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Full-Text Articles in Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law

Authors And Machines, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo Jan 2019

Authors And Machines, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo

Faculty Scholarship

Machines, by providing the means of mass production of works of authorship, engendered copyright law. Throughout history, the emergence of new technologies tested the concept of authorship, and courts in response endeavored to clarify copyright’s foundational principles. Today, developments in computer science have created a new form of machine, the “artificially intelligent” (AI) system apparently endowed with “computational creativity.” AI systems introduce challenging variations on the perennial question of what makes one an “author” in copyright law: Is the creator of a generative program automatically the author of the works her process begets, even if she cannot anticipate the contents …


Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva Subotnik, Peter Dicola Jan 2019

Existential Copyright And Professional Photography, Jessica Silbey, Eva Subotnik, Peter Dicola

Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property law has intended benefits, but it also carries certain costs — deliberately so. Skeptics have asked: Why should intellectual property law exist at all? To get traction on that overly broad but still important inquiry, we decided to ask a new, preliminary question: What do creators in a particular industry actually use intellectual property for? In this first-of-its-kind study, we conducted thirty-two in-depth qualitative interviews of photographers about how copyright law functions within their creative and business practices. By learning the actual functions of copyright law on the ground, we can evaluate and contextualize existing theories of intellectual …


Disruption And Deference, Olivier Sylvain Jan 2015

Disruption And Deference, Olivier Sylvain

Faculty Scholarship

Online video streaming applications enable users to watch over the-air broadcast programs at any time and almost on any device. As such, they challenge the pertinence of traditional video distribution law and the broadcast network system on which it is based. Congress enacted the Transmit Clause of the 1976 Copyright Act to resolve the high-stakes tussle between broadcasters and cable providers. But, today, that provision is ill-suited to resolving whether unauthorized streaming infringes on broadcasters’ copyright to perform works publicly. Its scope is ambiguous enough that judges across the country were notably divided on whether it reaches online video distribution—that …


Promoting Progress: A Qualitative Analysis Of Creative And Innovative Production, Jessica Silbey Dec 2014

Promoting Progress: A Qualitative Analysis Of Creative And Innovative Production, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter is based on data collected as part of a larger qualitative empirical study based on face-to-face interviews with artists, scientists, engineers, their lawyers, agents and business partners. Broadly, the project involves the collecting and analysis of these interviews to understand how and why the interviewees create and innovate and to make sense of the intersection between intellectual property law and creative and innovative activity from the ground up. This chapter specifically investigates the concept of “progress” as discussed in the interviews. “Promoting progress” is the ostensible goal of the intellectual property protection in the United States, but what …


Digital Copyright And Confuzzling Rhetoric, Peter K. Yu Jul 2011

Digital Copyright And Confuzzling Rhetoric, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

The entertainment industry tells people they shouldn’t steal music because they wouldn’t steal a car, but has anybody ever downloaded a car? Music fans praise Napster and other file-sharing services for helping to free artists from the stranglehold of the music industry, but how many of these services actually have shared profits with songwriters and performing artists? Industry representatives claim that people use YouTube primarily to listen to or watch copyrighted contents, but are they missing a big piece of the user-generated content picture? Artists are encouraged to forget about copyright and hold live concerts instead, but can all artists …