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The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman
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The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.
The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores …
The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman
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This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …
Taking Patents, Gregory Dolin, Irina D. Manta
Taking Patents, Gregory Dolin, Irina D. Manta
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The America Invents Act (AIA) was widely hailed as a remedy to the excessive number of patents that the Patent & Trademark Office issued, and especially ones that would later turn out to be invalid. In its efforts to eradicate “patent trolls” and fend off other ills, however, the AIA introduced serious constitutional problems that this Article brings to the fore. We argue that the AIA’s new “second-look” mechanisms in the form of Inter Partes Review (IPR) and Covered Business Method Review (CBMR) have greatly altered the scope of vested patent rights by modifying the boundaries of existing patents. The …
Copyright And Good Faith Purchasers, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Copyright And Good Faith Purchasers, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
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Good faith purchasers for value — individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property from a seller whose own actions in obtaining the property are of questionable legality — have long obtained special protection under the common law. Despite the seller’s own actions being tainted, such purchasers obtain valid title themselves and are allowed to freely alienate the property without any restriction. Modern copyright law, however, does just the opposite. Individuals who unknowingly and in good faith purchase property embodying an unauthorized copy of a protected work are altogether precluded from subsequently alienating such property, or risk running afoul …
Copyright Trust, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
Copyright Trust, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky
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Collaborative production of expressive content accounts for an ever growing number of copyrighted works. Indeed, in the age of content sharing and peer production, collaborative efforts may have become the paradigmatic form of authorship. Surprisingly, though, copyright law continues to view the single author model as the dominant model of peer production. Copyright law’s approach to authorship is currently based on a hodgepodge of rigid doctrines that conflate ownership and control. The result is a binary system under which a contributor to a collaborative work is either recognized as an author with a full control and management rights or a …
Competitive Patent Law, William Hubbard
Competitive Patent Law, William Hubbard
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Can U.S. patent law help American businesses compete in global markets? In early 2011, President Barack Obama argued that, to obtain economic prosperity, the United States must "out-innovate . .. the rest of the world,"1 and that patent reform is a "critical dimension[]" 2 of this innovation agenda. Soon thereafter, Congress enacted the most sweeping reforms to U.S. patent law in more than half a century, contending that the changes will "give American inventors and innovators the 21st century patent system they need to compete."3 Surprisingly, no legal scholar has assessed whether patent reform is capable of making …
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
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This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
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This is a review of Neil Weinstock Netanel’s Copyright’s Paradox (2008).
Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
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While the benchmark of trademark infringement traditionally has been a demonstration that consumers are likely to be confused by the use of a similar or identical trademark to identify the goods or services of another, a court-created doctrine called initial interest confusion allows liability for trademark infringement solely on the basis that a consumer might initially be interested, attracted, or distracted by a competitor's, or even a non-competitor's, product or service. Initial interest confusion is being used with increasing frequency, especially on the Internet, to shut down speech critical of trademark holders and their products and services, to prevent comparative …
Communicating Entitlements: Property And The Internet, William Hubbard
Communicating Entitlements: Property And The Internet, William Hubbard
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No abstract provided.