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Full-Text Articles in Law
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …