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Articles 1 - 30 of 44
Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law
Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein
Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein
Articles
Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive, and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …
Temporality In A Time Of Tam, Or Towards A Racial Chronopolitics Of Intellectual Property Law, Anjali Vats
Temporality In A Time Of Tam, Or Towards A Racial Chronopolitics Of Intellectual Property Law, Anjali Vats
Articles
This Article examines the intersections of race, intellectual property, and temporality from the vantage point of Critical Race Intellectual Property ("CRTIP"). More specifically, it offers one example of how trademark law operates to normalize white supremacy by and through judicial frameworks that default to Euro-American understandings of time. I advance its central argument-that achieving racial justice in the context of intellectual property law requires decolonizing Euro-American conceptions of time by considering how the equitable defense of laches and the judicial power to raise issues sua sponte operate in trademark law. I make this argument through a close reading of the …
Tools For Data Governance, Michael J. Madison
Tools For Data Governance, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This article describes the challenges of data governance in terms of the broader framework of knowledge commons governance, an institutional approach to governing shared knowledge, information, and data resources. Knowledge commons governance highlights the potential for effective community- and collective-based governance of knowledge resources. The article focuses on key concepts within the knowledge commons framework rather than on specific law and public policy questions, directing the attention of researchers and policymakers to critical inquiry regarding relevant social groups and relevant data “things.” Both concepts are key tools for effective data governance.
Is Blockchain The Next Step In The Evolution Chain Of [Market] Intermediaries?, Marcela Gomez, Pedro Bustamante, Martin B. H. Weiss, Ilia Murtazashvili, Michael J. Madison, Wilson Law, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Herminio Bodon, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy
Is Blockchain The Next Step In The Evolution Chain Of [Market] Intermediaries?, Marcela Gomez, Pedro Bustamante, Martin B. H. Weiss, Ilia Murtazashvili, Michael J. Madison, Wilson Law, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Herminio Bodon, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy
Articles
The blockchain is a decentralized solution for handling transactions where we are concerned (among other aspects) with the accuracy and verification of transactions. One of its main promises is to eliminate the need for centralized entities or intermediaries and legal enforcement. Rather than trusting self-interested human intermediaries, the blockchain provides an alternative that relies on transparent computational protocols (Werbach 2018).
In this paper, we delve into this broker-less claim and analyze whether the blockchain needs an intermediary to allow for widespread access to its functionality and whether the blockchain itself is an intermediary. The latter would turn the blockchain into …
Ostrom Amongst The Machines: Blockchain As A Knowledge Commons, Herminio Bodon, Pedro Bustamante, Marcela Gomez, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy, Michael J. Madison, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Martin B. H. Weiss
Ostrom Amongst The Machines: Blockchain As A Knowledge Commons, Herminio Bodon, Pedro Bustamante, Marcela Gomez, Prashabnt Krishnamurthy, Michael J. Madison, Ilia Murtazashvili, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Martin B. H. Weiss
Articles
Blockchains are distributed ledger technologies that allow the recording of any data structure, including money, property titles, and contracts. In this paper, we suggest that Hayekian political economy is especially well suited to explain how blockchain emerged, but that Elinor Ostrom’s approach to commons governance is particularly useful to understand why blockchain anarchy is successful. Our central conclusions are that the blockchain can be thought of as a spontaneous order, as Hayek anticipated, as well as a knowledge commons, as Ostrom’s studies of self-governance anticipated.
Everything Old Is New Again: Does The '.Sucks' Gtld Change The Regulatory Paradigm In North America?, Jacqueline D. Lipton
Everything Old Is New Again: Does The '.Sucks' Gtld Change The Regulatory Paradigm In North America?, Jacqueline D. Lipton
Articles
In 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) took the unprecedented step of opening up the generic Top Level Domain (“gTLD”) space for entities who wanted to run registries for any new alphanumeric string “to the right of the dot” in a domain name. After a number of years of vetting applications, the first round of new gTLDs was released in 2013, and those gTLDs began to come online shortly thereafter. One of the more contentious of these gTLDs was “.sucks” which came online in 2015. The original application for the “.sucks” registry was somewhat contentious with …
Data Collection And The Regulatory State, Hillary Green, James Cooper, Ahmed Ghappour, Felix Wu
Data Collection And The Regulatory State, Hillary Green, James Cooper, Ahmed Ghappour, Felix Wu
Articles
The following remarks were given on January 27, 2017 during the Connecticut Law Review's symposium, "Privacy, Security & Power: The State of Digital Surveillance."
Ip Things As Boundary Objects: The Case Of The Copyright Work, Michael J. Madison
Ip Things As Boundary Objects: The Case Of The Copyright Work, Michael J. Madison
Articles
My goal is to explore the meanings and functions of the objects of intellectual property: the work of authorship (or copyright work) in copyright, the invention in patent, and the mark and the sign in trademark. This paper takes up the example of the copyright work.
