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Full-Text Articles in Law
Silent Similarity, Jessica D. Litman
Silent Similarity, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
From 1909 to 1930, U.S. courts grappled with claims by authors of prose works claiming that works in a new art form—silent movies—had infringed their copyrights. These cases laid the groundwork for much of modern copyright law, from their broad expansion of the reproduction right, to their puzzled grappling with the question how to compare works in dissimilar media, to their confusion over what sort of evidence should be relevant to show copyrightability, copying and infringement. Some of those cases—in particular, Nichols v. Universal Pictures—are canonical today. They are not, however, well-understood. In particular, the problem at the heart of …
Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman
Readers' Copyright, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
My goal in this project is to reclaim copyright for readers (and listeners, viewers, and other members of the audience). I think, and will try to persuade you, that the gradual and relatively recent disappearance of readers’ interests from the core of copyright’s perceived goals has unbalanced the copyright system. It may have prompted, at least in part, the scholarly critique of copyright that has fueled copyright lawyers’ impression that “so many in academia side with the pirates.” It may also be responsible for much of the deterioration in public support for copyright. I argue here that copyright seems out …
Human Dignity And The Claim Of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama And Supreme Court Decisions, James Boyd White
Human Dignity And The Claim Of Meaning: Athenian Tragic Drama And Supreme Court Decisions, James Boyd White
Articles
I am going to bring together what may seem at first to be two extremely different institutions for the creation of public meaning, namely classical Athenian tragedy and the Supreme Court opinion.1 My object is not so much to draw lines of similarity and distinction between them, as a cultural analyst might do, as to try to capture something of what I believe is centrally at work in both institutions, in fact essential to what each at its best achieves. I can frame it as a question: How is it that the best instances of each genre (for I will …
The Trouble With Hairdressers, Donald J. Herzog
The Trouble With Hairdressers, Donald J. Herzog
Articles
Why should hairdressers, of all unlikely candidates, have come to exemplify equality, to be a cultural obsession of sort? Suffice it to say that hairdressers happened to occupy a social position that made it possible to demonize them.
Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller
Deep Inner Lives, Individualism And People Of Honour, William I. Miller
Articles
With the exception of St Augustine and perhaps Abelard, often praised as modern before their time, it is not unusual to find it maintained that the individual was not available in any serious conceptual, psychological or even sociological way before the seventeenth century. Our thick and deep self, according to this view, is thus a rather recent phenomenon. Some more expansive souls find the individual already emerging a century earlier, during the Reformation. Within the last three decades, medievalists, chagrined at being contemned by classicists on one flank and an alliance of Renaissance scholars, early modernists, modernists and post-modernists on …