Law Commons^™

The Morning After: Trips-Plus, Ftas,And Wikileaks: Fresh Insights On The Implementation And Enforcement Of Ip Protection In Developing Countries, Mohammed El Said

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

One Step Ahead, Two Steps Back: Reverse Engineering The Second Draft For The Third Revision Of The Chinese Copyright Law, Hong Xue

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Training And Education For Development, Peter K. Yu

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Beneficiaries Of Misconduct: A Direct Approach To It Theft, Andrew Popper

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Stolen information technology (IT) is a domestic and global problem. Theft of IT by upstream producers has a pernicious effect on the competitive market and violates fundamental policies designed to protect those who create and invent such assets. Companies profiting from stolen IT are not just free-riding on the successes of those who design and produce the products and ideas that are a driving force in the U.S. economy – they are destabilizing rational pricing and distorting lawful competition by virtue of outright theft. Current legal recourse is insufficient to address such misconduct; new approaches are needed at the state …

Public Interest Analysis Of The Us Tpp Proposal For An Ip Chapter, Sean Flynn, Margot E. Kaminski, Brook K. Baker, Jimmy H. Koo

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This briefing paper provides preliminary analysis of two leaked U.S. proposals for an intellectual property chapter in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The U.S. proposal, if adopted, would create the highest intellectual property protection and enforcement standards in any free trade agreement to date. Its provisions are primarily based on, and frequently go beyond, the maximalist and controversial standards of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and US law, while negating the development-oriented flexibilities required by the 2007 New Trade Deal for developing countries and included in the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement. If adopted, …

Acta And Access To Medicines, Sean Flynn, Bijan Madhani

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

The Greens/EFA Internet Core Group in the European Parliament, and a collection of its individual members, commissioned this analysis of potential impacts of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on access to medicines in developing countries.” On the whole, ACTA negotiators created an agreement that shifts international “hard law” rules and “soft law” encouragements toward making enforcement of intellectual property rights in courts, at borders, by the government and by private parties easier, less costly, and more “deterrent” in the level of penalties. In doing so, it increases the risks and consequences of wrongful searches, seizures, lawsuits and other enforcement actions …

Book Review: Gene Patents And Collaborative Licensing Models: Patent Pools, Clearinghouses, Open Source Models And Liability Regimes (Ed. Geertrui Van Overwalle), Jonas Anderson

Book Reviews

A review of Gene Patents and Collaborative Licensing Models: Patent Pools, Clearinghouses, Open Source Models and Liability Regimes.

Acta's State Of Play: Looking Beyond Transparency, Michael Geist

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights By Diminishing Privacy: How The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Jeopardizes The Right To Privacy , Alberto J. Cerda Silva

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Trade Agreement Creating Barriers To International Trade?: Acta Border Measures And Goods In Transit , Henning Grosse Ruse - Khan

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Collateral Damage: The Impact Of Acta And The Enforcement Agenda On The World's Poorest People , Andrew Rens

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acta - Risks Of Third-Party Enforcement For Access To Medinces, Brook K. Baker

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Acta As A New Kind Of International Ip Lawmaking, Kimberlee Weatherall

American University International Law Review

No abstract provided.

Will Individuals Aboard The Cultural Pirate Ship Be Struck By The Acta's Cannon Ball?, Shalom Andrews

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

Combating internet piracy is a global challenge. Fundamentally, piracy lingers because it has become a culturally acceptable behaviour that is under-enforced. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is the latest enforcement measure aimed at sinking the pirate ship.

The first part of this paper will explore piracy as a cultural phenomenon and how it interacts with Australian civil and criminal law. Pirates, who have awareness that their plundering is wrong, convince themselves that: there are moral grounds for their escapades; there is a government conspiracy to reduce internet freedom; they are fighting globalisation by attacking the corporations who reap disproportionate booty, …

Acta: Risks Of Third Party Enforcement For Access To Medicines, Brook K. Baker

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

In its current near-final draft form, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement [ACTA] being negotiated plurilaterally—and largely secretly—by a self-selected group of countries proposes to allow preliminary and final injunctive relief against third parties (third-party enforcement) to prevent infringement of intellectual property rights and/or to prevent infringing goods from entering into the channels of commerce. There is lingering uncertainty whether the relevant civil enforcement section will apply to the entire range of intellectual property rights or whether patents will be excluded. If patents are excluded, the dangers in ACTA would be reduced but not eliminated—new globalized forms of third-party enforcement would still …

Flouting The Elmo Necessity And Denying The Local Roots Of Interpretation: "Anthropology's" Quarrel With Acta And Authoritarian Ip Regimes, Alexander S. Dent

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This paper uses an anthropological definition of culture to examine the intensification of intellectual property policing, coupled with an expansion of its definition. These are ACTA’s aims. I argue that acts of sharing lie at the root of communication; humans must share in order to learn. Furthermore, symbols change their meaning as they circulate in different cultural contexts. Therefore, in denying the fundamental importance of sharing and local interpretation, ACTA will not only fail spectacularly as a policy document. It will also fuel a “war” on file-sharers, users of generic medicines, and manufacturers, sellers, and buyers of imitative goods and …

Public Interest Representation In Global Ip Policy Institutions, Jeremy Malcolm

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This paper compares the institutional and procedural arrangements that a range of global institutions make for civil society representation and input into policy development processes on intellectual property issues. The context for this analysis comes from two sets of norms for multi-stakeholder public policy development that exist in other regimes of governance: those of the Aarhus Convention (for environmental matters), and those of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (for Internet governance). These global norms, along with the actual practices of the institutions involved in global governance of intellectual property rights, are then contrasted with the proposed new institutional …

Getting To Best Practices - A Personal Voyage Around Fair Use, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

These days, I view fair use as a central feature of the law around our information ecology - its presence reminding us, from day to day, that there is more to copyright than maximization, and that innovation happens when the doctrinal settings are loose enough to permit a good deal of "play" (literally and figuratively) in the system. But before the mid-1990s I thought little about the fair use doctrine and did less. As I suspect may be true of other copyright lawyers of my generation (and the ones preceding it, I spent most of my professional career taking fair …

Intellectual Property Law Research, Charlene Cain

Research Guides

This research guides provides an overview of resources and search strategies for researching Intellectual Property Law: subject headings, statutes and popular names for selected statutes, legislative histories, regulations, and treatises. It also identifies sources for researching case law and secondary sources - reporters, courts, selected periodicals, and blogs and websites.

