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Full-Text Articles in Law
Copyright And The First Amendment: Comrades, Combatants, Or Uneasy Allies?, Joseph P. Bauer
Copyright And The First Amendment: Comrades, Combatants, Or Uneasy Allies?, Joseph P. Bauer
Joseph P. Bauer
The copyright regime and the First Amendment seek to promote the same goals. Both seek the creation and dissemination of more, better, and more diverse literary, pictorial, musical and other works. But, they use significantly different means to achieve those goals. The copyright laws afford to the creator of a work the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, transform, and perform that work for an extended period of time. The First Amendment, on the other hand, proclaims that Congress "shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech or of the press," thus at least nominally indicating that limitations on the reproduction …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …
Rediscovering Cumulative Creativity From The Oral Formulaic Tradition To Digital Remix: Can I Get A Witness?, Giancarlo Francesco Frosio
Rediscovering Cumulative Creativity From The Oral Formulaic Tradition To Digital Remix: Can I Get A Witness?, Giancarlo Francesco Frosio
Giancarlo Francesco Frosio
For most of human history the essential nature of creativity was understood to be cumulative and collective. This notion has been largely forgotten by modern policies regulating creativity and speech. As hard as it may be to believe, the most valuable components of our immortal culture were created under a fully open regime with regard to access to pre-existing expressions and reuse. From the Platonic mimēsis to the Roman imitatio, from Macrobius’ Saturnalia to the imitatio Vergili, from medieval auctoritas and Chaucer the compilator to Anon the singer and social textuality, from Chrétien’s art of rewriting to Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” …
Tattoos & Ip Norms, Aaron K. Perzanowski
Tattoos & Ip Norms, Aaron K. Perzanowski
Aaron K. Perzanowski
The U.S. tattoo industry generates billions of dollars in annual revenue. Like the music, film, and publishing industries, it derives value from the creation of new, original works of authorship. But unlike rights holders in those more traditional creative industries, tattoo artists rarely assert formal legal rights in disputes over copying or ownership of the works they create. Instead, tattooing is governed by a set of nuanced, overlapping, and occasionally contradictory social norms enforced through informal sanctions. And in contrast to other creative communities that rely on social norms because of the unavailability of formal intellectual property protection, the tattoo …
Why Copyright Law Lacks Taste And Scents, Leon R. Calleja
Why Copyright Law Lacks Taste And Scents, Leon R. Calleja
Leon R Calleja
This paper explores the resistance in U.S. copyright law to extend copyright protection to scents and tastes, and advances the position that copyright law’s originality and expression requirements limit copyrightable subject matter to expressions that engage both author and audience in a way that requires reflection upon the work—or at least, the capacity for reflection—in a necessarily intersubjective and communicative fashion, what I call a “public dimension.” That the sensations of taste and smell are inescapably immediate and private suggest that they lack the kind of public dimension that visual and audio works exhibit. Indeed, this creates an ineffability characterized …