Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
-
- Copyright (5)
- Intellectual property law (3)
- Doctrine of inequivalents (2)
- Efficiency (2)
- Fair use (2)
-
- Intellectual property (2)
- Modicum of creativity (2)
- Novelty (2)
- Scope of protection (2)
- Access-incentives tradeoff (1)
- Added value doctrine (1)
- Antitrust (1)
- Best practices (1)
- Blackstone (1)
- Calibration of innovation valuation (1)
- Clearance culture (1)
- Common law entitlement (1)
- Copyright act (1)
- Copyright's Paradox (1)
- Custom (1)
- DMCA (1)
- DRM (1)
- Effect of patent duration on innovation (1)
- Elasticity of innovation (1)
- Emergence of property rights (1)
- Empirical legal research (1)
- Entertainment (1)
- FTC (1)
- Hedonic characteristics (1)
- Industry standards (1)
Articles 1 - 10 of 10
Full-Text Articles in Law
Tiered Originality And The Dualism Of Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Tiered Originality And The Dualism Of Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Professor Balganesh responds to Gideon Parchomovsky & Alex Stein, Originality, 95 Va. L. Rev. 1505 (2009), arguing that their proposal can perhaps be accommodated under current copyright doctrine.
Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo
Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
The literature on the economics of copyright proceeds from the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are nonexcludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies is essentially zero. A close examination of the foundational literature on public goods theory reveals that the defining characteristic of public goods is instead the optimality criterion known as the “Samuelson condition,” which implies that the systematic bias toward underproduction is the result of the inability to induce consumers to reveal their preferences rather than the inability to exclude or price at …
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
This is a review of Neil Weinstock Netanel’s Copyright’s Paradox (2008).
Custom, Comedy, And The Value Of Dissent, Jennifer E. Rothman
Custom, Comedy, And The Value Of Dissent, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, I comment on Dotan Oliar and Christopher Sprigman's article, There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1787 (2008). Their study of the quasi-intellectual property norms in the stand-up comedy world provides yet another compelling example of the phenomenon that I have explored in which the governing intellectual property regime takes a backseat to social norms and other industry customs that dominate the lived experiences of many in creative fields. The microcosm of stand-up comedy reinforces my concern that customs are being used to …
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …
Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
All Faculty Scholarship
In this Essay we introduce a model of copyright law that calibrates authors’ rights and liabilities to the level of originality in their works. We advocate this model as a substitute for the extant regime that unjustly and inefficiently grants equal protection to all works satisfying the “modicum of creativity” standard. Under our model, highly original works will receive enhanced protection and their authors will also be sheltered from suits by owners of preexisting works. Conversely, authors of less original works will receive diminished protection and incur greater exposure to copyright liability. We operationalize this proposal by designing separate rules …
Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser
Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser
All Faculty Scholarship
For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main - if not the exclusive - bastion of user rights. Originating in the English court of equity, the doctrine permitted users under appropriate circumstances to employ copyrighted content without consent from the rightsholder. In the current digital media environment, however, the uncertainty that shrouds fair use and the proliferation of technological protection measures undermine the doctrine and its role in copyright policy. Notably, the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the circumvention of such measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use …
Understanding Patent-Quality Mechanisms, R. Polk Wagner
Understanding Patent-Quality Mechanisms, R. Polk Wagner
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Did Trips Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis Of Patent Duration And Incentives To Innovate, David S. Abrams
Did Trips Spur Innovation? An Empirical Analysis Of Patent Duration And Incentives To Innovate, David S. Abrams
All Faculty Scholarship
How to structure IP laws in order to maximize social welfare by striking the right balance between incentives to innovate and access to innovation is an empirical question. It is a challenging one to answer, both because innovation is difficult to value and changes in IP protection are rare. The 1995 TRIPS agreement provides a unique opportunity to learn about this question for two reasons. First, the adoption of the agreement was uncertain until shortly before adoption, making it a plausibly exogenous change to patent duration. Second, the nature of the law change meant that the patent duration change was …
Patents, Property, And Competition Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
Patents, Property, And Competition Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp
All Faculty Scholarship
The decision to regulate involves the identification of markets where simple assignment of property rights is not sufficient to ensure satisfactory competitive results, usually because some type of market failure obtains. By contrast, if property rights are well defined when they are initially created and can subsequently be traded to some reasonably competitive equilibrium, then regulation is thought not to be necessary. In such cases the antitrust laws have a significant role to play in ensuring that the market can be as competitive as free trading allows. One problem with the patent system is that once a patent is granted …