Law Commons^™

Untold Stories In South Africa: Creative Consequences Of The Rights-Clearing Culture For Documentary Filmmakers, Peter Jaszi, Sean Flynn

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This report summarizes research on the perceptions of South African documentary filmmakers about copyright clearance requirements and the effect of such requirements on their work. This work was performed in the context of a larger project exploring how lessons learned from “best practices” projects with documentary filmmakers in the U.S. can help their counterparts in other countries identify and overcome barriers to effective filmmaking posed by escalating
copyright clearance requirements.

Brief Of Eleven Law Professors And Aarp As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Bilski V. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218 (2010) (No. 08-964), Joshua Sarnoff, Lori Andrews, Andrew Chin, Ralph Clifford, Christine Farley, Sean Flynn, Debra Greenfield, Peter Jaszi, Charles Mcmanis, Lateef Mtima, Malla Pollack

Amicus Briefs

This is the brief filed by Joshua Sarnoff and Barbara Jones on behalf of various law professors and AARP in the Bilski v. Kappos case, discussing constitutional limits to the Patent power.

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States and its trading partners have adopted cultural and innovation policies under which the government grants one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. On a global basis, the reasons for doing so vary, but in the United States granting intellectual property rights has been justified as the principal means of promoting innovation and cultural progress. Until recently, however, few have questioned the wisdom of using such blunt policy instruments to promote progress in a wide range of industries in which the economics of innovation varies considerably.

Provisionally accepting the assumptions of the traditional economic case for intellectual …

Alternative Software Protection In View Of In Re Bilski, Charles Duan, Lauren Katzenellenbogen, James Skelley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) en banc decision, In re Bilski, redefined the standard for patenting processes including business methods and computer software. In Bilski, the Federal Circuit departed from the "useful, concrete, and tangible result" test it had established in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. SignatureFinancialGroup,Inc., which had been the standard for the past ten years. The Federal Circuit returned to a test articulated nearly 40 years ago by the Supreme Court in Gottschalk v. Benson, and clarified that State Street was "never intended to supplant the Supreme Court's test.", Under …

Memorial To Barbara Ringer, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The story goes that in 439 BC the retired consul Cincinnatus was summoned from the plow by the Senate and people of Rome. One more time, he saw the Republic through a time of particular peril, resigning office immediately afterwards to return to his rural retirement - to be transmuted into a timeless emblem of selfless probity. Episodes of this kind are even rarer in the annals of the U.S. civil service than in the Roman history. But I had the good fortune to be a witness to one such - Barbara Ringer's return to the Library of Congress in …

Statement Of Best Practices In Fair Use Of Dance-Related Materials Recommendations For Librarians, Archivists, Curators, And Other Collections Staff., Peter Jaszi

Copyright, Fair Use & Open Access

This Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use clarifies what librarians, archivists, curators, and others working with dance-related materials currently regard as a reasonable application of the Copyright Act’s fair use doctrine, where the use of copyrighted materials is essential to significant cultural missions and institutional goals.

Brief Of American Medical Association Et Al. As Amici Curiae In Support Of Plaintiffs’ Opposition To Defendants’ Motion To Dismiss And In Support Of Plaintiffs’ Motion For Summary Judgment, Association For Molecular Pathology V. U.S. Patent And Trademark Office, Joshua Sarnoff

Amicus Briefs

Amici seek to provide this Court with insight into the adverse effects on medical care and innovation that gene patents cause. These adverse effects could and should have been avoided, because genetic sequence and correlation patents – including all of the Myriad patents at issue – are not patentable inventions. These patents should never have been granted, and are not needed to create incentives for innovation.

The Myriad patents on breast cancer genes, mutations, and correlations between mutations and disease have a direct, severe, and adverse impact on members of the Amici medical organizations and all humanity. Myriad’s announced intention …

Submission Of American Patent And Health Law Professors On Australian Senate Community Affairs Committee Inquiry Into Gene Patents, Joshua Sarnoff

Congressional and Other Testimony

In response to the Australian Senate Community Affairs Committee’s Inquiry, the author and other American law professors submitted a brief to help the Senate Committee understand the current state of American law, and how the provision of patents on genetic technologies has and will continue to create serious problems for innovation, health care, and society at large.

The brief addresses the following subjects in regard to American law, which respond generally to the issues raised by the Committee’s inquiry. 1. The questionable need for patent rights in genetic sequences and other derivatives of naturally occurring materials, certain diagnostic discoveries, and …

Traditional Culture: A Step Forward For Protection In Indonesia, Peter A. Jaszi

Traditional Knowledge and Culture

Traditional Culture: A Step Forward for Protection in Indonesia is the culmination of research conducted as part of a group of scholars, journalists, and observers of the arts who made multiple trips to Central Java and Bali to look at the practice of certain “traditional” arts. These arts—Javanese wayang kulit, gamelan music, and batik, and Balinese dance, gamelan music, and ikat—have, like most Indonesian arts, historically operated without Intellectual Property (IP) regulation. Professor Jazsi met with artists, performers, and creators to discuss their concerns regarding the current state of their arts, and to explore possibilities for attribution and compensation for …

Brief Of Law Professors As Amici Curiae In Support Of The Petitioners, Harjo V. Pro-Football Inc., Victoria Phillips, Christine Haight Farley

Amicus Briefs

Amici are scholars at U.S. law schools whose research and teaching focus is intellectual property law, federal Indian law and constitutional law. Amici are concerned that the Court of Appeals decision below is inconsistent with the well settled law that laches does not apply to trademark cancellation claims, including those based on disparagement, because of the strong public interest in being free from the harms that disparagement causes.

These harms, which include damaging stereotyping and stigmatization, are serious and deserve protection no matter what private harm may be caused by delay to the trademark registrant. Further, precluding laches in these …

Convergence And Incongruence: Trademark Law And Icann's Introduction Of New Generic Top-Level Domains, Christine Haight Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper demonstrates how problematic convergences between Internet technology, the demands of a burgeoning e-market and trademark laws have created myriad issues in international governance of domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that governs internet's infrastructure, recently approved a new policy that would allow it to accept applications for additional generic top-level domains (gTLDs). What ICANN contemplates is a uniform system to approve generic top level domains that is expected to have profound implications. Under this new plan anyone can apply for a new gTLD at any time and it could be literally …

An Economic Justification For Open Access To Essential Medicine Patents In Developing Countries, Sean Flynn, Aidan Hollis, Mike Palmedo

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper offers an economic rationale for compulsory licensing of needed medicines in developing countries. The patent system is based on a trade-off between the “deadweight losses” caused by market power and the incentive to innovate created by increased profits from monopoly pricing during the period of the patent. However, markets for essential medicines under patent in developing countries with high income inequality are characterized by highly convex demand curves, producing large deadweight losses relative to potential profits when monopoly firms exercise profit-maximizing pricing strategies. As a result, these markets are systematically ill-suited to exclusive marketing rights, a problem which …

Is There Such A Thing As Postmodern Copyright?, Peter Jaszi

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Back in 1992, artist/entrepreneur Jeff Koons suffered a humiliating setback when the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit repudiated the suggestion that his reuse of objects from public culture might constitute a "fair use" defense to a copyright infringement claim. Fourteen years later, in a case that again involved a photographer's claim of copyright infringement, Koons triumphed in the same judicial forum. What had changed? This Article explores, in particular, one among a variety of alternative explanations: Koons may have caught the very leading edge of a profound wave of change in the social and cultural conceptualization …