Law Commons^™

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica Litman

Law & Economics Working Papers

In this essay, written for the 30th Anniversary of Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I revisit the ruinous litigation strategy copyright owners pursued after Napster to secure control of the market for personal uses of copyrighted works, which I wrote about ten years ago in War Stories, 20 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 337 (2002). The litigation campaign had effects that copyright owners now have reason to regret. Medical experts tell us that powerful antibiotics are highly effective in killing off both good and bad bacteria, but at a significant risk. Bugs that survive the treatment grow bigger, stronger, …

A State Law Approach To Preserving Fair Use In Academic Libraries, David R. Hansen

David R Hansen

Why Full Open Access Matters, Michael W. Carroll

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This Perspective argues that when authors or funders pay the full cost of publishing a scientific or scholarly journal article in an open access journal, the terms of reuse should require only attribution to some combination of the author(s), the original publisher, and the funder. Publications that charge authors and their financial backers the full cost of publication and then add other reuse restrictions are not fully open access publications.

Why Full Open Access Matters, Michael W. Carroll

Michael W. Carroll

Sports Merchandizing, Publicity Rights, And The Missing Role Of The Sports Fan, Joseph P. Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Sports fans play a tremendously important role in the success and popularity of sports teams and the enterprise of sports in general. It is somewhat curious, then, that fan interests are almost entirely missing from discussions about certain important legal issues that have a direct impact on them. Specifically, fan interests play a surprisingly limited role in discussions about sports team merchandising and player rights of publicity. This Article argues that modern sports licensing practices are coming into increasing conflict with the interests of sports fans, and that the law should take greater account of such interests. This Article starts …

Acting Like An Administrative Agency: The Federal Circuit En Banc, Ryan G. Vacca

Akron Law Faculty Publications

When Congress created the Federal Circuit in 1982, it thought it was creating a court of appeals. Little did it know that it was also creating a quasi-administrative agency that would engage in substantive rulemaking and set policy in a manner substantially similar to administrative agencies. In this Article, I examine the Federal Circuit's practices when it orders a case to be heard en banc and illustrate how these practices cause the Federal Circuit to look very much like an administrative agency engaging in substantive rulemaking. The number and breadth of questions the Federal Circuit agrees to hear en banc …

Acting Like An Administrative Agency: The Federal Circuit En Banc, Ryan G. Vacca

Ryan G. Vacca

When Congress created the Federal Circuit in 1982, it thought it was creating a court of appeals. Little did it know that it was also creating a quasi-administrative agency that would engage in substantive rulemaking and set policy in a manner substantially similar to administrative agencies. In this Article, I examine the Federal Circuit's practices when it orders a case to be heard en banc and illustrate how these practices cause the Federal Circuit to look very much like an administrative agency engaging in substantive rulemaking. The number and breadth of questions the Federal Circuit agrees to hear en banc …

10th Annual Conference On Recent Developments In Intellectual Property Law & Policy, Marc Greenberg, William T. Gallagher, Chester Chuang

Intellectual Property Law

Welcome to the 10 Annual Conference on Recent Developments in Intellectual Property Law andPolicy, presented by the Intellectual Property Law Center of Golden Gate University School of Law.

Protection Of Traditional Knowledge: Trade Barriers And The Public Domain, David R. Hansen

David R Hansen

Medical Alert: Alarming Challenges Facing Medical Technology Innovation, Lawrence M. Sung

Lawrence M. Sung

No abstract provided.

Paper For Presentation At The Jpil 2011 Conference In Milan: New Technology, New Problems And New Solutions - Private International Law And The Internet Revisited, Ulf Maunsbach

Ulf Maunsbach

No abstract provided.

New Business Models For Music, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

The popular music industry is in the middle of a technology-driven revolution. It is clear that the old order has been swept away, but it is not yet clear what form the “new order” will take. The major labels are on life support and will not survive in anything like their previous form. Compact Discs are dead as a distribution medium. Copyright is unenforceable and hence essentially irrelevant except at the margins of the “new order.” Barriers to entry have been reduced dramatically as the costs of producing top-quality recordings have declined by a couple of orders of magnitude. Portable …

Google Books Rejected: Taking The Orphans To The Digital Library Of Alexandria, Giancarlo Francesco Frosio

Giancarlo Francesco Frosio

The idea of the Library of Alexandria has powerfully expanded over the centuries, embodying the dream of universal wisdom and knowledge centralized in one single place. Digitization projects, such as the Google books project, are reviving the hope that this dream may come true. Moreover, the ubiquity of the networked environment promises to open access to this aiber-library to everybody with an Internet connection. Today the entire collection of human knowledge may be only one click away. Whether the dream of the Library ofAlexandria will be achieved by the Google books project is highly debated. Recently, a court decision concluded …

