Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Introducing The Copyright Anxiety Scale, Amanda Wakaruk, Céline Gareau-Brennan, Matthew Pietrosanu

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Navigating copyright issues can be frustrating to the point of causing anxiety, potentially discouraging or inhibiting legitimate uses of copyright-protected materials. A lack of data about the extent and impact of these phenomena, known as copyright anxiety and copyright chill, respectively, motivated the authors to create the Copyright Anxiety Scale (CAS). This article provides an overview of the CAS’s development and validity testing. Results of an initial survey deployment drawing from a broad cross-section of respondents living in Canada and the United States (n = 521) establishes that the phenomenon of copyright anxiety is prevalent and likely associated with …

The Costs Of Trademarking Dolls, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Curtin’s article, Zombie Cinderella and the Undead Public Domain, takes a recent case from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) as the basis for an argument that trademark doctrine needs stronger protection against the exclusive commercial appropriation of characters that are in the public domain. In that case, a doll manufacturer sought to register the term “Zombie Cinderella” for a doll that was zombie-ish and princess-like. The examiner refused registration because the term “Zombie Cinderella” for this kind of doll was confusingly similar to the mark for Walt Disney’s Cinderella doll. Although the TTAB overturned the examiner’s …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Creative Commons: An Explainer, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches automatically to original works you create, whether a poem, photograph, painting, song, video, or essay. Copyright limits what others can do with your creative work and protects your original work from, for example, being compiled or reused and sold for profit. If you hold the copyright—and didn’t, say, create the original work in an employment context where it may be subject to being a work for hire—you may want to allow others to use your work for particular purposes. You could individually negotiate a license granting rights to each person, which would undoubtedly take more and more …

Section 108 Of Title 17: A Discussion Document Of The Register Of Copyrights, Chris Weston, Aurelia J. Schultz, Emily M. Lanza, Michelle Choe, Karyn Temple Claggett

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The objective of the discussion document is: to review the issues raised over the past decade of revision work; to outline the Office’s current views and proposals on the various revision issues; and to present and explain model statutory language for a new section 108. Although the model statutory language should not be seen as the Office’s final view on section 108, the Office believes that it is important to provide a more concrete framework for further discussion. Additionally, the Discussion Document includes copious illustrative examples of how the Office envisions the proposals might work in practice.

CONCLUSION

Libraries, archives, …

Moral Rights And Supernatural Fiction: Authorial Dignity And The New Moral Rights Agendas, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In recent years, several scholars have revisited the question of moral rights protections for creators of copyright works in the United States. Their scholarship has focused on defining a moral rights agenda that comports with American constitutional values, as well as being practically suited to current copyright business practices. Much of this scholarship has prioritized a right of attribution over other moral rights, such as the right of integrity. This Article evaluates some of these recent moral rights models in light of a sample of comments made by American supernatural fiction authors about their works. The Author questions whether the …

Strategies Under Pressure: Usa-China Copyright Dispute, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese and American efforts in keeping the balance of innovation and copyright protection, with an emphasis on China’s strategies under Western, especially American pressure. The research findings are expected to enhance mutual efforts from the two countries to protect copyright and boost innovation and facilitate genuine communication between both sides in their decade-long intellectual property right (IPR) disputes.

Design/methodology/approach – For data collection, this study adopted in-depth interviews of 45 participants who were either copyright holders as publishers and authors, or ordinary consumers in China. Under the theoretical guidance …

Handcrafted Collaborative Copyright, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Tribute essay to Dean Laura Gasaway's tenacious and fearless information access advocacy.

The Google Book Settlement And The Fair Use Counterfactual, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

The sprawling Google Book Search litigation began as a dispute between the search engine colossus and a variety of authors and publishers over the legality of Google’s book digitization effort, the Google Book Search project (“GBS” or “Google Book Search”), for the purpose of indexing paper collections and making them searchable on the Internet. However, through the metamorphic power of class action litigation, a dispute over mere indexing and searching has been transformed into a comprehensive agreement over the future of the book as a digital commodity. Understanding this transformation and its implications is the central ambition of this article. …

Copyright And Permissions: Sometimes They're The Same, Kopana Terry

Library Presentations

No abstract provided.

Tactics And Terms In The Negotiation Of Electronic Resource Licenses, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This chapter introduces the reader to the realm of electronic resource license agreements. It provides the reader with an overview of basic contract law as it relates to electronic resource licensing. The chapter then discusses the electronic resource license negotiation process as well as license agreement term clauses. The aim of this chapter is to provide librarians with an understanding of basic licensing concepts and language in order to aid librarians in the review and negotiation of their own license agreements. The author hopes to impart lessons and tips he has learned in reviewing and negotiating license agreements with a …

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act And Library Liability, Fred H. Cate

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.