Law Commons^™

Copyright Fiduciaries: Problems And Solutions, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Andrew Gilden & Eva E. Subotnik, Copyright’s Capacity Gap, 57 U.C. Davis L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2023), available at SSRN (Aug. 9, 2023).

In this forthcoming article, Andrew Gilden and Eva Subotnik begin an important conversation about an underexplored area of copyright law. Their focus is copyright law’s inconsistent treatment of mental capacity. Under copyright law, copyright authors can produce valuable copyrighted work but those same authors may lack the legal capacity to make decisions about if, when, or how to exploit that work. For example, children and people with mental illness or disability can be copyright authors, but …

Centering Black Women In Patent History, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Kara Swanson’s latest article is a remarkable example of legal historical scholarship that excavates stories from the past to illuminate the present. It is chock full of archival evidence and historical analysis that explains gaps and silences in the United States patent registry as evidence of marginalized inventors–particularly Black women–who should be named inventors but are not.

The article is arresting reading for anyone interested in antebellum history, intellectual property, and the intersection of racism and sexism in law. Mostly, I am grateful to Professor Swanson for doing the obviously very hard work of digging through archives, reading microfiche, …

Notes On Trademark Monopolies, Wendy J. Gordon, Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Scholarship Chronologically

Since 1742, when Lord Hardwicke seemingly equated trademark protection with monopoly in one of the first trademark cases, until the mid- 1950s, concerns that trademarks represented a form of illegitimate monopoly effectively constrained the growth of trademark protection. In the twentieth century, Edward Chamberlain became the leading proponent of the trademark as monopoly view with the publication of his work, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, in 1933. In his work, Chamberlain argued that a trademark enabled its owner to differentiate her products and then to exclude others from using the differentiating feature. By doing so, trademark protection can effectively …