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No Bitin’ Allowed: A Hip-Hop Copying Paradigm For All Of Us, Horace E. Anderson Jr.
No Bitin’ Allowed: A Hip-Hop Copying Paradigm For All Of Us, Horace E. Anderson Jr.
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
It is long past time to reform the Copyright Act. The law of copyright in the United States is at one of its periodic inflection points. In the past, major technological change and major shifts in the way copyrightable works were used have rightly led to major changes in the law. The invention of the printing press prompted the first codification of copyright. The popularity of the player piano contributed to a reevaluation of how musical works should be protected. The dawn of the computer age led to an explicit expansion of copyrightable subject matter to include computer programs. These …
Counterfeits, Copying And Class, Ann Bartow
Counterfeits, Copying And Class, Ann Bartow
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
Consumers who want to express themselves by wearing contemporary clothing styles should not have to choose between expensive brands and counterfeit products. There should be a clear distinction in trademark law between illegal, counterfeit goods and perfectly legal (at least with respect to trademark law) "knockoffs," in which aesthetically functional design attributes have been copied but trademarks have not. Toward that end, as a normative matter, the aesthetic features of products should not be registrable or protectable as trademarks or trade dress, regardless of whether they have secondary meaning, just as functional attributes of a utilitarian nature are not eligible …