Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

Copyright Freeconomics, John M. Newman

John M. Newman

Innovation has wreaked creative destruction on traditional content platforms. During the decade following Napster’s rise and fall, industry organizations launched litigation campaigns to combat the dramatic downward pricing pressure created by the advent of zero-price, copyright-infringing content. These campaigns attracted a torrent of debate, still ongoing, among scholars and stakeholders—but this debate has missed the forest for the trees. Industry organizations have abandoned litigation efforts, and many copyright owners now compete directly with infringing products by offering licit content at a price of $0.

This sea change has ushered in an era of “copyright freeconomics.” Drawing on an emerging body …

Caution — Contains Extremely Offensive Material: David Wojnarowicz V. American Family Association, The Visual Artists Rights Act, And A Proposal To Expand Fair Use To Include Artists' Moral Rights, Sarah Leggin

Sarah Leggin

Although many artists build their careers by offending or challenging mainstream culture and live happily as outsiders, these and all artists still strive to protect their reputations and the integrity of their works. The importance of protecting the moral rights of artists has long been recognized by European law, but the United States has not embraced the value of artists’ rights in the same way. Today, U.S. copyright law recognizes moral rights for visual works that fall within narrow categories due to the enactment of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). Even after VARA was enacted and preempted …

It's Only A Day Away: Rethinking Copyright Termination In A New Era, Shane D. Valenzi

Shane D Valenzi

January 1, 2013 will mark the beginning of an important shift in US Copyright Law. On that day, for the first time, authors who signed over their creative rights to a producer, publisher, or other “litigation-savvy” grantee under the current Copyright Act will begin to enter a window of time within which they may terminate those prior grants of rights and reclaim their original copyrights. Of course, such actions are unlikely to go unchallenged, as many of these works generate billions of dollars of revenue for their current owners. This Article will examine the “new-works termination” provision of the Copyright …

Rereading A Canonical Copyright Case: The Nonexistent Right To Hoard In Fox Film Corp. V. Doyal, Shane D. Valenzi

Shane D Valenzi

Do copyright owners have the right to hoard their creative works? The right to exclude on an individual basis is the keystone of copyright law, yet using copyright protection to prevent all public access to a work runs counter to the very premises upon which copyright law is based. This right to exclude the world from use of a creative work—referred to as the right to “hoard” by Justice O’Connor in Stewart v. Abend, is commonly traced to a Lochner-era tax case: Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal. This Article examines the right to hoard and its origins in Fox Film, …

A Rollicking Band Of Pirates: Licensing The Exclusive Right Of Public Performance In The Theatre Industry, Shane D. Valenzi

Shane D Valenzi

With ticket prices on Broadway at an all-time high, amateur and regional theatres are the only venues for theatrical productions to which most Americans are exposed. Licensing these performance rights—known as “stock and amateur rights”—is the primary source of income for many playwrights, even for those whose plays flopped at the highest level. However, the licensing houses responsible for facilitating these transactions frequently retain and exercise the ability to issue exclusive performance licenses to certain large regional theatres. This practice limits public access to particular works and restricts playwrights’ potential earnings in those works. Though this behavior does not amount …

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

This Article deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and its relationship to licensing. It argues that not all digital locks and contractual notices qualify for legal protection under Section 1201, and attributes the courts’ indiscriminate protection of all Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures to the law’s incoherent formulation. The Article proposes a pair of filters that would enable courts to distinguish between those DRM measures that qualify for protection under Section 1201, and those that do not. The filters are shown to align with legislative intent and copyright precedent, as well as the approaches recently …

Insights From Psychology For Copyright's Originality Doctrine, Cameron J. Hutchison

Cameron J Hutchison

The discipline of psychology has much to offer the law of copyright. For example, determining whether or not a work is original in a legal sense implicates, and may be enriched by, the psychology of creativity. This paper is a foray into the linkage between psychological understandings of creativity and the legal standard of originality. While the methodologies and approaches to the psychological sub-discipline of creativity are many, certain frameworks are chosen which seem most relevant and probative to the task: psychoanalysis (specifically, Jungian psychoanalysis), experimental psychology (specifically, the cognitive science of creativity or “cognitive creativity”), and social psychology (specifically, …