It is usually argued that the central challenge in understanding the work is to develop a sensible method for appreciating its boundaries. Those boundaries, conventionally understood as the metaphorical "metes and bounds" of the work, might be established by deferring to the intention of the author, or by searching for authorship (creativity or originality) …
Innovation Prizes In Practice And Theory, Michael J. Burstein, Fiona Murray
Innovation Prizes In Practice And Theory, Michael J. Burstein, Fiona Murray
Articles
Innovation prizes in reality are significantly different from innovation prizes in theory. The former are familiar from popular accounts of historical prizes like the Longitude Prize: the government offers a set amount for a solution to a known problem, like £20,000 for a method of calculating longitude at sea. The latter are modeled as compensation to inventors in return for donating their inventions to the public domain. Neither the economic literature nor the policy literature that led to the 2010 America COMPETES Reauthorization Act — which made prizes a prominent tool of government innovation policy — provides a satisfying justification …
Derivative Works 2.0: Reconsidering Transformative Use In The Age Of Crowdsourced Creation, Jacqueline D. Lipton, John Tehranian
Derivative Works 2.0: Reconsidering Transformative Use In The Age Of Crowdsourced Creation, Jacqueline D. Lipton, John Tehranian
Articles
Apple invites us to “Rip. Mix. Burn.” while Sony exhorts us to “make.believe.” Digital service providers enable us to create new forms of derivative work — work based substantially on one or more preexisting works. But can we, in a carefree and creative spirit, remix music, movies, and television shows without fear of copyright infringement liability? Despite the exponential growth of remixing technologies, content holders continue to benefit from the vagaries of copyright law. There are no clear principles to determine whether any given remix will infringe one or more copyrights. Thus, rights holders can easily and plausibly threaten infringement …
Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane
Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …
Lost Classics Of Intellectual Property Law, Michael J. Madison
Lost Classics Of Intellectual Property Law, Michael J. Madison
Articles
Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” American legal scholarship often suffers from a related sin of omission: failing to acknowledge its intellectual debts. This short piece attempts to cure one possible source of the problem, in one discipline: inadequate information about what’s worth reading among older writing. I list “lost classics” of American scholarship in intellectual property law. These are not truly “lost,” and what counts as “classic” is often in the eye of the beholder (or reader). But these works may usefully be found again, and intellectual property law scholarship would be …
Book Review -- William Patry, How To Fix Copyright, Michael J. Madison
Book Review -- William Patry, How To Fix Copyright, Michael J. Madison
Articles
I review William Patry’s book How to Fix Copyright. The book is noteworthy for its ambitious yet measured effort to diagnose where copyright law has gone astray in recent years. It is less successful with respect to proposing possible changes to the law. Most interesting are parallels between How to Fix Copyright and an earlier comprehensive look at copyright law in the digital era: Paul Goldstein’s Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. William Patry and Paul Goldstein each have a lot of faith in the power of consumer choice in the cultural marketplace. That faith leads …
Madisonian Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
Madisonian Fair Use, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This short essay reflects on developments in the law, scholarship, and practice of fair use since the publication in 2004 of an earlier article on patterns in fair use practice and adjudication. It synthesizes many of those developments in the idea of “Madisonian” fair use, borrowing the separation of powers metaphor from James Madison’s work on the US Constitution and applying it, lightly and in a preliminary way, to copyright.
The End Of The Work As We Know It, Michael J. Madison
The End Of The Work As We Know It, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This paper takes a new look at the concept of the work of authorship in copyright, known in other systems as the copyright work. It complements inquiries into authorship and originality, extending earlier scholarship on the origins of legal “things” or objects and on the multi-dimensional character of their borders and boundaries.
