Law Commons^™

Intellectual Property, Copyright, And Piracy: A Cultural View, Steven W. Staninger

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

Religion plays a major role in determining culture, and has an important effect on how laws are both written and enforced. The concept of intellectual property varies in different cultural traditions, and the dominant religion of a culture plays a major role in the how copyright is viewed and if it is respected or enforced. This paper briefly evaluates the cultures of three major religious and intellectual traditions to determine what, if any, effect their beliefs and values have on the respect for and enforcement of laws defending intellectual property and copyright.

Why Full Open Access Matters, Michael Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Perspective argues that when authors or funders pay the full cost of publishing a scientific or scholarly journal article in an open access journal, the terms of reuse should require only attribution to some combination of the author(s), the original publisher, and the funder. Publications that charge authors and their financial backers the full cost of publication and then add other reuse restrictions are not fully open access publications.

Why Full Open Access Matters, Michael W. Carroll

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This Perspective argues that when authors or funders pay the full cost of publishing a scientific or scholarly journal article in an open access journal, the terms of reuse should require only attribution to some combination of the author(s), the original publisher, and the funder. Publications that charge authors and their financial backers the full cost of publication and then add other reuse restrictions are not fully open access publications.

What Can I Do With This?: Deciphering Copyright And License Notices, Benjamin J. Keele, Frederick W. Dingledy

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Copyright Versus The Public Domain: Does The Constitution Allow Congress To Take Works From The Public Domain And Replace Those With Private Exclusive Rights?, Dennis D. Crouch, Ted Wright

Faculty Publications

This case arose out of U.S. treaty obligations to restore copyright to foreign authors who had failed to comply with the pre-1989 formalities in the law. Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreement Act (URAA) restores those copyrights and, in doing so, allowed thousands of widely disseminated works to be removed from the public domain. Petitioners challenge the law—arguing that the law overreaches constitutional authority and violates speech rights protected by the First Amendment.

Draft Of Product Design: The Misfit Of Intellectual Property Law - 2011, Wendy J. Gordon

Scholarship Chronologically

The collection of legal rights commonly labeled "intellectual property" does not reflect any comprehensive master plan. Indeed, the label itself does a disservice in suggesting a set of laws with some coherence, cohesion, or at least commonality. 1 In fact, the various laws governing so-called intellectual property have evolved to address disparate concerns, at different times, and through distinct legal tools. 2 As a result, the canvas of intellectual property laws looks more like a messy collage - with overlaps, unmarked or blank spaces, and jagged edges - than a neat landscape characterized by careful planning and harmony.

Fair Use Markets: On Weighing Potential License Fees, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Breyer began his classic article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, with a line from Lord Macaulay, that copyright is "'a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers.'" Our society and its law values both writers and readers; the law cannot favor one side too much without losing some of the benefits the other side could have contributed. Make reading expensive and it will decrease, and readers might substitute less socially productive behaviors to take its place.

Librarians Can Improve Law Journal Publishing, Benjamin J. Keele, Michelle Pearse

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Causing Infringement, Mark Bartholomew, Patrick F. Mcardle

Journal Articles

Recent appellate decisions reveal a chaotic contributory infringement doctrine that offers little direction to entrepreneurs trying to balance digital innovation with legal strictures. Aware of the problem, both the Supreme Court and legal scholars urge a modeling of contributory infringement on common law tort rules. But common law tort is an enormous subject. Without further instruction, the subject area is too vast and contradictory to offer a realistic template for reform. Even when the narrower body of tort law for secondary actors is consulted, there is still too much variation in the existing precedent to provide the necessary guidance. Instead …

Drawing A Line In The Sand: Copyright Law And New Museums, Megan M. Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

Over the last twenty years, audience attendance at museums, galleries, and performing arts institutions in the United States has decreased dramatically. Major museums and galleries are considering ways to add engaging and meaningful value to the user experience with technology, from incorporating user-generated content to creating multimedia installations billed as “collaborative” works.

In 2010, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea exhibition featured landscapes from 1850 to the present, as well as a sound installation composed by students and faculty in the Arts and Technology program at the University of Texas at Dallas, which played on …

Copyright And Research In Google Book Search, Benjamin J. Keele

Library Staff Publications

Many researchers—even trained professionals—often use the Google search engine to begin searches for information. Google’s many products enable researchers to search public websites, scholarly articles, and even patents. One vast area of information not yet thoroughly indexed by Google is print books. Google Book Search (also at times referred to as Google Books, Google Print and Google Library Project) is the company’s effort to digitize and index the world’s print literature.

