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Full-Text Articles in Law

Imaginary Bottles, Jessica Litman Aug 2019

Imaginary Bottles, Jessica Litman

Articles

This essay, written for a symposium commemorating John Perry Barlow, who died on February 7, 2018, revisits Barlow's 1994 essay for WIRED magazine, "The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age (everything you know about intellectual property is wrong)." Barlow observed that networked digital technology posed massive and fundamental challenges for the markets for what Barlow termed “the work we do with our minds” and for the intellectual property laws designed to shape those markets. He predicted that those challenges would melt extant intellectual property systems into a smoking heap within a decade, and …


What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman Nov 2018

What We Don't See When We See Copyright As Property, Jessica Litman

Articles

For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which …


Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman Jan 2017

Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

Our copyright laws encourage authors to create new works and communicate them to the public, because we hope that people will read the books, listen to the music, see the art, watch the films, run the software, and build and inhabit the buildings. That is the way that copyright promotes the Progress of Science. Recently, that not-very-controversial principle has collided with copyright owners’ conviction that they should be able to control, or at least collect royalties from, all uses of their works. A particularly ill-considered manifestation of this conviction is what I have decided to call copy-fetish. This is the …


Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2014

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …


The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2010

The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

This Article explores playwrights' common law "play right." Since this conference celebrates the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I begin in England in the 17th Century. I find no trace of a common law playwright's performance right in either the law or the customary practices surrounding 17th and 18th century English theatre. I argue that the nature and degree of royal supervision of theatre companies and performance during the period presented no occasion (and, indeed, left no opportunity) for such a right to arise. I discuss the impetus for Parliament's enactment of a performance right statute in 1833, …


Bargaining In The Shadow Of Rate-Setting Courts, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2009

Bargaining In The Shadow Of Rate-Setting Courts, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Judges will tell you that they are comparatively poor rate regulators. The specialized, technical competence and supervisory capacity that public utilities commissions enjoy are usually absent from judicial chambers. Nonetheless, when granting antitrust remedies-particularly remedies for monopolistic abuse of intellectual property-courts sometimes purport to act as rate regulators for the licensing or sale of the defendant's assets. At the outset, we should distinguish between two forms ofjudicial rate setting. In one form, a court (or the FTC in its adjudicative capacity) grants a compulsory license and sets a specific rate as part of a final judgment or an order. The …


Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2009

Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …


Tactics And Terms In The Negotiation Of Electronic Resource Licenses, Kincaid C. Brown Jan 2008

Tactics And Terms In The Negotiation Of Electronic Resource Licenses, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This chapter introduces the reader to the realm of electronic resource license agreements. It provides the reader with an overview of basic contract law as it relates to electronic resource licensing. The chapter then discusses the electronic resource license negotiation process as well as license agreement term clauses. The aim of this chapter is to provide librarians with an understanding of basic licensing concepts and language in order to aid librarians in the review and negotiation of their own license agreements. The author hopes to impart lessons and tips he has learned in reviewing and negotiating license agreements with a …


Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2007

Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Let me begin with something that Jamie Boyle wrote ten years ago in Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person's Guide:' Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without copying. The relative bundles of rights of the user and the owner achieve their balance based on a set of economic and technical assumptions about the meaning of normal use. For our purposes, I would like to generalize this as something that Boyle might have written if he had not in that …


War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2006

War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica D. Litman

Other Publications

I'd like to thank the Copyright Society and the Brace committee for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I am honored that you invited me to give this lecture. I want to talk a little bit about war - copyright war - and then I want to talk a little bit about peace. It's become conventional that we're in the middle of a copyright war.' I tried to track down who started calling it that, and what I can tell you is that about ten years ago, about the time that copyright lawyers everywhere were arguing about the …


Default Rules In Sales And The Myth Of Contracting Out, James J. White Jan 2002

Default Rules In Sales And The Myth Of Contracting Out, James J. White

Articles

In this article, I trace the dispute in the courts and before the ALI and NCCUSL over the proper contract formation and interpretation default rules. In Part II, I consider the Gateway litigation. In Part III, I deal with UCITA and the revision to Article 2. In Part IV, I consider the merits of the competing default rules.


Patents: Help Or Hindrance To Technology Transfer?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1996

Patents: Help Or Hindrance To Technology Transfer?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

Intellectual property is a broad heading used to refer to a wide variety of rights associated with inventions, discoveries, writings, artistic works, product designs, and designations of the source of goods and services. Patents and trade secrets are the most important of these sorts of intellectual properties in the field of biotechnology. One aspect of intellectual property that distinguishes it sharply from other forms of property-and for some people makes it harder to justify-is that intellectual properties may be possessed and used by many people simultaneously. This is not so for tangible property. If someone borrows my car, I cannot …


Intellectual Property At The Public-Private Divide: The Case Of Large-Scale Cdna Sequencing, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 1996

Intellectual Property At The Public-Private Divide: The Case Of Large-Scale Cdna Sequencing, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

The Human Genome Project provides fertile ground for studying the role of intellectual property at the wavering boundary between public and private research science. It involves a major commitment of both public and private research funds in an area that is of significant interest both to research scientists working in university and government laboratories and to commercial firms. It thus provides a wealth of new scientific discoveries that are simultaneously potential candidates for commercial development and inputs into further research. Its obvious implications for human health raise the stakes of getting the balance between private property and public access right, …


Limitations Upon The Use, After Sale, Of Patented Articles, John B. Waite Jan 1917

Limitations Upon The Use, After Sale, Of Patented Articles, John B. Waite

Articles

In the case of Motion Picture Patents Co. v. Universal Film Co., 37 Sup. Ct. 416, the Supreme Court has just rendered a decision which reverses the much discussed case of Henry v. Dick Co., 224 U. S. 1. The opinion was by a divided court, however, as three of the justices dissented, and Justice McREYNOLDS "concurred in the result" only. It can, therefore, hardly be said to settle the ultimate rule as in contradiction to that followed in Henry v. Dick Co., and discussion of the case is of something more than mere academic value. The facts were that …


Revocability Of Licenses - The Rule Of Wood V. Leadbitter, Ralph W. Aigler Jan 1915

Revocability Of Licenses - The Rule Of Wood V. Leadbitter, Ralph W. Aigler

Articles

That a mere license purporting to create in the licensee a new right or privilege is revocable at law at the will of the licensor seems to have been definitely settled in England by Wood v. Leadbitter, 13 M. & W. 838 (1845). It was there held that the plaintiff who had entered the close of the defendant's master after the purchase of a proper ticket could be forcibly ousted, notice having been first given that he should leave. The only remedy open to the ousted ticket holder-in law at least-no excessive violence1 having been used, is to sue for …