Law Commons^™

Freebooting On Facebook -- Should The Social Media Giant Face Liability?, Nicholas J. Tait

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

The Curious Case Of Cady Noland And The Disappearing Cabin, Amanda Hoefer

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Location Unaware: Developing A Standard Of Secondary Liability For Location-Aware Technology Developers, Joseph Phillip Sklar

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Revenge Porn, Thomas Lonardo, Tricia P. Martland, Rhode Island Bar Journal

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property In Experience, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019.

Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that ...

Equitable Resale Royalties, Brian L. Frye

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

A “resale royalty right” is a legal right that gives certain artists the right to claim a percentage of the resale price of the artworks they created. Many countries have created a resale royalty right, but the United States has not, and a federal court recently held that a resale royalty right created by California was preempted by federal law.

Commentators disagree about the justification of the resale royalty right. Supporters argue that equity entitles artists to a resale royalty right, which also encourages the production of artwork and protects artists from exploitation. Opponents argue that the resale royalty right ...

Price Discrimination & Intellectual Property, Michael Meurer, Ben Depoorter

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the law and economics literature on intellectual property law and price discrimination. We introduce legal scholars to the wide range of techniques used by intellectual property owners to practice price discrimination; in many cases the link between commercial practice and price discrimination may not be apparent to non-economists. We introduce economists to the many facets of intellectual property law that influence the profitability and practice of price discrimination. The law in this area has complex effects on customer sorting and arbitrage. Intellectual property law offers fertile ground for analysis of policies that facilitate or discourage price discrimination ...

"Distinctive Sounds": A Critique Of The Transformative Fair Use Test In Practice And The Need For A New Music Fair Use Exception, Kristin Bateman

Seattle University Law Review

The Constitution gives Congress the power “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” resulting in our modern regime of patent, trademark, and copyright law. Over time, however, this artistic tradition of copying has collided with more modern concepts of intellectual property rights, especially copyright protections. The advent of the internet as well as state-of-the-art recording and mixing software has vastly increased opportunities to copy, remix, sample, parody, and otherwise alter the work of other artists, particularly musicians. More than twenty years after Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, transformative fair use has become the predominant test courts have used ...

The Lost Tort Of Moral Rights Invasion, Patrick R. Goold

Akron Law Review

Moral rights are often portrayed as an unwelcome import into U.S. law. During the nineteenth century, European lawmakers, influenced by personality theories of authorship, began granting authors rights of attribution and integrity. However, while these rights proliferated in Europe and international copyright treaties, they were not adopted in the United States. According to a common historical narrative, U.S. courts and lawmakers resisted moral rights because they were deemed incompatible with the copyright tradition of treating expressive works as alienable property. What little moral rights U.S. law provides today is thus seen as a necessary evil, grudgingly accepted ...

Super Bowl I, Jazz Radio, And The Glass Menagerie: Copyright, Preservation, And Private Copies, R. Anthony Reese

Akron Law Review

Copyright law is often described as providing incentives to make and disseminate creative works. Copyright law should also seek to foster the preservation of creative works so that people can enjoy, use, study, critique, and build upon them long after they are first created. Traditionally, copyright law fostered preservation largely because most copyright owners principally exploited their works by making and distributing many tangible copies of those works. Those copies could end up in many different hands, and each copy could potentially survive into the future. Some kinds of works, though, were disseminated principally by performance, and as a result ...

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Illustrating A Technical Manual: Copyright And Fair Use In A Real World Professional Context, Karyn Hinkle

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

This lesson was developed for students preparing to enter professional practice who were assigned to write and/or illustrate a technical howto manual on a topic of their choice (how to put on ski boots, draw blood, use a fitness tracking app, etc.). The teaching librarian conducts a class session on finding and creating images to illustrate the manuals and teaches differences between using copyrighted and non-copyrighted images. The students work on finding images in the public domain, creating their own images, and incorporating copyrighted images via Creative Commons licenses and the principle of fair use. Librarians can teach this ...

Fair Use In The Visual Arts: Lesson Plans For Librarians, Alexander Watkins, Bridget Madden, Alexandra Provo, Danielle Reay, Anna Simon

University Libraries Faculty & Staff Contributions

The authors guide art information professionals in crafting learning experiences that empower students to understand copyright and take advantage of fair use in their art, design, and academic practices. The College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, endorsed by ARLIS/NA in 2015, is a key document that has the potential to transform the use of images in the visual arts. Education will be an essential part of the integration of the Code into the visual arts, and art information professionals are well positioned to teach fair use and the Code. This ...

Linking On The Internet And Copyright Liability – A Clarion Call For Doctrinal Clarity And Legal Certainty, Cheng Lim Saw

Research Collection School Of Law

Prompted by the decisions of the CJEU in Svensson and GS Media, this paper attempts to unmask the potential copyright liability of an internet user who engages in hyperlinking, framing and/or inline linking from a principled and conceptually coherent perspective. The overall discourse in this paper will be guided by the following two questions:1.Do these forms of online activity constitute acts of communication (or making available) in the first instance?2.Should they fall within the purview of Art. 3(1) of the EU Information Society Directive and be subject to potential primary/direct liability (as opposed ...

