Law Commons^™

Individual Licensing And Consumer Protection, Lucie Guibault

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Copyright law is not primarily directed at consumers. Their interests are therefore only marginally accounted for, as the copyright rules exempt specific uses of works from the right holder’s control. This chapter examines the impact of digital technology on the position of consumers of licensed copyrighted content. While ownership of the physical embodiment of a work does not entail the ownership of the rights in the work, how does copyright law deal with ‘disembodied’ works? Whereas digital content is now commonly distributed on the basis of individual licensing schemes, what does it mean for consumers? Do they have a claim …

Testing Tarnishment In Trademark And Copyright Law: The Effect Of Pornographic Versions Of Protected Marks And Works Of Pornographic Versions Of Protected Marks And Work, Christopher Buccafusco, Paul J. Heald, Wen Bu

Faculty Articles

Federal and state law both provide a cause of action against inappropriate and unauthorized uses that ‘tarnish’ a trademark. Copyright owners also articulate fears of ‘tarnishing’ uses of their works in their arguments against fair use and for copyright term extension. The validity of these concerns rests on an empirically testable hypothesis about how consumers respond to inappropriate unauthorized uses of works. In particular, the tarnishment hypothesis assumes that consumers who are exposed to inappropriate uses of a work will find the tarnished work less valuable afterwards. This Article presents two experimental tests of the tarnishment hypothesis, focusing on unauthorized …

Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer

Faculty Articles

Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has often been perplexing. Much of this difficulty arises from an unclear understanding of the nature of functionality in fashion design. This Article proposes a robust account of fashion’s function. It argues that aspects of garment designs are functional not only when they affect the physical or technological performance of a garment but also when they affect the perception of the wearer’s body. Generally, clothes are not designed or chosen simply …

Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley

Faculty Articles

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and design patents are much easier to obtain than utility patents, and they often last much longer. Accordingly, to prevent claimants from obtaining “backdoor patents,” the other IP doctrines must screen out functionality. As yet, however, courts and scholars have paid little systematic attention to the ways in which these functionality screens operate across and within IP law.We have four tasks in this …

Honest Copying Practices, Joseph P. Fishman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

One of intellectual property theory’s operating assumptions is that creating is hard while copying is easy. But it is not always so. Copies, though outwardly identical, can come from different processes, from cheap digital duplication to laborious handmade re-creation. Policymakers around the world face a choice whether such distinctions should affect liability. The two branches of intellectual property that condition liability on actual copying, copyright and trade secrecy, give different answers. Both in the United States and elsewhere, trade secrecy regimes distinguish between copying methods deemed illegitimate and those deemed legitimate, what international treaties call “honest commercial practices.” Copyright regimes, …

Theft! A History Of Music: A Tale Of Law And Music That Leads Through The Gates Of Time! [Tales From The Public Domain], Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Back cover text:

This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ's turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing-extensively borrowing-from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race--again and again, race--and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate …

Causing Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

Copyright protection attaches to an original work of expression the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible medium. Yet, modern copyright law contains no viable mechanism by which to examine whether someone is causally responsible for the creation and fixation of the work. Whenever the issue of causation arises, copyright law relies on its preexisting doctrinal devices to resolve the issue, in the process cloaking its intuitions about causation in altogether extraneous considerations. This Article argues that copyright law embodies an unstated, yet distinct theory of authorial causation, which connects the element of human agency to a work …

Moving Past Michelin: Towards Judicial Reconsideration Of The Intersection Of Copyright And The Charter Right To Freedom Of Expression, Graham Reynolds

All Faculty Publications

On a regular basis over the past two decades, Canadian courts considering the intersection of the Charter right to freedom of expression and copyright have cited to Michelin v. CAW-Canada as authority. In this paper, I argue that it is no longer acceptable for them to do so. As I will establish, the approaches to the intersection of freedom of expression and copyright employed in Michelin rely upon and have been shaped by conceptions of copyright and freedom of expression that although once endorsed by the Supreme Court of Canada, are no longer valid, namely the author-centric view of copyright …

Fair Use Is Good For Creativity And Innovation, Bill Patry

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Commenting on legal debates in other countries is usually bad manners. When, however, the debates concern a law from your own country, and that law is being misrepresented, it may be of service to set the record straight. The record, based on almost 300 years of Anglo-American case law and the experiences of those of us who apply fair use every day in our jobs, demonstrates that fair use is good for creativity and innovation, and in practice works well. You don’t have to take my word for it; if you are willing to put the time in, and have …

Software's Copyright Anticommons, Clark D. Asay

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have long assessed “anticommons” problems in creative and innovative environments. An anticommons develops when an asset has numerous rights holders, each of which has a right to prevent use of the asset, but none of which has a right to use the asset without authorization from the other rights holders. Hence, when any one of those rights holders uses its rights in ways that inhibit use of the common asset, an anticommons may result.

