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Beyond Napster: Using Antitrust Law To Advance And Enhance Online Music Distribution, Matthew Fagin, Frank Pasquale, Kim Weatherall
Beyond Napster: Using Antitrust Law To Advance And Enhance Online Music Distribution, Matthew Fagin, Frank Pasquale, Kim Weatherall
Frank A. Pasquale
What should be the broad principles guiding the copyright and competition policy governing online music? In short, what are the key concerns or values that we want preserved in relation to the distribution of music online? We will outline the background to the present investigations and existing law in Part I and argue in Part II that these concerns can be encapsulated in two broad areas: (1) the preservation of some scope for private and personal use and (2) the encouragement and growth of a diverse sector for the distribution of copyrighted works online. We also argue that, at least …
Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale
Toward An Ecology Of Intellectual Property: Lessons From Environmental Economics For Valuing Copyright's Commons, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
The fair use defense in copyright law shields an intellectual commons of protected uses of copyrighted material from infringement actions. In determining whether a given use is fair, courts must assess the new use's potential effect on the market for the copyrighted work. Fair use jurisprudence too often fails to address the complementary, network, and long-range effects of new technologies on the market for copyrighted works. These effects parallel the indirect, direct, and option values of biodiversity recently recognized by environmental economists. Their sophisticated methods for valuing natural resources in tangible commons can inform legal efforts to address the intellectual …
Copyright In An Era Of Information Overload: Toward The Privileging Of Categorizers, Frank Pasquale
Copyright In An Era Of Information Overload: Toward The Privileging Of Categorizers, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
Environmental laws are designed to reduce negative externalities (such as pollution) that harm the natural environment. Copyright law should adjust the rights of content creators in order to compensate for the ways they reduce the usefulness of the information environment as a whole. Every new work created contributes to the store of expression, but also makes it more difficult to find whatever work one wants. Such search costs have been well-documented in information economics. Copyright law should take information overload externalities like search costs into account in its treatment of alleged copyright infringers whose work merely attempts to index, organize, …
Breaking The Vicious Circularity: Sony's Contribution To The Fair Use Doctrine, Frank Pasquale
Breaking The Vicious Circularity: Sony's Contribution To The Fair Use Doctrine, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
The fair use doctrine permits certain uses of copyrighted material that are unauthorized by the copyright holder. In 1984, the Supreme Court decided in Sony v. Universal Studios (Sony) that unauthorized home taping of television programs was a fair use of such programs. Decried by the dissent and frequently contested in ensuing cases, that decision sealed the majority's case that the videotape recorder was capable of substantial non-infringing uses and therefore legal. In the twenty years since Sony, the dissent's skepticism about the fairness of time-shifting has gotten about as warm a reception in appellate courts as the majority's position. …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Frank A. Pasquale
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …