Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

More Than An Academic Question: Defining Student Ownership Of Intellectual Property Rights, Kurt M. Saunders, Michael A. Lozano

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Intellectual property is increasingly important due to technology’s rapid development. The importance of intellectual property is also reflected within universities as traditional centers of research and expression, where students and faculty are encouraged to develop inventions and creative works throughout the educational experience. The commercialization potential of the intellectual property that emerges from these efforts has led many universities to adopt policies to determine ownership of intellectual property rights. Many of these policies take different approaches to ownership, and most students are unaware of their rights and are unlikely to consider whether the university has a claim to ownership ...

Tinker Meets The Cyberbully: A Federal Circuit Conflict Round-Up And Proposed New Standard For Off-Campus Speech, Benjamin A. Holden

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the seminal school speech case interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court long before mobile devices and social media upended accepted norms governing how students behave at school. The new reality has brought with it new line-drawing challenges for public schools faced with the warring requirements of school discipline on the one hand, and the First Amendment on the other. The threshold unanswered question this Article presents is whether Tinker should give jurisdiction to public schools over student speech which originates off ...

License To Bill: The Validity Of Coupling Automatic Subscription Renewals With Free Trial Offers By Online Services, Koren Grinshpoon

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

A prominent and expanding list of online services rely on a business model which pairs free trial offers with subsequent automatic subscription renewals (e.g., Amazon Prime, Blue Apron, etc.). Offering free trials to lure new users, while employing automatic renewal clauses in its terms of use to perpetuate recurring revenue, poses a substantial legal risk to online services. Numerous claims citing unfair and deceptive business practices are filed each year against such online services, primarily raising issues of informed consent, adequate disclosure, and notice. This Article reviews applicable federal law and regulations, as well as the applicable laws of ...

Let’S Play: A Walkthrough Of Quarter-Century-Old Copyright Precedent As Applied To Modern Video Games, Kyle Coogan

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Looking to the copyright protection over the audiovisual displays of video games, current precedent—created by extensive litigation in the 1980s over early arcade games—may be a round hole into which the square peg of today’s highly complex video games would have difficulty fitting. This is an issue that has increasing importance as the market for the passive consumption of video game audiovisual displays through tournament streams, walk-throughs, etc., continues to balloon. If courts were to apply precedent from litigation in the 1980s to video games as they exist today, the idea that copyright protection automatically attaches to ...

Protecting The Mickey Mouse Ears: Moving Beyond Traditional Campaign-Style Enforcement Of Intellectual Property Rights In China, Adela Hurtado

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Multinational corporations often struggle to protect their intellectual property rights in China. The Walt Disney Company, which has a long relationship with China, knows this all too well. In fact, counterfeit Mickey Mouse ears—along with numerous other Disney character goods—are now sold in plain sight at the new Shanghai Disneyland Resort. In an attempt to combat counterfeiting, companies such as Disney rely on a traditional method of enforcement of intellectual property rights: government campaigns. Campaigns are short periods of time during which multiple raids and government enforcement actions occur to crack down on counterfeiting. The irony of Disney ...

Why The Nagoya Protocol To The Cbd Matters To Science And Industry In Canada And The United States, Jerome H. Reichman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts—principally trespass and negligence—in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property- and harm-based torts has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant's volitional actions interfere with a potential economic ...

Digital Infrastructures That Embody Library Principles: The Imls National Digital Platform As A Framework For Digital Library Tools And Services, Trevor Owens, Ashley E. Sands, Emily Reynolds, James Neal, Stephen Mayeaux, Maura Marx

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Digital library infrastructures must not simply work. They must also manifest the core principles of libraries and archives. Since 2014, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has engaged with stakeholders from diverse library communities to consider collaborative approaches to building digital library tools and services. The “national digital platform” for libraries, archives, and museums is the framework that resulted from these dialogs.1 One key feature of the national digital platform (NDP) is the anchoring of core library principles within the development of digital tools and services. This essay explores how NDP-funded projects enact library principles as part ...

Osi2018 Summary Report On The 1st Summit Meeting Of The Global Open Scholarship Initiative, March 12-14, 2018, The Open Scholarship Initiative, Glenn Hampson

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

When the roadmap for OSI was first being developed in 2015, our original intent was to hold a series of 10 annual meetings beginning in 2016. After the first two meetings, however, it became apparent that the next step in this process should be to pause and have just the summit group meet to formally discuss and plan out what comes next instead of having this complex conversation online (which we had been doing since mid-2017) or amongst a group of several hundred participants. This decision was also necessitated by the lack of a large enough budget to put together ...

