Law Commons^™

Conquering Copyright: Why Copyright Needs To Be Modernized Based On Practical Illustrations Of Inconsistent Copyright Precedent, Saipranay Vellala

Akron Law Review

Copyright law establishes an author’s right to secure exclusive rights in their writings. If an author finds an infringing work, the author can file a copyright infringement suit to protect their original writings and stop an infringer from misappropriating their work. In analyzing copyright infringement, however, some legal theories, such as the Inverse Ratio Rule, mischaracterize the crux of the copyright infringement inquiry and complicate the infringement inquiry for judges and juries—adversely affecting authors. Using indie musicians as an exemplary embodiment of modern copyright jurisprudence’s adverse effects, indie musicians who merely have access to a more famous musician’s music may …

Letting Anarchy Loose On The World: The Anarchist Cookbook And How Copyright Fails The Author, Debora Halbert

Akron Law Review

The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell remains one of the most controversial books in print, even 50 years after its first publication. The story to be told about its ongoing publication can teach us about the politics of authorship, ownership, publication, copyright assignments, the public domain, and the legacies our printed words leave behind. Later in life Powell regretted publishing the book and wished that it would be removed from publication and circulation but stated that he did not own the copyright and so could not control the book. However, even at his death the book remained in print and …

A Tale Of Two Copyrights, Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Akron Law Review

This essay explores two possible copyright regimes. The first uses costless and perfect price discrimination to enable copyright owners to capture the full market or exchange value of their work. The second also uses costless and perfect price discrimination, but allows copyright owners to capture only the persuasion cost for authoring and distributing a work. We can call the first regime, costless copyright maximalism, and the second, costless copyright minimalism. The choice between these two regimes is primarily distributional: Should we design copyright to allocate the surplus associated with copyrighted works to copyright owners or to copyright consumers? This essay …

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, simply to comply …

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, …

Trademark Boundaries And 3d Printing, Lucas S. Osborn

Akron Law Review

3D printing technology promises to disrupt trademark law at the same time that trademark law and policy sustain repeated criticism. The controversial growth of trademark law over the last century has yielded amorphous sponsorship and affiliation confusion issues and empirically fragile post-sale and initial-interest confusion theories, among others. Into this melee marches 3D printing technology, which dissociates the process of design from that of manufacturing and democratizes manufacturing. Rather than being embodied only in physical objects, design is embodied in digital CAD files that users can post and sell on the internet. The digitization of physical objects raises fundamental questions …

Redefining The Intended Copyright Infringer, Yvette Joy Liebesman

Akron Law Review

The contemporary copyright infringer is pretty much anyone who can get caught. Yet, who could be caught back when the Copyright Act of 1976 was enacted is just a subset of those who can be caught today—we had very different concepts about who was the intended target of an infringement action than who fits into that mold today. The advent and growth of cyberspace communication now makes it both easier to infringe and for IP owners, with very little effort, to capture infringers. The ability of individuals to both easily infringe and easily be found infringing has altered the IP …

Copyright Easements, Jason Mazzone

Akron Law Review

When authors assign the copyright in their work to publishers, some productive uses of the work are impeded. The author loses opportunities to use or to authorize others to use the work unless the publisher consents; the publisher does not permit all uses of the work that the author would like or that would benefit a consuming audience. Copyright easements can solve the problem. Under a system of copyright easements, an easement holder would have designated rights in a creative work that would permit uses of the work that would ordinarily require permission of the copyright owner. If the author …

The Effects Of The Fair Use Doctrine On Text-Book Publishing And Copying; Part Ii, Roger Billings

Akron Law Review

Although not expressly authorized by law, it has, through custom, become regarded as a fair use for scholars to make handwritten copies of copyrighted materials needed for research. The basis for allowing hand-copying is that it is such a slow, tedious method of reproduction that scholars usually choose to purchase the complete work rather than to hand-copy excerpts from it. Consequently, hand-copying does not significantly reduce publishers' sales. However, this reasoning obviously cannot be applied to photocopying. As photocopying, a fast and convenient process, becomes cheaper than buying the book, when a professor desires to make a complete volume for …

The Effect Of The Fair Use Doctrine On Text-Book Publishing And Copying, Roger Billings

