Law Commons^™

Price Discrimination, Personal Use And Piracy: Copyright Protection Of Digital Works, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The growth of digital information transmission worries copyright holders who fear the new technology threatens their profits because of greater piracy and widespread sharing of digital works. They have responded with proposals for expanded protection of digital works. Specifically, they seek restrictions on personal use rights regarding digital works provided by the fair use and first sale doctrines. The proposed changes in the allocation of property rights to digital information significantly affect the ability of copyright holders to practice price discrimination. Broader user rights make discrimination more difficult; broader producer rights make discrimination easier. I argue that more price discrimination …

A Response To Mr. Y'Barro's Reply, L. Ray Patterson

Scholarly Works

Copyrightists would do themselves -- and the law -- a great favor by joining in the search for the proper solution without focussing on how to use copyright law to enhance guaranteed profits, even though the effort entails the abuse of constitutional rights and corruption of the learning process. They should accept the fact that first amendment protections are not embedded in copyright law; that the public interest is an important component of copyright law; and that the consumer/competitor distinction is important for the proper administration of copyright law.

Regents Guide To Understanding Copyright And Educational Fair Use, L. Ray Patterson

Scholarly Works

The Regents Guide to Copyright and Educational Fair Use, adopted by the Regents of the University System of Georgia, is the most comprehensive statement on copyright and educational fair use ever adopted by a major university system. The purpose of this comment is to provide a brief background for readers and users of the document.

The Regents Copyright Committee, appointed by Dr. James Muyskens, Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University System of Georgia, continues in existence and has eight members, who represent a cross-section of the university community, and include administrators (two of whom are lawyers), faculty (two of …

Promulgating Requirements For Admission To Prosecute Patent Applications, Michelle J. Burke, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

Among federal agencies, the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office is unique in its ability to require attorneys to submit to special requirements, such as passing a six hour examination, before being permitted to practice before it in patent cases. Indeed, the Supreme Court has held that an individual so admitted to practice before the PTO need not comply with state requirements otherwise applicable to those practicing law.

The first part of this article discusses how this requirement came to be. It then discusses how the PTO determines whether an individual is fit to sit for the patent examination, focusing …

Computer Ram 'Copies:' Hit Or Myth? Historical Perspectives On Caching As A Microcosm Of Current Copyright Concerns, I. Trotter Hardy

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Response To David Nimmer, ‘Copyright In The Dead Sea Scrolls: Authorship And Originality’, Martha Woodmansee

Faculty Publications

Response to David Nimmer's article "Authorship and Originality."

On The Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity, Martha Woodmansee

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of The Personal Use Principle Under Copyright Law, Hsin-Chih Cheng

LLM Theses and Essays

Personal use is when an individual uses a copyrighted work for private purposes, such as learning or entertainment. Personal use is a right given in the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution, however, an issue arises when the individual wants to make a copy of the copyrighted work. New technologies like photocopying and videotaping make this issue more prominent today. Some copyright owners think that the individual’s copying for private use is harmful to their potential market and they argue for compensation. Does the individual have the right under the personal use principle to reproduce the copyrighted work for private …

Fair Use In American And Continental Laws, Omar M.A. Obeidat

LLM Theses and Essays

Intellectual property, unlike tangible property, does not exclusively occupy one place at a designated time. Instead, intellectual property is composed of information which can be reproduced or used in multiple places at any given time. This fundamental difference between intellectual and tangible property is reflected in the legal provisions that regulate these types of property. There are two dominant theories that justify the legal protection of intellectual property: the individualistic European approach, and the commercial Anglo-American approach. Under the European approach, the protection of the creation is a natural right guaranteed to the author. In other words, natural law guarantees …

Who's Afraid Of Functional Claims - Reforming The Patent Law's 112, 6 Jurisprudence, Mark Weston Janis

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Product Differentiation Through Space And Time: Some Antitrust Policy Issues, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property In The Era Of The Creative Computer Program, Ralph D. Clifford

Faculty Publications

Computer scientists, using artificial intelligence techniques such as neural networks, are enabling computers to independently create works that appear to qualify for federal intellectual property protection. In at least one case, the creator of this kind of program has registered its output, a series of musical compositions, under his name as author with United States Copyright Office. Whether the output of the computer satisfies the statutory and constitutional requisites for protection is questionable, however. The author of this Article argues that the output of an autonomously creative computer program cannot be protected under the current copyright and patent laws. Further, …

Fair Use Of Copyrighted Software, Stephen M. Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This article discusses how the functional aspects of software should be accounted for in applying copyright's fair use doctrine. Copyright provides an incentive for authors to produce creative works, by giving them an exclusive right to make and distribute copies of their work. The fair use doctrine permits others to make copies where strict enforcement of the exclusive right would be counter-productive. Fair use often permits use of copyrighted material where the author suffers no loss, or where the author might deny permission for reasons counter to copyright's goals of fostering creativity and innovation. Parts II and III apply this …

Protection Of Famous Trademarks In Japan And The United States, Kenneth L. Port

Faculty Scholarship

The concepts of trademark jurisprudence in Japan and the United States differ drastically. This difference is apparent in many aspects of trademark protection in both countries and is most evident in the treatment of famous marks. Although Japan and the United States share elements of trademark law that cause some observers to claim that Japan is legally the fifty-first State, the conceptual differences at the foundation of trademark law in each country are so significant that such a claim seems inaccurate and misleading.