Untold Stories In South Africa: Creative Consequences Of The Rights Clearance Culture For Documentary Filmmakers, Sean M. Flynn, Peter A. Jaszi

PIJIP Faculty Scholarship

This report summarizes research on the perceptions of South African documentary filmmakers about copyright clearance requirements and the effect of such requirements on their work. This work was performed in the context of a larger project exploring how lessons learned from “best practices” projects with documentary filmmakers in the U.S. can help their counterparts in other countries identify and overcome barriers to effective film making posed by escalating copyright clearance requirements.

Imagining The Law: Art, Christine Haight Farley

Contributions to Books

Law’s relations to art--to its creation, its production, and dissemination, its restriction as well as to commercial and contractual agreements about art works—are as multiform and complex as the category of art itself. Acknowledging that there is no discrete body of law that governs art, the author defines art law as “the survey of legal issues raised by art, artist, and the art world” and surveys four central themes: the law as art, the law of art, the law of creativity, and the collision of art and law. Any legal dispute about art usually evokes a plea for special legal …

What The Federal Circuit Can Learn From The Supreme Court-And Vice Versa, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Using Competition Law To Promote Access To Knowledge, Sean Flynn

Contributions to Books

One of the points of convergence among the many strands of the A2K movement is resistance to the one-size-fits-all ratcheting up of intellectual property provisions around the world. The resistance is grounded in analysis showing that intellectual property rules often create social costs that far outweigh their intended benefits. Much of the A2K movement’s advocacy for limitations of intellectual property rights is located within the field of intellectual property law – promoting the inclusion and use of balancing mechanisms within the laws granting intellectual property rights. But intellectual property rights are also shaped and limited by their interaction with other …

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: The Shaping Of Fair Use Best Practices For Online Video, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article discusses the intertwining of creative and copyright practices, as demonstrated by the emergence and evolution of standards to assess fair use in online video from 2007-2009. The development of such standards demonstrates the effectiveness of community-based standards to expand the utility of fair use and the importance of practice in affecting the interpretation of law. This process demonstrates the relationship between copyright practice and creative practice.

The Statute Of Anne: Today And Tomorrow, Peter Jaszi, Craig Joyce, Marshall A. Leaffer, Tyler Trent Ochoa

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay provides the epilogue to the University of Houston’s Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law’s 2010 National Conference, “The ©©© Conference: Celebrating Copyright’s tri-Centennial,” in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The conference focused on the Statute of Anne, the first copyright statute ever, anywhere, enacted by the British Parliament in 1710.

Copyright law in the United States, the lineal descendant of the Statute of Anne, has managed to negotiate a course between over-protecting and under-protecting copyrighted matter, and to strike at least a rough balance between the social interest in securing capital investment, on the one hand, and encouraging …

Memorial To Barbara Ringer, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The story goes that in 439 BC the retired consul Cincinnatus was summoned from the plow by the Senate and people of Rome. One more time, he saw the Republic through a time of particular peril, resigning office immediately afterwards to return to his rural retirement - to be transmuted into a timeless emblem of selfless probity. Episodes of this kind are even rarer in the annals of the U.S. civil service than in the Roman history. But I had the good fortune to be a witness to one such - Barbara Ringer's return to the Library of Congress in …

Clean Technology Transfer And Intellectual Property Rights, Nitya Nanda, Nidhi Srivastava

Sustainable Development Law & Policy

No abstract provided.

Appropriability And Property, Yonatan Even

American University Law Review

This paper challenges the malleability of the idea of property as a relative, indeterminate "bundle of rights", which appears to dominate property doctrine at least since Ronald Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost". Focusing on the core goals of property regimes, the paper proposes an alternative view of property rights - one that is centered on the ability of owners to appropriate the benefits of their assets in the face of a threat from numerous potential adversaries, rather than their ability to contract such assets away within a bilateral context. This appropriability problem, it is argued, is a defining concept …

Is There Such A Thing As Postmodern Copyright?, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Back in 1992, artist/entrepreneur Jeff Koons suffered a humiliating setback when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit repudiated the suggestion that his reuse of objects from public culture might constitute a "fair use" defense to a copyright infringement claim. Fourteen years later, in a case that again involved a photographer's claim of copyright infringement, Koons triumphed in the same judicial forum. What had changed? This Article explores, in particular, one among a variety of alternative explanations: Koons may have caught the very leading edge of a profound wave of change in the social and cultural conceptualization …

Convergence And Incongruence: Trademark Law And Icann's Introduction Of New Generic Top-Level Domains, Christine Haight Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper demonstrates how problematic convergences between Internet technology, the demands of a burgeoning e-market and trademark laws have created myriad issues in international governance of domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that governs internet's infrastructure, recently approved a new policy that would allow it to accept applications for additional generic top-level domains (gTLDs). What ICANN contemplates is a uniform system to approve generic top level domains that is expected to have profound implications. Under this new plan anyone can apply for a new gTLD at any time and it could be literally …