Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

How To Write A Life: Some Thoughts On Fixation And The Copyright/Privacy Divide, Laura A. Heymann

Laura A. Heymann

No abstract provided.

Session 2: The U.S. Perspective, Peter K. Yu, Allan Adler, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, Mickey Osterreicher, Michael Wolfe, Aurelia J. Schultz

Peter K. Yu

This panel provides an overview of the current state of protection of moral rights in the United States, including discussion of the “patchwork” approach of federal and state laws, as well as judicial opinions.

Can Dna Be Speech?, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig

In Search Of A Forum For The Families Of The Guantanamo Disappeared, Peter Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

The United States government has committed grave human rights violations by disappearing people during the past decade into the detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And for nearly thirty years, beginning with a 1983 decision from a case arising in Uruguay, there has been a well-developed body of international law establishing that parents, wives and children of the disappeared suffer torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (CID).

This paper argues that the rights of family members were severely violated when their loved ones were disappeared into Guantanamo. Family members of men disappeared by the United States have legitimate claims …

First Amendment Interests And Copyright Accommodations, David S. Olson

David S. Olson

Copyright law exists to encourage the creation of works of authorship by granting exclusive rights. But copyright’s incentive function seems in tension with the public’s First Amendment interests to use and freely hear copyrighted speech. Conventional wisdom holds, however, that copyright law serves to encourage much more speech than it discourages, and resolves First Amendment concerns with protections internal to copyright law like the fair use defense and the idea/expression dichotomy. This Article argues that the conventional wisdom no longer holds given the unprecedented expansion of copyright’s scope and cor-responding drastic diminution of the public domain in the last three …

Conflict Of Interest That Led To The Gulf Oil Disaster, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing eleven people and spilling billions of gallons of oil into the gulf. In the days and weeks that followed, the media pointed to the Minerals Management Services (MMS), the regulatory agency responsible for managing offshore drilling, as being complicit with BP. The MMS issued permits for deepwater drilling in violation of its regulations; provided hundreds of exemptions to the regulations; maintained lax monitoring and enforcement procedures; allowed the companies to draft regulations that suited their interests and objectives; and engaged in inappropriate relationships …

Requirements Of A Valid Islamic Marriage Vis-À-Vis Requirements Of A Valid Customary Marriage In Nigeria, Olanike Sekinat Odewale Mrs

Olanike Sekinat Adelakun

Bringing Small Business Development To Urban Neighborhoods, Robert E. Suggs

Robert E. Suggs

This article describes a race-neutral policy proposal designed to increase business formation and success rates for young urban African Americans. The proposal suggests using local governments' taxing authority, in a manner analogous to tax increment financing, to create financial incentives for successful small business owners to employ, and then mentor and train as business owners, young urban entrepreneurs from deteriorating neighborhoods. The amount of financial incentive varies directly with financial success of protégés and requires the transfer of some of the mentor’s social (reputational) capital to the protégé. Business activity has created wealth and economic mobility for other ethnic groups, …

Racial Discrimination In Business Transactions, Robert E. Suggs

Robert E. Suggs

When the Supreme Court invalidated a municipal minority business set-aside in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., it failed to recognize the special circumstances confronting the minority entrepreneur. Contrary to the Court’s own erroneous assertion that “[s]tates and their local subdivisions have many legislative weapons at their disposal both to punish and prevent present [business] discrimination ….” – they do not. Nor can they create effective antidiscrimination remedies as a practical matter. As a result that decision leaves minority business owners vulnerable to discrimination from other business firms but without a remedy. Part I identifies the glaring failure of …

Rethinking Minority Business Development Strategies, Robert E. Suggs

Robert E. Suggs

Minority business set-asides were created as a prophylactic measure to redress discrimination against minority owned business firms. Predominantly minority jurisdictions found them especially attractive because they promised to provide minority firms a share of the procurement dollars expended by these jurisdictions. The Croson decision invalidated Richmond’s ordinance and posed substantial barriers to further enactments. This article proposes an alternative to such set-aides. It argues that the proposed alternative, an Equal Opportunity Rating Agency (EORA), provides a superior business development policy tool and does not have the constitutional vulnerabilities of set-asides. An EORA would operate much like a credit rating agency, …

Inside Guantanamo, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

In May 2007 I visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. What I saw and experienced then are fading away and will soon disappear, now that two-thirds of the nearly 800 detainees have been released and President Obama will close the detention centers within the year. Consequently, this essay provides a historical account of one person's media visit to Guantanamo, when it was a fully-operational prison violating human rights, due process and international law.

The essay describes not only the visit but also the application process -- a bizarre experience. The military's application concluded with two quotes from the New Testament and included …

Chasing 'Enemy Combatants' And Circumventing International Law: A License For Sanctioned Abuse, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

In 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court made a major error in judgment. It ruled that the executive may forcibly remove over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and relocate them in American detention camps. In two recent Supreme Court cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court made similar errors in judgment by accepting the administration's term "enemy combatant." The Supreme Court's errors were compounded when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in October, 2006, statutorily defining the term enemy combatant for the first time. By acknowledging the term enemy combatant, the …