The Blessing Of Talent And The Curse Of Poverty: Rectifying Copyright Law's Implementation Of Authors' Material Interests In International Human Rights Law, Saleh Al-Sharieh

Notre Dame Journal of International & Comparative Law

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) grants authors the right to the protection of the material interests resulting from their intellectual works. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights interpreted these interests to comprise the ability to achieve an adequate standard of living (as a minimum). This paper argues that copyright law provides a useful yet incomplete model for the protection of authors’ material interests. Copyright creates the legal environment necessary for establishing a market for intellectual works but does not guarantee its benefits to authors. Therefore, States Parties to the ICESCR should both tailor ...

“Wake Up, Mr. West!”: Distinguishing Albums And Compilations For Statutory Damages In Copyright Within A Streaming–Centric Music Economy, Tyler Laurence

University of Miami Business Law Review

The concept of the music album has been a vital cornerstone of the recorded music industry since its adoption in the form of the long–play vinyl record in 1948. For over sixty years, the ability for artists to package a cohesive collection of performances has remained of paramount priority and an art within itself, notwithstanding the flurry of technological innovations that have altered the album’s size, shape, length, and interactivity. These collections of songs have even withstood the so–called “era of unbundilization,” as digital music services declared a new piecemeal distribution standard of albums through the turn ...

Ip Law Book Review, Vol. 8 #2, William T. Gallagher

Intellectual Property Law

THE BRANDING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: HOW UNIVERSITIES CAPTURE, MANAGE, AND MONETIZE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND WHY IT MATTERS, by Jacob Rooksby. Reviewed by Liza Vertinsky, Emory University School of Law

ILLEGAL LITERATURE: TOWARD A DISRUPTIVE CREATIVITY by David S. Roh. Reviewed by Shubha Ghosh, Syracuse University College of Law

ARTISTIC LICENSE: THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF COPYRIGHT AND APPROPRIATION, by Darren Hudson Hick. Reviewed by Shubha Ghosh, Syracuse University College of Law

THE LAW AND PRACTICE OF TRADEMARK TRANSACTIONS: A GLOBAL AND LOCAL OUTLOOK, edited by Irene Calboli and Jacques de Werra. Reviewed by Jake Linford, Florida State University College of ...

The Battle To Define Asia’S Intellectual Property Law: From Tpp To Rcep, Anupam Chander, Madhavi Sunder

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A battle is under way to decide the intellectual property law for half the world’s population. A trade agreement that hopes to create a free trade area even larger than that forged by Genghis Khan will define intellectual property rules across much of Asia and the Pacific. The sixteen countries negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) include China, India, Japan, and South Korea, and stretch to Australia and New Zealand. A review of a leaked draft reveals a struggle largely between India on one side and South Korea and Japan on the other over the intellectual property rules ...

Oops!... I Infringed Again: An Analysis Of U.S. Copyright And Its Intended Beneficiaries, Gabriele A. Forbes-Bennett

Student Theses

This paper seeks to establish the reasons why federal copyright protection was created, discuss the shifts in reasoning behind major amendments, and explore its effects on copyright holders and the public, with a slight focus on the music industry. Federal copyright has existed in the United States since the late 1700s, with the creation of the Copyright Act in 1790. Adopted from the first copyright law ever created, the English Statute of Anne (1710), the Copyright Act was meant to protect citizens from piracy in a world where the risk of such a thing was rapidly increasing. The stated objective ...

Balances Of Power Between Ip Creators: Ethical Issues In Scholarly Communication, Kristin Laughtin-Dunker

Library Presentations, Posters, and Videos

Scholarly communications often values free access above all else, but what happens when that drive for openness conflicts with ethical issues of consent and ownership? In this CARL IG Showcase panel, members of SCORE (Scholarly Communication and Open Resources for Education) will discuss some of the thorny issues of ethics and scholarly communication, including: consent (particularly among diverse communities outside of the institution) and digital collections, students as information creators / library as publisher, and decolonizing who we consider scholars and what we consider scholarship. This panel will feature speakers who will share current discussions and personal stories on issues pertinent ...

Emojis And The Law, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

Emojis are an increasingly important way we express ourselves. Though emojis may be cute and fun, their usage can lead to misunderstandings with significant legal stakes—such as whether someone should be obligated by contract, liable for sexual harassment, or sent to jail.

Our legal system has substantial experience interpreting new forms of content, so it should be equipped to handle emojis. Nevertheless, some special attributes of emojis create extra interpretative challenges. This Article identifies those attributes and proposes how courts should handle them.

One particularly troublesome interpretative challenge arises from the different ways platforms depict emojis that are nominally ...