So Happy Together: Should The California Decision Be A Basis To Recognize A Right Of Public Performance In Pre-1972 Sound Recordings?, Vicenç Feliú

Faculty Scholarship

One of the peculiarities of American copyright law is the way it deals with sound recordings. The federal copyright regime treated sound recordings as different from the protection awarded other copies and, consequently, there are some gaps in protection coverage. Because of how federal protection developed, pre-1972 sound recordings are not protected by federal law and have only the patchwork protection afforded under state laws.In August of 2013, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, the founding members of the 1960s rock group The Turtles, filed a $100 million class action suit in California, under the incorporated name Flo & Eddie, Inc ...

Business Methods, Technology, And Discrimination, Daniel Harris Brean

Daniel Harris Brean

Legal Issues: Security And Privacy With Mobile Devices, Brian Leonard, Maurice Dawson

Maurice Dawson

Tcl V. Ericsson: The First Major U.S. Top-Down Frand Royalty Decision, Jorge L. Contreras

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

On December 21, 2017, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California released its long awaited Memorandum of Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in TCL Communications v. Ericsson. In a lengthy and carefully crafted decision, Judge James Selna sets forth some important new points regarding the calculation of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) royalties for standardsessential patents (SEPs). Among other things, the decision offers a strong endorsement of “top down” methodologies for the calculation of SEP royalties, and makes significant use of the non-discrimination (ND) prong of the FRAND commitment in arriving at a FRAND ...

Surveying The Scalability Of Open Access Monograph Initiatives: Final Report, Christopher Barnes,, Rebecca Welzenbach, Kathleen Folger

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

In June of 2016, the University of Michigan Library (MLibrary) and Knowledge Unlatched (KU) announced the start of a collaboration “to study and overcome remaining obstacles to the spread of open access scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences.”1 This survey grew out of that partnership and was designed to gather data useful for determining the scalability of library-supported open access (OA) initiatives focusing on monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences such as Luminos, Open Book Publishers, and KU. The survey was designed and conducted by Christopher A. Barnes, Ph.D., while a graduate student in library ...

Restructuring Intellectual Property Jurisdictions Post-Brexit: Strategic Considerations For The Eu And Britain, Alexandra George

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Britain’s decision to “Brexit” from the European Union has caused great uncertainty and justified concern with respect to intellectual property laws and investments. Post-Brexit arrangements between the European Union and Britain have not yet been determined, and it is unclear whether these will be settled with respect to intellectual property law before Brexit is due to take effect in 2019. With intellectual property intensive industries accounting for 88 percent of EU imports and 90 percent of EU exports, British-EU intellectual property arrangements are the subject of intense interest worldwide as intellectual property owners and users speculate as to the ...

Slipping Through The Cracks: How Digital Music Streaming Cuts Corners On Artists’ Royalty Revenues Globally, Frances Lewis

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

At a time when the digital distribution of music is dominating the music industry, there are more music consumers than ever. This makes it vitally important for performing artists to receive the credit they are due. An inherent problem in music’s digital distribution market is that music streaming companies often fail to acquire proper licenses to expand their music libraries faster than their competitors. Performing artists who may not have the same income stream as their A-list counterparts often cannot bear the cost of litigation to pursue uncredited royalties. The U.S. class action model provides performing artists with ...

Misconstruing Whistleblower Immunity Under The Defend Trade Secrets Act, Peter S. Menell

Peter Menell

In crafting the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA), Congress went beyond the federalization of state trade secret protection to tackle a broader social justice problem: the misuse of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) to discourage reporting of illegal activity in a variety of areas. The past few decades have witnessed devastating government contracting abuses, regulatory violations, and deceptive financial schemes that have hurt the public and cost taxpayers and investors billions of dollars. Congress recognized that immunizing whistleblowers from the cost and risk of trade secret liability for providing information to the Government could spur law enforcement. But could this ...

Economic Implications Of State Sovereign Immunity From Infringement Of Federal Intellectual Property Rights, Peter S. Menell

Peter Menell

No abstract provided.

"The Exclusive Right To Their Writings": Copyright And Control In The Digital Age, Jane C. Ginsburg

Maine Law Review

The recent coincidence of new technology and new legislation in the United States may have enhanced the ability of U.S. copyright owners to wield electronic protective measures to control the exploitation of their works. The legislation, which reinforces the technology, has led many to perceive and to deplore a resulting imbalance between copyright owners and the copyright-using public. Critics assert that the goals of copyright law have never been, and should not now become, to grant “control” over works of authorship. Instead, copyright should accord certain limited rights over some kinds of exploitations. Economic incentives to create may be ...

Freeing The Mind: Free Software And The Death Of Proprietary Culture, Eben Moglen

Maine Law Review

The subject matter we are going to talk about is variously named and the words have some resonances of importance. I am going to use the phrase “Free Software” to describe this material, and I am going to suggest to you that the choice of words is relevant. We are talking not merely about a form of production or a system of industrial relations, but also about the beginning of a social movement with specific political goals, which will characterize not only the production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production and distribution of culture generally.