Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Civil Law
Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia Garcia
Authoring Prior Art, Joseph P. Fishman, Kristelia Garcia
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Patent law and copyright law are widely understood to diverge in how they approach prior art, the universe of information that already existed before a particular innovation’s development. For patents, prior art is paramount. An invention can’t be patented unless it is both novel and nonobvious when viewed against the backdrop of all the earlier inventions that paved the way. But for copyrights, prior art is supposed to be virtually irrelevant. Black-letter copyright doctrine doesn’t care if a creative work happens to resemble its predecessors, only that it isn’t actually copied from them. In principle, then, outside of the narrow …
Is That Really Me?: Social Networking And The Right Of Publicity, Rachel A. Purcell
Is That Really Me?: Social Networking And The Right Of Publicity, Rachel A. Purcell
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
Social networking websites are ubiquitous in modern culture and popular with people of all ages and demographics. Operators of this kind of site, which consist largely of third party generated content, are immune from many types of civil liability for third party postings under the Communications Decency Act. However, the Act does not immunize these providers from intellectual property right infringements. Recent court decisions suggest that this immunity exception may extend not only to federal intellectual property rights, but state intellectual property rights like the right of publicity. This Note will evaluate the emerging circuit split regarding state intellectual property …
A Generation Of Racketeers? Eliminating Civil Rico Liability For Copyright Infringement, Julie L. Ross
A Generation Of Racketeers? Eliminating Civil Rico Liability For Copyright Infringement, Julie L. Ross
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
This article addresses questions raised in recent years by the increasingly severe penalties for copyright infringement, focusing on potential civil RICO liability as illustrated by a hypothetical peer-to-peer file-sharing example. Because civil litigation has been, by a wide margin, the favored means for pursuing copyright violators, the criminal copyright infringement statute remains largely untested, and the few cases that address its provisions offer conflicting interpretations. Now that RICO penalties are available in civil copyright infringement cases, courts faced with resolving the ambiguities in the application of the criminal copyright infringement provisions will need to reconcile divergent policies. To effectuate its …