Akron Law Review

Perhaps nowhere will photocopying be more beneficial than in the field of education. The question is, what effect will it have on publishing? Senator Quentin Burdick stated the basic problem when he said, ". . . [Y]ou have someone who spends years in perfecting a textbook, and all of a sudden it is used free of charge. Where does he sell textbooks?" The problem of unauthorized photocopying of textbooks is considered one of the more difficult ones encountered in the area of fair use, an area itself regarded as one of the most troublesome in the whole law of copyright. …

The Protection Of Property Rights In Computer Software, Edward W. Rilee

Akron Law Review

During the last decade a number of attempts have been made by the courts in the realm of patent and copyright law to settle the issue of the protection of property rights in computer software. These traditional methods of protection, however, have not been able to assimilate this relatively new technological invention. Likewise, at the start of a new decade, little or no progress towards a comprehensive form of software protection can be detected. This paper will examine the problems associated with using federal patent or copyright law to provide computer software protection and discuss why state trade secret protection …

You Can't Always Get What You Want But Digital Sampling Can Get What You Need!, Ronald Mark Wells

Akron Law Review

This comment will examine copyright law, its role in the popular music industry, and its relationship with digital sampling. To lay the groundwork, Part I will examine the function of copyright law as it relates to musical compositions. Part II will then peruse the area of sound recordings. Finally, Part III will take a critical look at digital sound sampling and its legitimacy in relation to present copyright law

Film Artists Bushwhacked By The Coloroids: One-Hundredth Congress To The Rescue?, Nicholas Swyrydenko

Akron Law Review

The late, great film director, John Huston, in a videotaped speech prepared specially before his death for presentation at a Senate hearing on the issue of the colorization of black and white films, raged that he and other film artists, who had worked to produce such classic films as The Maltese Falcon, were being "bushwhacked by the coloroids," and he pleaded with Congress to step in to preserve that work.' This comment will trace the response of the One-Hundredth Congress to the pleas of John Huston and other film artists to preserve the original integrity of their films, and …

Copyright Infringement Of Musical Compositions: A Systematic Appproach, E. Scott Fruehwald

Akron Law Review

This article addresses the problems that courts face when dealing with copyright infringement of musical compositions. Infringement of music presents special problems for judges and juries because music is an intuitive art that is nonverbal and nonvisual. Consequently, traditional methods of establishing infringement are often unreliable when applied to music.

This paper will concentrate on the question of whether a composition that is similar to, but not the same as, another work infringes on the other work. I This inquiry is both qualitative and quantitative. First, one must establish that the first work employs material from the second work. Determining …

Copyright Tensions In A Digital Age, John D. Shuff, Geoffrey T. Holtz

Akron Law Review

The rapid and exponential expansion of our ability to duplicate and disseminate information by digital means has rejuvenated inherent tensions in the law pertaining to copyright and has created some new ones. Not since the advent of radio in the early 1900s have such tensions come so squarely into focus. Even though courts are rarely, if ever, called upon to address certain of these tensions since the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, they are being called upon to do so now

The Medium Is The Message: Copyright Law Confronts The Information Age In New York Times V. Tasini, Mark B. Radefeld

Akron Law Review

This Note analyzes the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in New York Times Co. v. Tasini and its implications for the future of copyright law and electronic publishing. Part II of this Note documents the background of copyright law, and details how the default provisions of §201(c) govern the publisher-author relationship. Part III of this Note introduces the parties and circumstances surrounding the Tasini case. Part III continues by outlining the District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Supreme Court decisions in this landmark case. Part IV of this …

Second Level Agreements, Yafit Lev-Aretz

Akron Law Review

This Article analyzes in-depth a significant practice that has not been recognized in legal scholarship. Their unique structure and the way in which Second Level Agreements have developed within the relatively short time of their existence have important consequences for the various players in the copyright market...The Article also offers a normative assessment of the benefits and shortcomings of the Second Level Agreements practice...The Article then carefully looks at the future of Second Level Agreements while reviewing four potential catalysts—the shift towards premium content, the Viacom v. Google ruling, the move towards disintermediation, and the rise of noncommercial licensing system. …