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Full-Text Articles in Law

Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2007

Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Let me begin with something that Jamie Boyle wrote ten years ago in Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person's Guide:' Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without copying. The relative bundles of rights of the user and the owner achieve their balance based on a set of economic and technical assumptions about the meaning of normal use. For our purposes, I would like to generalize this as something that Boyle might have written if he had not in that …


Trademark Law And Status Signaling: Tattoos For The Privileged, Jeffrey L. Harrison Jan 2007

Trademark Law And Status Signaling: Tattoos For The Privileged, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

The motivations for buying a good or service are highly complex. At the most basic level, people buy goods because of what the goods do or because of the aesthetic elements they embody. More technically, buyers derive utility from the "functional" quality of these goods. Another motivation relates to what the goods "say" about the buyer. Here, the good is a signaling device. Signaling is not new, of course, and can indicate anything from social class to political leanings.

This Essay addresses the issue of whether it should be public policy to subsidize this type of person-to-person status signaling. This …


Compulsory Licensing Vs. Private Negotiations In Peer-To-Peer File Sharing, Michael Botein, Edward Samuels Jan 2007

Compulsory Licensing Vs. Private Negotiations In Peer-To-Peer File Sharing, Michael Botein, Edward Samuels

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.


Why The Customer Isn’T Always Right: Producer-Based Limits On Rights Accretion In Trademark, Rebecca Tushnet Jan 2007

Why The Customer Isn’T Always Right: Producer-Based Limits On Rights Accretion In Trademark, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this article the author responds to James Gibson’s article Risk Aversion and Rights Accretion in Intellectual Property Law, which offers valuable insights into the extra-judicial dynamics that have contributed to the seemingly unending expansion of copyright and trademark rights over the past few decades. Her response focuses on the trademark side of that expansion. The theoretical basis for granting trademark rights is that, if consumers perceive that a mark or other symbol indicates that a single source is responsible for a product or service—whether through physical production, licensing, sponsorship, or other approval—then the law should give effect to …


Lawful Personal Use, Jessica D. Litman Jan 2007

Lawful Personal Use, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Despite having sued more than 20,000 of its customers,2 the recording industry wants the world to know that it has no complaint with personal use. Copyright lawyers of all stripes agree that copyright includes a free zone in which individuals may make personal use of copyrighted works without legal liability.3 Unlike other nations, though, the United States hasn't drawn the borders of its lawful personal use zone by statute.4 Determining the circumstances under which personal use of copyrighted works will be deemed lawful is essentially a matter of inference and analogy, and differently striped copyright lawyers will differ vehemently on …


The Social Costs Of Property Rights In Broadcast (And Cable) Signals, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Jan 2007

The Social Costs Of Property Rights In Broadcast (And Cable) Signals, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

The use of property as a regulatory mechanism in the telecommunications sector is hardly novel. Since the early twentieth century, policy makers and regulators in the United States have experimented with different mechanisms for allocating private rights in the radio spectrum. In 1959, Ronald Coase proposed that the FCC auction rights in the broadcast spectrum and convert broadcast licenses into tradable commodities. However, it was not until very recently that the FCC implemented Coase's idea. At least part of the reason for the long delay in implementing this seemingly efficient mechanism lay in the public nature of broadcasting and the …