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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 …
Campbell At 21/Sony At 31, Jessica Litman
Campbell At 21/Sony At 31, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
When copyright lawyers gather to discuss fair use, the most common refrain is its alarming expansion. Their distress about fair use’s enlarged footprint seems completely untethered from any appreciation of the remarkable increase in exclusive copyright rights. In the nearly 40 years since Congress enacted the 1976 copyright act, the rights of copyright owners have expanded markedly. Copyright owners’ demands for further expansion continue unabated. Meanwhile, they raise strident objections to proposals to add new privileges and exceptions to the statute to shelter non-infringing uses that might be implicated by their expanded rights. Copyright owners have used the resulting uncertainty …
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. …
The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica Litman
The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this paper, written for Berkeley’s symposium on the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I explore the history of the common law public performance right in dramatic works. Eaton Drone dubbed the dramatic public performance right “playright” in his 1879 treatise, arguing that just as “copyright” conferred a right to make and sell copies, “playright” conferred a right to perform or “play” a script. I examine case law and customary theatrical practice in England, and find no trace of a common law play right before 1833, when Parliament established a statutory public performance right for plays. Similarly, in …