Business Commons^™

Intellectual Property In The Digital Streaming Age: How Music Becomes A Lawsuit, Alexandra Tasev

Honors College Theses

A mix of both entertainment business and law, the purpose of this review is to address the question of “are current copyright laws and procedures too restrictive of new and smaller-name artists from entering the market?” Through a law review and analysis of the history of copyright law, this thesis outlines the issues new, smaller music artists face as a result of rapid digital evolution paired with a slow-moving legal system. Failing to amend the current standards for dealing with old copyright cases will cause further issues with the growing popularity of digital platforms like YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify, and TikTok. …

Sample-Based Hip-Hop Music And Fair Use Laws In The Age Of Streaming Services, Michael Vanbuhler

Senior Theses

This thesis takes an in depth look at the history and processes behind creating sample-based music. Sampling was popularized during the beginnings of hip-hop music and now a wide variety of genres use samples or techniques created by sample-based music. Early hip-hop beats took samples of drum breaks or a portion of a track from another artist or band. As hip-hop grew in the late 80s and early 90s, the use of samples became a question of intellectual property rights and if it was acceptable to sample someone’s copyrighted work. Lawsuits in the early 90’s helped to create new caselaw …

Hey, He Stole My Copyright: Putting Theft On Trial In The Tenenbaum Copyright Case, Peter J. Karol

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article approaches the well-publicized Joel Tenenbaum copyright case through an analysis of its highly-charged trial rhetoric. In particular, it argues that the case as tried was not really about Joel Tenenbaum or his actions. Rather, the trial was about whether, and to what extent, peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing is “theft,” and the P2P sharer a “thief.” So approached, the case provides a captivating, perhaps unique, academic case study on the power of theft rhetoric in a copyright trial as advanced before a jury.

It first introduces the Tenenbaum litigation generally, and its place in the recording companies’ broad attack …

A Pattern-Oriented Approach To Fair Use, Michael J. Madison

Articles

More than 150 years into development of the doctrine of "fair use" in American copyright law, there is no end to legislative, judicial, and academic efforts to rationalize the doctrine. Its codification in the 1976 Copyright Act appears to have contributed to its fragmentation, rather than to its coherence. This Article suggests that fair use is neither badly conceived nor badly applied, but that it is too often badly understood. As did much of copyright law, fair use originated as a judicially-unacknowledged effort via the law to validate certain favored social practices and patterns. In the main, it has continued …