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Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Law
Digital Copyright, Jessica Litman
What Notice Did, Jessica Litman
What Notice Did, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this article, I explore the effect of the copyright notice prerequisite on the law's treatment of copyright ownership. The notice prerequisite, as construed by the courts, encouraged the development of legal doctrines that herded the ownership of copyrights into the hands of publishers and other intermediaries, notwithstanding statutory provisions that seem to have been designed at least in part to enable authors to keep their copyrights. Because copyright law required notice, other doctrinal developments were shaped by and distorted by that requirement. The promiscuous alienability of U.S. copyrights may itself have been an accidental development deriving from courts' constructions …
Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
We have copyright laws to 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 …
Campbell At 21/Sony At 31, Jessica Litman
Campbell At 21/Sony At 31, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
When copyright lawyers gather to discuss fair use, the most common refrain is its alarming expansion. Their distress about fair use’s enlarged footprint seems completely untethered from any appreciation of the remarkable increase in exclusive copyright rights. In the nearly 40 years since Congress enacted the 1976 copyright act, the rights of copyright owners have expanded markedly. Copyright owners’ demands for further expansion continue unabated. Meanwhile, they raise strident objections to proposals to add new privileges and exceptions to the statute to shelter non-infringing uses that might be implicated by their expanded rights. Copyright owners have used the resulting uncertainty …
Silent Similarity, Jessica Litman
Silent Similarity, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
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. …
Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica Litman
Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this essay, written for the 30th Anniversary of Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I revisit the ruinous litigation strategy copyright owners pursued after Napster to secure control of the market for personal uses of copyrighted works, which I wrote about ten years ago in War Stories, 20 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 337 (2002). The litigation campaign had effects that copyright owners now have reason to regret. Medical experts tell us that powerful antibiotics are highly effective in killing off both good and bad bacteria, but at a significant risk. Bugs that survive the treatment grow bigger, stronger, …
Readers' Copyright, Jessica Litman
Readers' Copyright, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
This essay is part of a project intended to help reclaim copyright for readers, listeners, and viewers. A system of copyright protection makes little sense unless it is designed to encourage the use and enjoyment of the works it induces authors to create and publishers to disseminate. I argue that a clear-eyed examination of copyright's history reveals that solicitude for readers and members of the audience is, in fact, deeply encoded in copyright's DNA. Recently, readers' interests have faded in apparent importance in the copyright scheme in ways that have unbalanced the copyright system, and undermined public support for copyright …
Real Copyright Reform, Jessica Litman
Real Copyright Reform, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
A copyright system is designed to produce an ecology that nurtures the creation, dissemination and enjoyment of works of authorship. When it works well, it encourages creators to generate new works, assists intermediaries in disseminating them widely, and supports readers, listeners and viewers in enjoying them. If the system poses difficult entry barriers to creators, imposes demanding impediments on intermediaries, or inflicts burdensome conditions and hurdles on readers, then the system fails to achieve at least some of its purposes. The current U.S. copyright statute is flawed in all three respects. In this article, I explore how the current copyright …
The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica Litman
The Invention Of Common Law Play Right, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this paper, written for Berkeley’s symposium on the 300th birthday of the Statute of Anne, I explore the history of the common law public performance right in dramatic works. Eaton Drone dubbed the dramatic public performance right “playright” in his 1879 treatise, arguing that just as “copyright” conferred a right to make and sell copies, “playright” conferred a right to perform or “play” a script. I examine case law and customary theatrical practice in England, and find no trace of a common law play right before 1833, when Parliament established a statutory public performance right for plays. Similarly, in …
The Politics Of Intellectual Property, Jessica Litman
The Politics Of Intellectual Property, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
This talk, delivered at the 2006 AALS mid-year meeting, briefly addresses the politics of copyright legislation before segueing into the politics of intellectual property scholarship. I urge that the metaphor of a “copyright war,” used by both copyright owners and copyright reformers, is uncomfortably apt. It reflects a polarization of the copyright community that has affected copyright scholarship in unhealthy ways, encouraging scholars to choose sides in the copyright wars and to tailor their scholarship to fit.
The Copyright Revision Act Of 2026, Jessica Litman
The Copyright Revision Act Of 2026, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this lecture, the Twelfth Annual Honorable Helen Wilson Nies Memorial Lecture in Intellectual Property Law, I suggest we may be gearing up to persuade Congress to embark on a new round of copyright revision. If history is any guide, we already know what a revised copyright law is likely to look like: it will be longer, broader, more complicated and less flexible than the one we have now. Before committing ourselves to that enterprise, we should take the opportunity to imagine what the copyright system might look like if we were free to write on a blank slate. I …
Billowing White Goo, Jessica Litman
Billowing White Goo, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this paper, written for a symposium on “Fair Use: Incredibly Expanding or Extraordinarily Shrinking?,” I argue that the size of the fair use footprint has remained about the same over the past three decades, while the size and scope of copyright’s exclusive rights have expanded markedly. In order to protect a broader range of worthy uses under the fair use umbrella, courts have adopted new tests tailored to privilege particular sorts of uses, but in doing so they haven’t expanded fair use so much as they have moved it around. In part I of the paper, I briefly summarize …
Lawful Personal Use, Jessica Litman
Lawful Personal Use, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
Whenever someone makes a copy of a copyrighted work, that copy is either authorized by the copyright owner, permitted by some express provision of the copyright statute (such as the ephemeral copy provision in section 112 or the fair use provision in section 107), or infringing. That's what we tell our colleagues and what we teach our students. But most of us don't actually believe it, and this article argues that that understanding of the copyright law is wrong. I make this argument by examining the copyright law through the lens of personal use. Unlike many other jurisdictions, the United …
Creative Reading, Jessica Litman
Creative Reading, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this short essay, a comment on Rebecca Tushnet’s Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity, 70 Law & Contemporary Problems 133 (2007), I argue that copyright scholars have undervalued the copyright interests of readers, listeners and viewers. By ignoring the central importance of audience interests in the copyright scheme, we have all but conceded that the essential policy question in determining whether a use of copyrighted material should be lawful is the way the use looks from the viewpoint of the copyright owner. This approach fails to appreciate that reading, listening, viewing and playing commonly involve significant creativity, …
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica Litman
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. The role of copyright in the dissemination of scholarly research is in many ways curious, since neither authors nor the entities who compensate them for their authorship are motivated by the incentives supplied by the copyright system. Rather, copyright is a bribe to entice professional publishers and printers to reproduce and distribute scholarly works. As technology has spawned new methods of restricting access to works, and copyright law has enhanced copyright owners’ rights to …
War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica Litman
War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
No abstract provided.
The Story Of Sony V. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets The Boston Strangler, Jessica Litman
The Story Of Sony V. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets The Boston Strangler, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
No abstract provided.
The Sony Paradox, Jessica Litman
The Sony Paradox, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
Senator Orrin Hatch's introduction of the "Induce Act" in the summer of 2004 transformed the ongoing debate over the legality, morality and economics of peer-to-peer file sharing into a debate over Sony v. Universal Studios. Fans of the Sony decision insist that the legal rule announced in the case made the world safe for innovation. Sony's detractors read the decision more narrowly, and insist it has little application to the networked digital environment. The Supreme Court agreed to hear MGM v. Grokster in part to resolve the dispute about the meaning and scope of Sony, and will almost certainly revisit …