Notice And Takedown, Here And Abroad, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been around for more than a dozen years now. Some of its provisions were just weird, such as the one that established sui generis protection for boat hull designs. Others have had a skeptical reception in the courts, like the anti-circumvention provisions that forbid certain forms of hacking through technological protections for copyrighted works.

But one DMCA provision that has proved popular in both the copyright community and the courts is the notice-and-takedown procedure codified at 17 U.S.C. § 512(c). When a copyright owner finds that some Internet user has illegally posted its copyrighted …

David Trager: Jurist, Jeffrey B. Morris

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Prehistory Of Fair Use, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

This article proceeds as follows: Part I begins with a brief summary of the fêted case Folsom v. Marsh and its place in the development of American copyright law. Folsom v. Marsh has been criticized for expanding copyright protection beyond acts of mere mechanical reproduction to include an abstract concept of the work’s value. Of course, this critique is premised on the belief that the scope of copyright prior to Folsom v. Marsh’s intervention was so narrow that it tolerated almost all secondary works. Part II exposes the frailty of this premise.

Specifically, Part II explores the foundation for the …

The Creativity Effect (With C. Sprigman), Christopher J. Buccafusco

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fair Use As A Matter Of Law, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

Courts have recently abandoned the centuries-old practice of construing fair use as an issue of fact for the jury. Fair use now stands as an issue of law for the judge. This change is threatening traditional contours of copyright law that protect fair-use speech. Courts, then, must reform their current construction of fair use by returning to its origins— fair use as a factual matter for the jury. Yet even if courts do construe fair use as a matter of fact, the question remains whether courts should ever decide fair use as a matter of law. To answer this question, …

Vogue Juridique & The Theory Choice Problem In The Debate Over Copyright Protection For Fashion Designs, Michael G. Bennett, Nick Buell, Jason Cetel, C. C. Perry

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Top Tens In 2010: Patent, Trademark, Copyright And Trade Secret Cases, Stephen M. Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This piece discusses notable intellectual property decisions in 2010 in the United States. Viewed across doctrinal lines, some interesting threads emerge. The scope of protection was at issue in each area, such as whether human genes and business methods are patentable, whether a product idea may be a trade secret, and where the constitutional limits on copyright legislation lie. Secondary liability remains widely litigated, as rights holders seek both deep pocket defendants and a means to cut off individual infringers. The courts applied slightly different standards as to the state of mind required for secondary liability. Many of the cases …

Will You Go To Jail For Copyright Infringement?, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

We’ve all seen it. Stick a movie in the DVD player, and up pops a scary message from law enforcement: if you infringe copyright, the feds will come after you. Indeed, this threat is so ubiquitous that it has worked its way into popular perception; as any copyright expert knows from cocktail party conversations, laypeople seem to view copyright infringement as mostly a criminal matter.

It’s certainly possible to go to jail for violating copyright law, as long as the violation is willful and involves specific kinds or amounts of infringement. And the good news for copyright owners is that …

Contracting Away Copyright Privileges, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

In copyright class, professors usually spend most of their time explaining the “public law” aspects of copyright – the exclusive rights that the law gives copyright holders (e.g., reproduction and public performance) and the privileges that the law gives to those who use copyrighted goods (e.g., fair use and first sale). But as they and their students know, many everyday encounters with copyrighted goods are governed not by this public law, but by the “private law” that sellers and buyers create through contracts.

Software provides the best example. If you somehow managed to legally purchase and install a computer program …

Post-Sale Restraints And Competitive Harm: The First Sale Doctrine In Perspective, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A post-sale restraint is a condition or contract provision that operates after a good has been sold. In antitrust law these restraints are roughly divided into two classes, “intrabrand” and “interbrand.” An intrabrand restraint limits the way a firm can distribute the restricted property. For example, resale price maintenance controls the price at which goods can be resold. Intrabrand nonprice restraints place other types of limits, such as the places from which goods can be sold, the uses for which they can be sold, and the identity of buyers. By contrast, an interbrand restraint limits a purchaser’s right to deal …

The Elephantine Google Books Settlement, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The genius - some would say the evil genius - of the proposed Google Books settlement was the way it fuses legal categories. The settlement raised important class action, copyright, and antitrust issues, among others. But just as an elephant is not merely a trunk plus legs plus a tail, the settlement was more than the sum of the individual issues it raised. These “issues” were really just different ways of describing a single, overriding issue of law and policy - a new way to concentrate an intellectual property industry.

