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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual Property Law
Surveying The Borders Of Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg
Surveying The Borders Of Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
The copyright course I teach at Columbia Law School begins with a survey of what copyright is not: it is not a patent, a trademark, or an object of physical property. Nor, as the course examines a little later on, does copyright protect every object of economic value whose worth might be further enhanced were it to be shielded from unauthorized copying. However, the frontiers between copyright and mere commercial value have never been well defined. Not only may the same item be simultaneously the object of copyright and of other legal rights, but copyright increasingly covers – or is …
Four Reasons And A Paradox: The Manifest Superiority Of Copyright Over Sui Generis Protection Of Computer Software, Jane C. Ginsburg
Four Reasons And A Paradox: The Manifest Superiority Of Copyright Over Sui Generis Protection Of Computer Software, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
The "Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs" offers an extensive and challenging critique of current intellectual property protection of software. The authors argue strongly that the law should focus on the value of the know-how embodied in programs and the importance of protecting it, rather than on the particular means which might be used to appropriate it. The authors seek to compel reconceptualization of the place of computer programs, and of software authors' creativity, within the domain of intellectual property. However, their brief for change manifests several flaws. Paradoxically, it comes at once both too soon and too …
Textualism And The Future Of The Chevron Doctrine, Thomas W. Merrill
Textualism And The Future Of The Chevron Doctrine, Thomas W. Merrill
Faculty Scholarship
The last decade has been a remarkable one for statutory interpretation. For most of our history, American judges have been pragmatists when it comes to interpreting statutes. They have drawn on various conventions – the plain meaning rule, legislative history, considerations of statutory purpose, canons of construction – "much as a golfer selects the proper club when he gauges the distance to the pin and the contours of the course." The arrival of Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court has changed this. Justice Scalia is a foundationalist, insisting that certain interpretational tools should be permanently banned from judicial use. What …