In the software world, scholars have long argued that anticommons problems arise, if at all, because of patent rights. Copyright, on the other hand, has …

Collision Course: State Community Property Laws And Termination Rights Under The Federal Copyright Act - Who Should Have The Right Of Way?, Loren E. Mulraine

Law Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recapture rights under copyright law, as well as a primer on the difference between common law and community property law as it relates to property rights in a divorce proceeding. The paper will utilize as a case study the dispute between William “Smokey” Robinson and his former spouse, Claudette Robinson, and provide a statutory solution for future disputes where federal copyright law and state community property laws collide at the intersection of copyright terminations. Specifically, should these newly recaptured rights be treated as a new estate and thus not …

The Commercial Appropriation Of Frame: A Cultural Analysis Of Right Of Publicity And Passing Off, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Over several centuries, the rhetoric of 'gap filling' has often been invoked to naturalise expansions of intellectual property ("IP") rights-copyright term extension, the patenting of life forms, trademark disparagement, and so forth. The ready pragmatism of the phrase has definite audience appeal, making big changes sound like straightforward responses to external conditions-rather than choices about how to draw the line between private ownership and public discourse. We know, however, that once filled, 'gaps' tend to stay filled. Retrospective debates about the wisdom of such decisions tend to be (both literally and figuratively) of merely academic interest. So what is most …

Ip Things As Boundary Objects: The Case Of The Copyright Work, Michael J. Madison

Articles

My goal is to explore the meanings and functions of the objects of intellectual property: the work of authorship (or copyright work) in copyright, the invention in patent, and the mark and the sign in trademark. This paper takes up the example of the copyright work.

It is usually argued that the central challenge in understanding the work is to develop a sensible method for appreciating its boundaries. Those boundaries, conventionally understood as the metaphorical "metes and bounds" of the work, might be established by deferring to the intention of the author, or by searching for authorship (creativity or originality) …

An Empirical Study Of The Copyright Practices Of American Law Journals, Brian L. Frye, Franklin L. Runge, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article presents an empirical study of the copyright practices of American law journals in relation to copyright ownership and fair use, based on a 24-question survey. It concludes that many American law journals have adopted copyright policies that are inconsistent with the expectations of legal scholars and the scope of copyright protection. Specifically, many law journals have adopted copyright policies that effectively preclude open-access publishing, and unnecessarily limit the fair use of copyrighted works. In addition, it appears that some law journals may not understand their own copyright policies. This article proposes the creation of a Code of Copyright …

Incidental Intellectual Property, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As Mark Twain apocryphally observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The history of the right of publicity reflects a common intellectual property rhyme. Much like copyright, the right of publicity is an incidental intellectual property right that emerged out of regulation. Over time, the property right gradually detached itself from the regulation and evolved into an independent legal doctrine.

Copyright emerged from the efforts of the Stationers’ Company to preserve its members’ monopoly on the publication of works of authorship. Similarly, it can be argued the right of publicity emerged from the efforts of bubblegum companies to …

Against Creativity, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

According to the Supreme Court, copyright requires both independent creation and creativity. The independent creation requirement provides that copyright cannot protect an element of a work of authorship that is copied from a previously existing work. But scholars disagree about the meaning of and justification for the creativity requirement.

The creativity requirement should be abandoned because it is irrelevant to the scope of copyrightable subject matter and distorts copyright doctrine by encouraging inefficient “creativity rhetoric.” The purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of economically valuable works of authorship, not creativity.

What's In, And What's Out: How Ip's Boundary Rules Shape Innovation, Mark Mckenna, Christopher J. Sprigman

Journal Articles

Intellectual property law sorts subject matter into a variety of different regimes, each with different terms of protection and different rules of protectability, infringement, and defenses. For that sorting to be effective, IP needs principles to distinguish the subject matter of each system. This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of border-drawing that our IP system undertakes — identifying “useful” subject matter.