In this essay, I argue for the critical importance of …

The Forgotten Right Of Fair Use, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

Free speech was once an integral part of copyright law; today it is all but forgotten. At common law, principles of free speech protected those who expressed themselves by using another's expression. Free speech determined whether speakers had infringed a copyright. To prevail on a copyright claim, then, a copyright holder would need to prove that the speaker’s use fell outside the scope of permissible speech - or in other words, that the use was not fair. Where uncertainty prevented that proof, fair use would protect speakers from the suppression of copyright. Today, however, all this has changed. Copyright has …

No Bitin’ Allowed: A Hip-Hop Copying Paradigm For All Of Us, Horace E. Anderson Jr.

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

It is long past time to reform the Copyright Act. The law of copyright in the United States is at one of its periodic inflection points. In the past, major technological change and major shifts in the way copyrightable works were used have rightly led to major changes in the law. The invention of the printing press prompted the first codification of copyright. The popularity of the player piano contributed to a reevaluation of how musical works should be protected. The dawn of the computer age led to an explicit expansion of copyrightable subject matter to include computer programs. These …

Copyright For Engineered Dna: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Christopher M. Holman

Faculty Works

The rapidly emerging field of synthetic biology has tremendous potential to address some of the most compelling challenges facing our planet, by providing clean renewable energy, nutritionally-enhanced and environmentally friendly agricultural products, and revolutionary new life-saving cures. However, leaders in the synthetic biology movement have voiced concern that biotechnology's current patent-centric approach to intellectual property is in many ways ill-suited to meet the challenge of synthetic biology, threatening to impede follow-on innovation and open access technology. For years, copyright and patent protection for computer software have existed side-by-side, the two forms of intellectual property complementing one another. Numerous academic commentators …

The Landscape Of Collective Management Schemes, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Collective management comes in many shapes and sizes. There is, however, an interesting definition proposed by WIPO: [T]he term “collective management” only refers to those forms of joint exercise of rights where there are truly “collectivized” aspects (such as tariffs, licensing conditions and distribution rules); where there is an organized community behind it; where the management is carried out on behalf of such a community; and where the organization serves collective objectives beyond merely carrying out the tasks of rights management . . . . In contrast, “rights clearance organizations” are those which perform joint exercise of rights without any …

The Google Book Settlement And The Trips Agreement, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The proposed amended settlement in the Google Book case has been the focus of numerous comments and critiques. This "perspective" reviews the compatibility of the proposed settlement with the TRIPS Agreement and relevant provisions of the Berne Convention that were incorporated into TRIPS, in particular the no-formality rule, the most-favored nation (MFN) clause, national treatment obligations, and the so-called three-step test.

Golan V. Holder: A Look At The Constraints Imposed By The Berne Convention, Daniel J. Gervais

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

One of the central issues in the Golan v. Holder litigation is the extent to which the United States had flexibility to tailor the protection of existing works that had fallen in the public domain when it joined the Berne Convention. This Essay argues that the Berne Convention obligates the United States as a Berne Union member to provide some degree of protection, but otherwise leaves wide latitude to set the conditions under which works in the public domain receive retroactive copyright protection. The Convention itself does not mandate that any particular level of protection be granted to such works …

Open Content Licensing: From Theory To Practice, Lucie Guibault, Christina Angelopoulos

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Although open content licences only account for a fraction of all copyright licences currently in force in the copyright world, the mentality change initiated by the open content movement is here to stay. To promote the use of open content licences, it is important to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of these licences, as well as to gain insight on the practical advantages and inconveniences of their use. This book assembles chapters written by renowned European scholars on a number of selected issues relating to open content licensing. It offers a comprehensive and objective study of the principles of open …

The Dmca And Repeat Infringers, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The recent agreement between big media companies and big Internet service providers (ISPs) concerning online copyright infringement has the law and technology world abuzz. ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to implement a system under which subscribers who repeatedly and illegally download copyrighted content will have their Internet access impeded and maybe even terminated.

This is big news, and it will probably receive more attention in this IP Viewpoints series. But the purpose of this column is to put this agreement in context, because much of what the companies have agreed to do appears to be …