Knowledge Curation, Michael J. Madison
Knowledge Curation, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This Article addresses conservation, preservation, and stewardship of knowledge, and laws and institutions in the cultural environment that support those things. Legal and policy questions concerning creativity and innovation usually focus on producing new knowledge and offering access to it. Equivalent attention rarely is paid to questions of old knowledge. To what extent should the law, and particularly intellectual property law, focus on the durability of information and knowledge? To what extent does the law do so already, and to what effect? This article begins to explore those questions. Along the way, the article takes up distinctions among different types …
Beyond Invention: Patent As Knowledge Law, Michael J. Madison
Beyond Invention: Patent As Knowledge Law, Michael J. Madison
Articles
The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Bilski v. Kappos, concerning the legal standard for determining patentable subject matter under the American Patent Act, is used as a starting point for a brief review of historical, philosophical, and cultural influences on subject matter questions in both patent and copyright law. The article suggests that patent and copyright law jurisprudence was constructed initially by the Court with explicit attention to the relationship between these forms of intellectual property law and the roles of knowledge in society. Over time, explicit attention to that relationship has largely disappeared from …
What Blogging Might Teach About Cybernorms, Jacqueline D. Lipton
What Blogging Might Teach About Cybernorms, Jacqueline D. Lipton
Articles
Since the dawn of the information age, scholars have debated the viability of regulating cyberspace. Early on, Professor Lawrence Lessig suggested that “code is law” online. Lessig and others also examined the respective regulatory functions of laws, code, market forces, and social norms. In recent years, with the rise of Web 2.0 interactive technologies, norms have taken center-stage as a regulatory modality online. The advantages of norms are that they can develop quickly by the communities that seek to enforce them, and they are not bound by geography. However, to date there has been scant literature dealing in any detail …
Constructing Commons In The Cultural Environment, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
Constructing Commons In The Cultural Environment, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
Articles
This Essay considers the problem of understanding intellectual sharing/pooling arrangements and the construction of cultural commons arrangements. We argue that an adaptation of the approach pioneered by Elinor Ostrom and collaborators to commons arrangements in the natural environment may provide a template for the examination of constructed commons in the cultural environment. The approach promises to lead to a better understanding of how participants in commons and pooling arrangements structure their interactions in relation to the environment(s) within which they are embedded and with which they share interdependent relationships. Such an improved understanding is critical for obtaining a more complete …
Foreword: On Publishing Anonymously, Anthony C. Infanti
Foreword: On Publishing Anonymously, Anthony C. Infanti
Articles
In this foreword to the fall 2010 issue of the Pittsburgh Tax Review, I explain the troubling set of circumstances that led to our decision to publish one of the articles anonymously. All of the articles in this issue share a focus on suggestions for state and local tax reform in Pennsylvania. The circumstances surrounding the decision to publish this one article anonymously raise a host of questions regarding the extent to which tax professionals are free to make suggestions for tax reform without being subject to employer censorship.
Some Optimism About Fair Use And Copyright Law, Michael J. Madison
Some Optimism About Fair Use And Copyright Law, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This short paper reflects on the emergence of codes of best practices in fair use, highlighting both the relationship between the best practices approach and an institutional perspective on copyright and the relationship between the best practices approach and social processes of innovation and creativity.
Reply: The Complexity Of Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
Reply: The Complexity Of Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
Articles
Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, and responses to that article by Professors Thráinn Eggertsson, Wendy Gordon, Gregg Macey, Robert Merges, Elinor Ostrom, and Lawrence Solum. This short Reply comments briefly on each of those responses.
Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane
Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …
The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
The University As Constructed Cultural Commons, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, Katherine J. Strandburg
Articles
This paper examines commons as socially constructed environments built via and alongside intellectual property rights systems. We sketch a theoretical framework for examining cultural commons across a broad variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts, and we apply that framework to the university and associated practices and institutions.
Of Coase And Comics, Or, The Comedy Of Copyright, Michael J. Madison
Of Coase And Comics, Or, The Comedy Of Copyright, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This Essay responds to There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, by Dotan Oliar and Christopher Sprigman. It argues that case studies of disciplines and domains that may be governed by intellectual property regimes are invaluable tools for comparative analysis of the respective roles of law and other forms of social order. The Essay examines the case of stand-up comedy under a lens that is somewhat broader than the one used by the authors of the original study, one that takes into account not only the social norms of individual …
Notes On A Geography Of Knowledge, Michael J. Madison
Notes On A Geography Of Knowledge, Michael J. Madison
Articles
Law and knowledge jointly occupy a metaphorical landscape. Understanding that landscape is essential to understanding the full complexity of knowledge law. This Article identifies some landmarks in that landscape, which it identifies as forms of legal practice: several recent cases involving intellectual property licenses, including the recent patent law decision in Quanta v. LG Electronics and the open source licensing decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer. The Article offers a preliminary framework for exploring the territories of knowledge practice in which those legal landmarks appear.
A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton
A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton
Articles
In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …
Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison
Intellectual Property And Americana, Or Why Ip Gets The Blues, Michael J. Madison
Articles
This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on intellectual property law and business models, suggests the re-examination of the role of intellectual property law in the persistence of cultural forms of all sorts, including (but not limited to) business models. Some argue that the absence of intellectual property law inhibits the emergence of durable or persistent cultural forms; copyright and patent regimes are justified precisely because they supply foundations for durability. The essay tests that proposition via brief reviews of three persistent but very different cultural models, each of which represents a distinct form of American culture: The Rocky …
Funky Mussels, A Stolen Car, And Decrepit Used Shoes: Non-Conforming Goods And Notice Thereof Under The United Nations Sales Convention, Harry Flechtner
Funky Mussels, A Stolen Car, And Decrepit Used Shoes: Non-Conforming Goods And Notice Thereof Under The United Nations Sales Convention, Harry Flechtner
Articles
This is a draft of a paper that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Boston University International Law Journal. This paper, which derives from comments delivered at a 2006 conference held at Istanbul (Turkey) Bilgi University, gives an overview of Part III, Chapter II, Section II of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). This portion of the Convention encompasses provisions addressing a number of critical issues, including the seller's obligations concerning the quality (Article 35), title (Article 41) and intellectual property aspects (Article 42) of goods sold in a transaction governed …
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. Recently, we have seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a …