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Full-Text Articles in Law

Licensing As Digital Rights Management, From The Advent Of The Web To The Ipad, Reuven Ashtar Jan 2011

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 …


Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser Jan 2010

Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

For centuries, the fair use doctrine has been the main--if not the exclusive--bastion of user rights. Originating in the English courts of equity, the doctrine permitted users, under appropriate circumstances, to employ copyrighted content without the rightsholder's consent. 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 technological protection measures even for fair use purposes, has diminished the ability of fair use to counterbalance a copyright …


Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy, Aaron K. Perzanowski Jan 2009

Rethinking Anticircumvention's Interoperability Policy, Aaron K. Perzanowski

Aaron K. Perzanowski

Interoperability is widely touted for its ability to spur incremental innovation, increase competition and consumer choice, and decrease barriers to accessibility. In light of these attributes, intellectual property law generally permits follow-on innovators to create products that interoperate with existing systems, even without permission. The anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) represent a troubling departure from this policy, resulting in patent-like rights to exclude technologies that interoperate with protected platforms. Although the DMCA contains internal safeguards to preserve interoperability, judicial misinterpretation and a narrow textual focus on software-to-software interoperability render those safeguards largely ineffective. Subjecting restrictions on …


Beyond Fair Use, Gideon Parchomovsky, Philip J. Weiser Jan 2009

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 …