Protecting Folklore Of Indigenous Peoples: Is Intellectual Property The Answer?, Christine Farley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

What can the Navajos do to prevent non-Navajos from using Navajo rug patterns to produce rugs overseas using cheap material and labor, thereby undercutting the Navajos themselves in a market for their famous rugs? What can the Australian Aboriginal peoples do when their sacred and secret imagery is reporduced on carpets they did not make, and sold to non-Aboriginals, who will inevitably walk on them? Do these communities have any legal rights to these pieces of their culture? Does the law provide any means for them to take back their culture or to prevent further poaching?https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=923410

Ulysses And The Ten Years War: A Survey Of Missed Opportunities, Robert Spoo

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Reexamination: Toward A Viable Administrative Revocation System For U.S. Patent Law, Mark D. Janis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Foucault In Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, And Hardwired Censors, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

This is an essay about law in cyberspace. I focus on three interdependent phenomena: a set of political and legal assumptions that I call the jurisprudence of digital libertarianism, a separate but related set of beliefs about the state's supposed inability to regulate the Internet, and a preference for technological solutions to hard legal issues on-line. I make the familiar criticism that digital libertarianism is inadequate because of its blindness towards the effects of private power, and the less familiar claim that digital libertarianism is also surprisingly blind to the state's own power in cyberspace. In fact, I argue that …

On The Economics Of Copyright, Restitution And 'Fair Use': Systemic Versus Case-By-Case Responses To Market Failure, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The 'public goods' characteristics possess by intangible works of authorship and invention present the basic market failure problem usually relied on to justify intellectual property rights. What is ordinarily less emphasized is that such market failure is no more than half of the prerequisite for an economically desirable copyright or patent system: another requisite condition is that there be less costly market imperfections after intellectual property is instituted than there would have been in the absence of the intellectual property regime. Intellectual property rights are best justified in the presence of "asymmetric market conditions", that is where (1) in the …

Muddy Waters: Infringement Analysis After "Markman" And "Warner-Jenkinson", Clyde F. Willian, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Protecting A Piece Of American Folklore: The Example Of The Gusset, Jo Carrillo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Language Of The Law: The Special Role And Trademarks, Trade Names, And Other Trade Emblems., John T. Cross

Faculty Scholarship

In 1979, the United States Supreme Court decided Friedman v. Rogers, a case involving a First Amendment challenge to a Texas statute that prohibited optometrists from practicing under an assumed trade name. Although an important case, Friedman certainly is not one of the major milestones of First Amendment jurisprudence. Prior Supreme Court decisions established that although commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment, government may regulate speech to prevent deception or confusion. Because a majority in Friedman found a possibility of deception, the Court held that Texas could constitutionally prohibit the use of a trade name. Friedman becomes much …

Deregulatory Takings, Breach Of The Regulatory Contract, And The Telecommunications Act Of 1996, William J. Baumol, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Professors Baumol and Merrill reply to Deregulatory Takings and Breach of the Regulatory Contract, published last year in this Review, which argued that the price incumbents may charge potential competitors for bottleneck facilities under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 should be based not on forward-looking costs but on historical costs. Professors Baumol and Merrill contend that pricing with reference to historical costs would depart from the principles called for by economic analysis for efficient pricing and they further argue that neither the Takings Clause nor the regulatory contract precludes the use of forward-looking costs in setting prices. If a taking …

Copyright And International Trips Compliance (Symposium: Fifth Annual Conference On International Intellectual Property Law And Policy), Shira Perlmutter, Jerome H. Reichman, Whitmore Gray

Other Publications

MS. PERLMUTTER: We have heard today about copyright in two different regions of the world, in Central and Eastern Europe' and in China. In recent years there has been an increasing convergence in the substance of national laws in different regions of the world. One of the major factors has been the TRIPs Agreement? I will focus on the current efforts toward implementing the TRIPs Agreement, and this will be a procedure-oriented talk.

Fair Use, Efficiency, And Corrective Justice, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legitimacy And The Useful Arts, Craig Allen Nard

Faculty Publications

The fundamental question this Article addresses is who should be primarily responsible for making patent validity determinations: the courts5 or the Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”)?6 Which entity *517 would best serve the constitutional goal of promoting the progress of the useful arts?

Some Reflections On Copyright Management Systems And Laws Designed To Protect Them, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Copyright management systems (CMS)—technologies that enable copyright owners to regulate reliably and charge automatically for access to digital works—are the wave of the very near future. The advent of digital networks, which make copying and distribution of digital content quick, easy, and undetectable, has provided the impetus for CMS research and development. CMS are premised on the concept of "trusted systems" or "secure digital envelopes" that protect copyrighted content and allow access and subsequent copying only to the extent authorized by the copyright owner. Software developers are testing prototype systems designed to detect, prevent, count, and levy precise charges for …

Genomic Patents And Product Development Incentives, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

Patents on human genetic information have been controversial among different groups for different reasons. The purpose of a patent system is to motivate the commercial development of new technologies; it is thus unsurprising that those who have fundamental misgivings about commercial biotechnology would oppose gene patents. More intriguing is the controversy over gene patenting among those who welcome the commercial development of biotechnology products by private firms. While many proponents of commercial biotechnology assert that gene patents are essential to motivate product development, some have expressed more nuanced views, endorsing patents under some circumstances and condemning them as unnecessary or …

An Artist's Privilege, Niels Schaumann

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines visual art in light of the letter and the spirit of the Constitution's Copyright Clause and the Copyright Act of 1976 (“Act”) and concludes that artists should have the freedom to copy works, not only of popular culture, but of all kinds. In other words, people creating art should be permitted to copy anything and everything. This is not to suggest that copyright serves no purpose: destroying the copyright edifice merely to protect the ability of certain artists to create would be dangerous and foolhardy. Practical limitations on an artist's privilege to copy can be imposed to …

Marketing Software In Brazil: Stragegic Planning In A Changing Economic And Legal Environment, Susan T. Craighead

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis examines globalization and strategic planning in the context of the marketing and distribution of software in Brazil. It includes a discussion of strategic choices, along with relevant laws, available to a company planning to market software in Brazil.