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Full-Text Articles in Law
Discovering Ebay's Impact On Copyright Injunctions Through Empirical Evidence, Matthew Sag, Pamela Samuelson
Discovering Ebay's Impact On Copyright Injunctions Through Empirical Evidence, Matthew Sag, Pamela Samuelson
Faculty Articles
This Article reports on new empirical evidence discrediting the widely held view that judges have resisted applying the Supreme Court’s teachings in eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. about injunctive relief in copyright cases. That 2006 patent law decision ruled that courts should not automatically issue injunctions upon a finding of infringement; instead, plaintiffs must prove their entitlement to injunctive relief. eBay had a seismic impact on patent litigation and greatly reduced the threat that small infringements could be leveraged into billion-dollar settlements. Yet prior empirical work, at least one major copyright law treatise, and many articles assert that eBay had …
Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Faculty Scholarship
To prove copyright infringement, a plaintiff must convince a jury that the defendant copied from the plaintiff’s work rather than independently creating it. To prove copying, especially cases involving music, it’s common for plaintiffs and their experts to argue that the similarities between the parties’ creative works are so great that it is simply implausible that the defendant’s work was created without copying from the plaintiff’s work. Unfortunately, in its present form, the argument is mathematically illiterate: It assumes, without any underlying evidence, that the experts know or could reasonably estimate how likely it is that a song with similarity …
There's No Such Thing As Independent Creation, And It's A Good Thing, Too, Christopher Buccafusco
There's No Such Thing As Independent Creation, And It's A Good Thing, Too, Christopher Buccafusco
Faculty Scholarship
Independent creation is the foundation of U.S. copyright law. A work is only original and, thus, copyrightable to the extent that it is independently created by its author and not copied from another source. And a work can be deemed infringing only if it is not independently created. Moreover, independent creation provides the grounding for all major theoretical justifications for copyright law. Unfortunately, the doctrine cannot bear the substantial weight that has been foisted upon it. This Article argues that copyright law’s independent creation doctrine rests on a set of discarded psychological assumptions about memory, copying, and creativity. When those …