What Is (And Isn't) Fair Use In Music Sampling?, Devin Mckinney

Musselman Library Staff Publications

"Fair use" is a principle embedded in copyright law which permits -- under circumstances governed by a set of considerations commonly known as "the four factors" -- the borrowing of material from copyrighted works to create new works. Created for Fair Use Week 2018, this poster highlights the principle as it has applied to three controversial cases involving music sampling. For each case, the observer is given the essential facts; shown which of the four factors (represented by icons) were most central; and told the real-world outcome of each case. As an interactive display, the poster covered each "Outcome" column with a ...

Fair Use And Social Media, John Dettinger

Musselman Library Staff Publications

This poster was created in a collaborative effort by Musselman Library’s Copyright Committee as part of a display for Fair Use Week 2018. The poster was intended to get viewers to think about the 4 factors of fair use in the context of two art projects that used social media photos: Yolocaust by Shahak Shapira and New Portraits by Richard Prince. It was also intended to get viewers thinking about the ways their social media content might get used beyond the original intention.

Copyrighting The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qimron V. Shanks, David L. Cohen

Maine Law Review

In 1992, Professor Elisha Qimron of Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, Israel, brought suit against the editors and publisher of A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a complete set of photographs of the scrolls, for copyright infringement and the tort of mental anguish asking for approximately $250,000 in damages. The case centered on an appendix of the book which included a portion of a scroll text, Misgat Ma'Aseh ha-Torah—Some Rulings Pertaining to the Torah (MMT), reconstructed by Qimron. MMT consists of 121 lines of text, and Qimron's reconstruction—referred to in the ...

The Perfection And Priority Rules For Security Interests In Copyrights, Patents, And Trademarks: The Current Structural Dissonance And Proposed Legislative Cures, Thomas M. Ward

Maine Law Review

The structural legal dissonance that undermines the effective financing of federal intellectual property rights (patents, trademarks registrations, copyrights, and maskworks) is rooted in the prominence of title in both the early conceptual history of personal property financing and in the language of the federal tract recording acts. While genuine ownership transfers have always represented the prototype under the federal intellectual property recording statutes, transfers intended for security were also originally included because of the early judicial thinking about the importance of title to the validity (against third parties) of a “mortgage” right in intangible personal property. As products of their ...

Pirate Tales From The Deep [Web]: An Exploration Of Online Copyright Infringement In The Digital Age, Nicholas C. Butland, Justin J. Sullivan

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Technology has seen a boom over the last few decades, making innovative leaps that border on science fiction. With the most recent technological leap came a new frontier of intellectual property and birthed a new class of criminal: the cyber-pirate. This Article discusses cyber-piracy and its interactions and implications for modern United States copyright law. The Article explains how copyright law, unprepared for the boom, struggled to adapt as courts reconciled the widely physical perceptions of copyright with the digital information being transferred between billions of users instantaneously. The Article also explores how cyber-piracy has made, and continues to make ...

Book Review: Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, And Intellectual Property Rights In American Dance By Anthea Kraut, Carys Craig

Carys Craig

Dance may be one of the world’s oldest art forms, but it is a relatively recent entrant into the sphere of copyright law—and remains something of an afterthought amongst copyright lawyers and scholars alike. For copyright scholars, at least, that should change with the publication of Anthea Kraut’s CHOREOGRAPHING COPYRIGHT: RACE, GENDER, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN AMERICAN DANCE. Kraut performs a fascinating exploration of the evolution of choreographic copyright—sweeping, political, polemical—that should leave no one in doubt as to the normative significance of choreography as a subject matter of copyright law and policy. Nor ...

Fair Use And First Amendment: Without Fair Use, What Would You Freely Speak About?, Adam Blaier

Pace Intellectual Property, Sports & Entertainment Law Forum

The question this paper tries to answer is: Without fair use, what would you freely speak about? This paper will seek to demonstrate that the Copyright Clause’s Fair Use doctrine, and the First Amendment are cousins who help each other, rather than enemies sworn to destroy each other as some believe. First I will give a brief overview and history of each doctrine. Next I will speak about three areas where I believe fair use and the First Amendment cross paths extensively. These areas are: (1) school/education; (2) social media and news; and (3) sports images/broadcasting. Finally ...

Brief Of Amici Curiae - Copyright And Intellectual Property Law Professors In Support Of Defendant-Petitioner Pandora Media, Inc., Tyler T. Ochoa, Joseph C. Gratz

Faculty Publications

Brief submitted to the Supreme Court of the State of California.

Case No. S240649 FLO & EDDIE, INC., Plaintiff-Respondent, v. PANDORA MEDIA, INC., Defendant-Petitioner.

Plaintiff Flo & Eddie, Inc., contends that the phrase “exclusive ownership” in California Civil Code section 980 includes all possible uses to which a copyrightable work may be put, including an exclusive right of public performance. At the time California Civil Code section 980 was first enacted in 1872, however, the phrase “exclusive ownership” in relation to a copyrightable work meant something different and much narrower: namely, the right of first publication (reproduction and sale) only. Since the ...

A Tale Of Two Composers: An Argument For A Limited Expansion Of Moral Rights For Composers, Cassidy Grunninger

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.