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar

Reuven Ashtar

This Article deals with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, Section 1201, and its relationship to licensing. It argues that not all digital locks and contractual notices qualify for legal protection under Section 1201, and attributes the courts’ indiscriminate protection of all Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures to the law’s incoherent formulation. The Article proposes a pair of filters that would enable courts to distinguish between those DRM measures that qualify for protection under Section 1201, and those that do not. The filters are shown to align with legislative intent and copyright precedent, as well as the approaches recently …

The Changing Nature Of Books And The Uneasy Case For Copyright, Niva Elkin-Koren

Niva Elkin-Koren

Digital technology penetrated the publishing industry decades ago, but it was only in the past two years, that the digital revolution finally reached the book industry, as eBooks became a viable alternative to printed books.

eBooks are not simply a fancy package for buying and selling books. They are transforming print culture. They are changing the nature of books as we know them, giving rise to new social practices of writing and reading. eBooks and digital libraries are also transforming the publishing and bookselling industries, enabling new methods of production and distribution, shaking the boundaries between the traditional players, and …

Trademarks And The Right To Practice, Juan Lapenne

Juan Lapenne

No abstract provided.

Uruguayan Decision On Counterfeits In Transit, Juan Lapenne

Juan Lapenne

No abstract provided.

Insights From Psychology For Copyright's Originality Doctrine, Cameron J. Hutchison

Cameron J Hutchison

The discipline of psychology has much to offer the law of copyright. For example, determining whether or not a work is original in a legal sense implicates, and may be enriched by, the psychology of creativity. This paper is a foray into the linkage between psychological understandings of creativity and the legal standard of originality. While the methodologies and approaches to the psychological sub-discipline of creativity are many, certain frameworks are chosen which seem most relevant and probative to the task: psychoanalysis (specifically, Jungian psychoanalysis), experimental psychology (specifically, the cognitive science of creativity or “cognitive creativity”), and social psychology (specifically, …

Introduction To Crtical Concepts In Intellectual Property Law: Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The two-volume set entitled Critical Concepts in Intellectual Property Law: Copyright brings together a thought-provoking collection of landmark and recent scholarship on copyright. Section 1 of Volume I focuses on the history of copyright, with Tyler Ochoa and Mark Rose providing an example of the prevailing interpretation of the history and articles by Thomas Nachbar and by William Treanor and Paul Schwartz offering fresh takes on the early English and American experiences. Section 2 focuses on copyright’s philosophical foundations, framed by the work of Justin Hughes and followed by revisionist perspectives on Lockean and Hegelian theory offered by Seana Shiffrin …

"Hot News": The Enduring Myth Of Property In News, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed To Repeat It?, Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that four leading communications industries have historically followed a single pattern that he calls “the Cycle.” Because Wu’s argument is almost entirely historical, the cogency of its claims and the force of its policy recommendations depends entirely on the accuracy and completeness of its treatment of the historical record. Specifically, he believes that industries begin as open, only to be transformed into closed systems by a great corporate mogul until some new form of ingenuity restarts the Cycle anew. Interestingly, even taken at face value, many of the episodes described in the …

Acta's Constitutional Problems: The Treaty Is Not A Treaty, Sean Flynn

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

On the eve of the United States’ entry into the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”), there is considerable confusion as to just what legal effect the agreement will have. In written answers to Senator Ron Wyden, the United States Trade Representative (“USTR”) went to lengths to describe ACTA as non-binding, asserting that “ACTA does not constrain Congress’ authority to change U.S. law,” and that it would operate only as an “Executive Agreement” that “can be implemented without new legislation.” But European negotiators have described the agreement to their legislature in very different terms, asserting that ACTA is “a binding international agreement …

Secret Inventions, Jonas Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Patent law - and innovation policy more generally - has traditionally been conceptualized as antithetical to secrecy. Not only does the patent system require inventors to publicly disclose their inventions in order to receive a patent, but various patent doctrines are designed to encourage inventors to forego trade secrecy. This Article offers a critique of the law’s preference for patents. In particular, this Article examines whether and under what circumstances the law should prefer patents over secrets, and vice versa.

As an initial step towards a theoretically-supported system of inventor incentives, this Article constructs a framework that attempts to balance …

Grundläggande Immaterialrätt [Basic Intellectual Property Law], 2 Ed., Ulf Maunsbach, Ulrika Wennersten

Ulf Maunsbach

No abstract provided.

Swedish Soda Club Dispute – Competition Law And Ipr Intersection”, Publicerad I -, Ulf Maunsbach

Ulf Maunsbach

No abstract provided.

The Problem With Intellectual Property Rights: Subject Matter Expansion, Andrew Beckerman Rodau

Andrew Beckerman Rodau

This article examines the expansion of the subject matter that can be protected under intellectual property law. Intellectual property law has developed legal rules that carefully balance competing interests. The goal has long been to provide enough legal protection to maximize incentives to engage in creative and innovative activities while also providing rules and doctrines that minimize the effect on the commercial marketplace and minimize interference with the free flow of ideas generally. The expansive view of subject matter protectable via intellectual property law has erased the clear delineation between patent, copyright, and trademark law. This has led to overprotection …