This aspect is critical because our IP system gives utility patent law pride of place and draws the boundaries of the other doctrines in large part to respect utility patent’s supremacy. Yet IP law’s sense …

Charting The Contours Of Copyright Regime Optimized For Engineered Genetic Code, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

There is a growing disconnect between the traditional patent-centric approach to protecting biotechnological innovation and the emerging intellectual property imperatives of “synthetic biology,” a promising new manifestation of biotechnology that enables the design and construction of artificial biological pathways, organisms or devices, as well as the redesign of existing natural biological systems. As explained in previous articles, one way to deal with this disconnect would be to expand the scope of copyrightable subject matter to encompass engineered genetic sequences, much in the way that copyright was expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to include computer programs. The present article expands …

Fair Use And Fair Dealing: Two Approaches To Limitations And Exceptions In Copyright Law, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, David Nimmer

Faculty Scholarship

Premised on realizing a balance between protection and access, ‘limitations and exceptions’ play an important role in the any copyright system. Jurisdictions around the world are generally thought to adopt one of two possible approaches to structuring limitations and exceptions: (a) the fair dealing approach, which delineates highly specific and carefully-worded exceptions with little room for judicial discretion, and (b) the fair use approach, which relies on more open-ended language and its contextual tailoring by courts. This chapter undertakes a comparative analysis of these two approaches using the Indian and US copyright systems as its focus. It shows that, although …

Droit De Suite, Copyright’S First Sale Doctrine And Preemption Of State Law, David E. Shipley

Scholarly Works

The primary focus of this article is whether California’s forty-year old droit de suite statute; the California Resale Royalty Act (CRRA), is subject to federal preemption under the Copyright Act. This issue is now being litigated in the Ninth Circuit, and this article concludes that the CRRA is preempted under section 301(a) of the Copyright Act and under the Supremacy Clause because it at odds with copyright’s well-established first sale doctrine.

The basic idea of droit de suite is that each time an artist’s work is resold by a dealer or auction house, the artist is entitled to a royalty, …

Extended Collective Licenses In International Treaty Perspective: Issues And Statutory Implementation, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

National legislation establishing extended collective licenses (ECLs) “authoriz[es] a collective organization to license all works within a category, such as literary works, for particular, limited uses, regardless of whether copyright owners belong to the organization or not. The collective then negotiates agreements with user groups, and the terms of those agreements are binding upon all copyright owners by operation of law.” Albeit authorized under national laws, collective coverage of non-members’ works may pose issues of compatibility with international norms. For example, if non-members must opt-out in order to preserve the individual management of their rights, is the opt-out a “formality” …

Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter o􀁼ers an overview of copyright in general in common law and civil law countries, with an emphasis on the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). It addresses the history and philosophies of copyright (authors’ right), subject matter of copyright (including the requirement of 􀁿xation and the exclusion of “ideas”), formalities, initial ownership and transfers of title, duration, exclusive moral and economic rights (including reproduction, adaptation, public performance and communication and making available to the public, distribution and exhaustion of the distribution right), exceptions and limitations (including fair use), and remedies. It also covers the liability of …

Ownership Of Intellectual Property In The Library Complex, Patrick Roughen

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

In order to broadly explore intellectual property in the context of the library complex, this research examines the patents produced by companies that provide goods and services to libraries, as well as patents associated with international libraries. This paper also surveys the trademarks and copyrights held by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, located in Charlotte, North Carolina. This research suggests ways in which development of intellectual property by U.S. libraries might evolve in the future, with evidence obtained primarily through the searching of online databases.

Artistic Control After Death, Eva Subotnik

Faculty Publications

To what extent should authors be able to control what happens to their literary, artistic, and musical creations after they die? Viewed through the lens of a number of succession law trends, the evidence might suggest that strong control is warranted. The decline of the Rule Against Perpetuities and rise of incentive trusts reflect a tightening grip of the dead hand. And yet, an unconstrained ability of the dead to determine future uses of literature, art, and music is a fundamentally troubling notion. This Article evaluates the instructions authors give with respect to their authorial works against the backdrop of …