Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons^™

Rethinking Copyright And Personhood, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the primary theoretical justifications for copyright is the role that creative works play in helping develop an individual’s sense of personhood and self-actualization. Typically ascribed to the writings of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, personhood-based theories of copyright serve as the foundation for the moral rights prominent in European copyright law and mandated by the leading intellectual property treaty, which give authors inalienable control over aspects of their works after they have been created. The conventional wisdom about the relationship between personhood and copyright suffers from two fatal flaws that have gone largely unappreciated. First, in …

It’S Not About The Money: The Role Of Preferences, Cognitive Biases And Heuristics Among Professional Athletes, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

Professional athletes are often regarded as selfish, greedy, and out-of-touch with regular people. They hire agents who are vilified for negotiating employment contracts that occasionally yield compensation in excess of national gross domestic products. Professional athletes are thus commonly assumed to most value economic remuneration, rather than the love of the game or some other intangible, romanticized inclination.

Lending credibility to this intuition is the rational actor model, a law and economic precept which presupposes that when individuals are presented with a set of choices, they rationally weigh costs and benefits, and select the course of action that maximizes their …

Social Psychology, Calamities, And Sports Law, Michael Mccann

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the role of situational pressures, fundamental attribution errors, and legal frameworks in how professional sports actors respond to the threat and occurrence of calamities. Both natural and manmade threats to American health are likely to rise over the next decade. Such threats may include catastrophic weather, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and communicable disease pandemics. In response to these threats, professional sports leagues, professional athletes, fans, and media might engage in unprecedented behavior. Consider, for instance, increasingly-devastating weather patterns, and how they might animate leagues to relocate franchises to cities with more favorable forecasts. The same outcome might …