Music, William Henslee

Journal Publications

The fair use doctrine in copyright has become the excuse for every creatively challenged author who gets caught using someone else's intellectual property without paying for it and tries to pass it off as his or her own. Fair use has also become the means to use someone else's work for purposes unrelated to the original without paying for the use.

While there are scholars who believe fair use should be more widely applicable than it already is, this Article will discuss how the fair use defense in music has been expanded far beyond the original legislative intent and has …

Lawful Personal Use, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Despite having sued more than 20,000 of its customers,2 the recording industry wants the world to know that it has no complaint with personal use. Copyright lawyers of all stripes agree that copyright includes a free zone in which individuals may make personal use of copyrighted works without legal liability.3 Unlike other nations, though, the United States hasn't drawn the borders of its lawful personal use zone by statute.4 Determining the circumstances under which personal use of copyrighted works will be deemed lawful is essentially a matter of inference and analogy, and differently striped copyright lawyers will differ vehemently on …

The Secret Life Of Legal Doctrine: The Divergent Evolution Of Secondary Liability In Trademark And Copyright Law, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian

Journal Articles

The recent explosion in intellectual property litigation has witnessed increasing recourse to secondary liability theories. The courts have responded favorably to plaintiffs by enunciating substantial reinterpretations of extant principles, thereby precipitating a veritable secondary liability revolution. Numerous commentators have bemoaned this trend, contending that judicial recasting of liability rules expands intellectual property rights beyond their intended scope, thereby resulting in an overprotective regime that stifles innovation. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the secondary liability revolution has been all but ignored in the literature: While the courts have broadened the scope of secondary liability principles with respect to …

Inducers And Authorisers: A Comparison Of The Us Supreme Court's Grokster Decision And The Australian Federal Court's Kazaa Ruling, Jane C. Ginsburg, Sam Ricketson

Faculty Scholarship

On June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court announced its much-awaited decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. A few months after this, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its decision at first instance in relation to parallel litigation in that country concerning the KaZaa file sharing system. Both decisions repay careful consideration of the way in which the respective courts have addressed the relationship between the protection of authors' rights and the advent of new technologies, particularly in relation to peer-to-peer networks.

In the Grokster case, songwriters, record producers and motion picture producers alleged that two popular …

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 …