Law Commons^™

Copyright Law: Essential Cases And Materials, Alfred Yen, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

The Global Trade Mark, Edward Lee

Edward Lee

This Article offers a proposal for WTO countries to adopt global IP rights for a special class of trademarks: famous or well-known marks. Well-known marks are well-suited for greater departure from the territoriality principle, given the transnational protections for well-known marks that already exist under the Paris Convention and TRIPS Agreement. This Article proposes creating a Global Trademark (GTM) for well-known marks, to be governed by one, uniform international law. The GTM will span all countries in the WTO. The GTM is inspired, in part, by the Community Trade Mark (CTM) in the European Union, the first truly transnational IP …

Paracopyright: A Peculiar Right To Control Access, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Copyright-Exempt Nonprofits: A Simple Proposal To Spur Innovation, Edward Lee

Edward Lee

New types of social networks have recently emerged that have facilitated the growth of a different kind of user-generated content: curation. The user finds various content from the Internet and then organizes or “curates” the content in a social network platform in a way that better serves the user’s purpose. For example, on Pinterest, users can “pin” content from the web onto their virtual “pinboards” that have topical categories of the users’ choice. The content typically involves a photograph (in reduced size) from the original web page that is then displayed on the user’s pinboard. Clicking on the photograph displays …

The Fight For The Future: How People Defeated Hollywood And Saved The Internet—For Now, Edward Lee

Edward Lee

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Breathing Space, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, copyright law's fair use and idea/expression doctrines are "built-in free speech safeguards" that establish a "definitional balance" between copyright and the First Amendment. Yet these "built-in free speech safeguards" are among the most uncertain and ill-defined doctrines in all of copyright law. If we accept the Supreme Court's statement that these doctrines play a critical role as First Amendment safety valves, it follows that the chilling effect of uncertainty in these doctrines has a constitutional dimension. Current copyright law doctrine, however, fails to take into account the potential chilling effect of copyright liability. This …

The Dmca And The Regulation Of Scientific Research, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

This Article analyzes the impact of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on academic encryption research. In this Article, I argue that for both legal and practical reasons academic encryption researchers should be able to conduct and publish certain types of research without significant fear of liability under the DMCA. However, the DMCA will have a non-trivial impact on the conditions under which such research takes place, and this impact can be expected to have several undesirable effects. More broadly, this impact highlights the problematic way in which the DMCA regulates scientific research in furtherance of intellectual property rights. The …

Copyright And Time: A Proposal, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

This Article argues that courts should adjust the scope of copyright protection by considering time as a factor in fair use analysis. More specifically, the longer it has been since a copyrighted work was published, the greater the scope of fair use should be. Up to now, most of the debate over the role of time in copyright law has focused on the controversial issue of copyright duration and term extension. By focusing so narrowly on the end of the copyright term, however, this debate has neglected the more significant issue of how time should affect the scope of copyright …