Law Commons^™

Do We Need A New Conception Of Authorship?, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Thank you to the organizers for having me. I’m delighted to be here. I’m going to take a step away from conceptual art, and go a little bit into history and a little bit into doctrine – and do the usual law professor thing. We law professors like to say that one of the great things about the job is that we get to overrule the Supreme Court ten thousand times a day, but the bad thing about the job is no one cares. And so, I’m going to try and make this such that you care.

Here’s the core …

Copyright Owners' Putative Interests In Privacy, Reputation, And Control: A Reply To Goold, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

My own view is that Goold overstates the explanatory role of tort law. But even were that not the case, the courts need to reach some kind of “settled” understanding on these various interests before a cause of action is created or definitively rejected, and that no such consensus on the three matters mentioned yet exists, whether they are viewed as forms of tort or otherwise. Goold’s work may nevertheless be an important step toward reaching closure on these and other open questions in copyright law.

Causing Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

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 …

A Theory Of Copyright Authorship, Christopher Buccafusco

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to grant rights to “Authors” for their “Writings.” Despite the centrality of these terms to copyright jurisprudence, neither the courts nor scholars have provided coherent theories about what makes a person an author or what makes a thing a writing. This article articulates and defends a theory of copyrightable authorship. It argues that authorship involves the intentional creation of mental effects in an audience. A writing, then, is any fixed medium capable of producing mental effects. According to this theory, copyright may attach to the original, fixed, and minimally creative form or manner …

What's A Name Worth?: Experimental Tests Of The Value Of Attribution In Intellectual Property, Christopher Jon Sprigman, Christopher Buccafusco, Zachary C. Burns

Faculty Scholarship

Despite considerable research suggesting that creators value attribution – i.e., being named as the creator of a work – U.S. intellectual property (IP) law does not provide a right to attribution to the vast majority of creators. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many European countries give creators, at least in their copyright laws, much stronger rights to attribution. At first blush it may seem that the U.S. has gotten it wrong, and the Europeans have made a better policy choice in providing to creators a right that they value. But for reasons we will explain in this …

From Hypatia To Victor Hugo To Larry And Sergey: ‘All The World's Knowledge’ And Universal Authors’ Rights, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Access to ‘all the world’s knowledge’ is an ancient aspiration; a less venerable, but equally vigorous, universalism strives for the borderless protection of authors’ rights. Late 19th-century law and politics brought us copyright universalism; 21st-century technology may bring us the universal digital library. But how can ‘all the world’s knowledge’ be delivered, on demand, to users anywhere in the world (with Internet access), if the copyrights of the creators and publishers of many of those works are supposed to be enforceable almost everywhere in the world? Does it follow that the universal digital library of the near future threatens copyright …

Current Patent Laws Cannot Claim The Backing Of Human Rights, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

In the dispute over the enforcement of pharmaceutical patents, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is sometimes cited as giving patent protection the status of a 'human right'. It is true that the ICESCR provides for ‘the right of everyone’ ‘[t]o benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author’. But that does not mean that patent protection is a human right. Patent fails as a human right for many reasons, one of which is the lack of fit between current patent …

Reasons To Write, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Jag In La La Land, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright's Communications Policy, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it too easy to be a pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright gives content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms …

On Commodifying Intangibles, Wendy J. Gordon, Sam Postbrief

Faculty Scholarship

It was made clear long ago that property and value are different things. Value exists. It is a fact. It can arise from law, and much of law aims at creating more value in the world. But value can also arise in spite of law (consider, for example, the fortunes that bootleggers made during the Roaring Twenties), or in law's interstices. When a particular value arises despite a lack of explicit legal protection, its possessors often ask courts or legislatures to give them a legal entitlement to preserve and further exploit that value. Typically the holders demand (1) a liberty …

The Search For An Author: Shakespeare And The Framers, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

In Re “William Shakespeare”, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.