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Full-Text Articles in Law
Copyright’S Memory Hole, Jessica Silbey, Eric Goldman
Copyright’S Memory Hole, Jessica Silbey, Eric Goldman
Faculty Scholarship
There is growing interest in using copyright to protect the privacy and reputation of people depicted in copyrighted works. This pressure is driven by heightened concerns about privacy and reputation on the Internet, plus copyright’s plaintiff-favorable attributes compared to traditional privacy and reputation torts.
The Constitution authorizes copyright law because its exclusive rights benefit society by increasing our knowledge. Counterproductively, to advance privacy and reputation interests, copyright law is being misdeployed to suppress socially valuable works. This results in “memory holes” in society’s knowledge, analogous to those discussed in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
By referencing Constitutional considerations, the Article …
Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon
Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …
Do We Have A Right To Speak With Another's Language? Eldred And The Duration Of Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon
Do We Have A Right To Speak With Another's Language? Eldred And The Duration Of Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The law embodies two contradictory sets of rights and interests pertaining to copyright and speech. On the one hand. stand authors' claims to deserve compensation and control over their works. On the other hand stand the public's claims to be free to build on and deploy the cultural works that pervade daily life.
Excuse And Justification In The Law Of Fair Use: Commodification And Market Perspectives, Wendy J. Gordon
Excuse And Justification In The Law Of Fair Use: Commodification And Market Perspectives, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Over twenty years ago, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. reprinted my article, "Fair Use as Market Failure" (82 Columbia Law Review 1600 (1982), available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3577724. That 1982 piece suggested that an underlying pattern governs the protean forms of "fair use", and I employed the notion of market failure to reveal and explain how the pattern functioned. Since then, some misunderstandings of my argument have arisen.
I am pleased to publish in this, the Fiftieth Anniversary issue of the Journal of the Copyright Society, a clarification – and partial amendment – of my position. As …
On Commodifying Intangibles, Wendy J. Gordon, Sam Postbrief
On Commodifying Intangibles, Wendy J. Gordon, Sam Postbrief
Faculty Scholarship
It was made clear long ago that property and value are different things. Value exists. It is a fact. It can arise from law, and much of law aims at creating more value in the world. But value can also arise in spite of law (consider, for example, the fortunes that bootleggers made during the Roaring Twenties), or in law's interstices. When a particular value arises despite a lack of explicit legal protection, its possessors often ask courts or legislatures to give them a legal entitlement to preserve and further exploit that value. Typically the holders demand (1) a liberty …
A Property Right In Self-Expression: Equality And Individualism In The Natural Law Of Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
A Property Right In Self-Expression: Equality And Individualism In The Natural Law Of Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
This Article argues that a properly conceived natural-rights theory of intellectual property would provide significant protection for free speech interests. This is more than just an academic exercise. Judges have failed to use the First Amendment to provide extensive protection for free expression in intellectual property cases, in part because they mistakenly find a warrant for strong "authors' rights" in a philosophy of natural law. Natural rights theory, however, is necessarily concerned with the rights of the public as well as with those whose labors create intellectual products. When the limitations in natural law's premises are taken seriously, natural rights …