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Full-Text Articles in Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law
What Notice Did, Jessica Litman
What Notice Did, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this article, I explore the effect of the copyright notice prerequisite on the law's treatment of copyright ownership. The notice prerequisite, as construed by the courts, encouraged the development of legal doctrines that herded the ownership of copyrights into the hands of publishers and other intermediaries, notwithstanding statutory provisions that seem to have been designed at least in part to enable authors to keep their copyrights. Because copyright law required notice, other doctrinal developments were shaped by and distorted by that requirement. The promiscuous alienability of U.S. copyrights may itself have been an accidental development deriving from courts' constructions …
Silent Similarity, Jessica Litman
Silent Similarity, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
From 1909 to 1930, U.S. courts grappled with claims by authors of prose works claiming that works in a new art form -- silent movies -- had infringed their copyrights. These cases laid the groundwork for much of modern copyright law, from their broad expansion of the reproduction right, to their puzzled grappling with the question how to compare works in dissimilar media, to their confusion over what sort of evidence should be relevant to show copyrightability, copying and infringement. Some of those cases – in particular, Nichols v. Universal Pictures – are canonical today. They are not, however, well-understood. …