Law Commons^™

Draft Of Fair Use As Market Failure: A Structural And Economic Analysis Of The Betamax Case And Its Predecessors - 1982, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

In the recent and much publicized Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America (Betamax) case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that persons who make videotapes of copyrighted television programs in the privacy of their homes should be considered to be copyright infringers. Basic to the court's reasoning was a misunderstanding of the "fair use" doctrine. Called "the most troublesome [doctrine] in the whole law of copyright," "fair use" renders noninfringing certain uses of copyrighted material that might technically violate the statute, but which do not violate the statute's basic purposes.

Leveling The Road From Borg-Warner To First National Maintenance: The Scope Of Mandatory Bargaining, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court's most recent effort to distinguish nonmandatory bargaining topics, First National Maintenance Corp. v. NLRB, ¹⁹ illustrates the Court's lack of clarity in this area and vindicates Cox's and Wellington's criticisms of the Court's approach in Borg-Warner. In First National Maintenance (F.N.M.), the Court held that an employer's decision "to shut down part of its business purely for economic reasons" was outside the scope of mandatory bargaining.²⁰ The Court could cite no evidence that Congress intended to prevent employee representatives from obtaining full effective bargaining over such decisions, nor did it articulate any general principle to …

Exercise Of Executive Discretion: A Study Of A Regional Office Of The Department Of Labor, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Writing for a recent symposium on empirical research in administrative law, Professor Paul Verkuil noted that such research "casts light on one of the dark corners of the law. The vast majority of administrative decisions are of the informal variety, meaning they take place outside the reach of generic administrative procedure acts and frequently outside the courts themselves."' We are only beginning to appreciate how vast is this dark corner and how varied the possible modes of illumination.

This essay casts some additional light into the corner by reporting on a study of the exercise of executive discretion by a …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Law: A Testable Model Of Strategic Behavior, Robert Cooter, Stephen G. Marks, Robert Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

Part I describes the framework of the model. Part II discusses the domination of psychological effects by tangible variables, which is the basis for comparative statics. Part III explains the table of predictions, and Part IV applies the predictions to externalities and rules for real-locating payoffs from trial. There is little mathematics in the text. The mathematical reader can refer to the Appendix for a brief presentation of our model, or to a companion paper on file with this Journal which develops the mathematics at length.

The Tax Benefit Of Bliss, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years the Supreme Court has limited its substantive decisions in federal income tax matters.^I For the most part, the handful of tax cases it has considered each year deal with collection, liens, or other issues peripheral to doctrinal development in the tax area.² The Court's recent decision in Diedrich v. Commissioner,³ however, dealt with a realization question involving net gifts; and its grant of certiorari consolidating the cases of Bliss Dairy, Inc. v. United States and Hillsboro National Bank v. Commissioner⁴ promises a continuing interest in substantive tax law. Bliss Dairy will enable the …

A Critique Of John Hart Ely's Quest For The Ultimate Constitutional Interpretivism Of Representative Democracy, James E. Fleming

Faculty Scholarship

Contemporary constitutional theory, John Hart Ely argues in Democracy and Distrust, is dominated by a false dichotomy between "clause-bound interpretivism" and "noninterpretivism." Clausebound interpretivists, such as the late Justice Hugo Black, believe that "judges deciding constitutional issues should confine themselves to enforcing norms that are stated or clearly implicit in the written Constitution" (p. 1). Noninterpretivists, such as the Supreme Court that produced the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade,2 contend that "courts should go beyond that set of references and enforce [substantive] norms that cannot be discovered within the four comers of the document" (p. 1). The genius of …

Abstract Of Gift Failure Versus Market Failure - 1982, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

Gifts and gift exchanges can serve a combination of economic, personal, social, and humanitarian ends. This article explores how intellectual products are unusually capable of serving these ends through gift relations, and suggests ways in which the law can assist in this process.

Notes Re Betamax - 1982, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

There's a lot of misunderstanding of by BX article. Some simplifying things: There are three types of "market failure" in copyright. The first inheres in the nonexhaustibil ity of the good; barring a right to post-dissemination control against copying, goods may be underproduced because potential users will refuse to pay for access, figuring they can get access to a friend's copy later for free or at lower cost than the creator would charoe. Thus. relying only o~ the physical control which lets i creato~ charge for the "first look", will (except where the look wont' make copying possible- the trade …

Managing Flood Risk: Technical Uncertainty In The National Flood Insurance Program, Michael S. Baram, J. Raymond Miyares

Faculty Scholarship

Congress established the National Flood Insurance Program ("NFIP")² to prevent flood damage and to provide relief after such damage has occurred. The NFIP is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency ("FEMA" or "Agency") ³ and has become a major influence on state and local land use regulation and a critical factor in private land use decisions across the nation.

This innovative program seeks to control the risk of flood damage by inducing local government to take land use control and other "police power" measures. It offers, as the inducement for such measures, the availability of federal flood insurance …

Mandatory Pku Screening: The Other Side Of The Looking Glass, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The challenge that PKU screening programs face is to be effective without sacrificing individual liberty. Most states have assumed that this is impossible, and have enacted mandatory PKU screening tests. It now appears that in fact voluntary screening for PKU can be effective. Accordingly, it seems appropriate to reexamine existing mandatory screening statutes to determine if we can replace government coercion with voluntary informed consent. Focus should be placed on the proper role of the government in screening, and on improving the consent process, and not on those few couples who withhold consent.

Utility And Rights, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

Two notions concerning the relation of rights to utilitarianism seem widely accepted, by both utilitarians and their critics. The first is that utilitarianism is hostile to the idea of moral rights. The second is that utilitarianism is capable of providing a normative theory about legal and other institutional rights. This chapter chiefly concerns the second thesis, and argues against it. But it also says something about the first. In previous writings I have challenged the first thesis, but here I shall suggest that it is sound. The upshot is that utilitarianism has a great deal of trouble accommodating rights.

Fair Use As Market Failure: A Structural And Economic Analysis Of The Betamax Case And Its Predecessors, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

In the recent and much publicized Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Sony Corp. of America (Betamax) case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that persons who make videotapes of copyrighted television programs in the privacy of their homes should be considered to be copyright infringers. Basic to the court's reasoning was a misunderstanding of the "fair use" doctrine. Called "the most troublesome [doctrine] in the whole law of copyright," "fair use" renders noninfringing certain uses of copyrighted material that might technically violate the statute, but which do not violate the statute's basic purposes.

The Emerging Stowaway: Patients' Rights In The 1980s, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

At one point in Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pyr of Nantucket, Pym, who has stowed away in the hold of a whaling vessel, believes he has been abandoned and that the hold will be his tomb. He expressed sensations of "extreme horror and dismay," and "the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded in as the prominent disasters to be encountered."

Developments In Banking Law: 1980-81, Dennis S. Aronowitz, Robert Volk

Faculty Scholarship

The years 1980 and 1981 were marked by a continuation and acceleration of change in the nation's financial institutions in general and in depository institutions in particular. Until recently, the banking and thrift industries have been unique in possessing the capacity to thrive in a changing economy without changing very significantly themselves. This phenomenon was largely attributable to a regulatory environment that protected depository institutions, minimizing competition from unregulated financial entities and imposing a form of organization that permitted institutions to thrive while conducting their activities in traditional ways. The advent of stubbornly high inflation and historically high interest rates …