Law Commons^™

Digital Locks, Physical Objects And Immaterial Works, Pascale Chapdelaine

Law Publications

One of the greatest controversies in contemporary copyright law is the introduction of technological protection measures (TPMs) at the international and national level. By creating a separate parallel regime for digital copyright works, TPMs shifted the paradigm by redefining the rules of engagement of how users would increasingly access and experience digital copyright works.

In this chapter of my book Copyright User Rights, Contracts, and the Erosion of Property (Oxford University Press, 2017) I look at the implementation of TPMs as a regulatory tool from a multi-jurisdictional perspective. Initially mainly intended to protect copyright holders’ works made accessible online or …

Three Strikes For Copyright, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

How should copyright law change to take account of the internet? Should copyright expand to plug the internet’s leakiness and protect content that the internet would otherwise make more freely available? Or, should copyright relax its strict liability regime given diverse and productive reuses in the internet age and the benefits networked diffusion provides users and second-generation creators? Answering these questions depends on what we think copyright is for and how it is used and confronted by creators and audiences. In a new article studying these questions in the very focused setting of Wikipedia articles about baseball and baseball players …

Section 108 Of Title 17: A Discussion Document Of The Register Of Copyrights, Chris Weston, Aurelia J. Schultz, Emily M. Lanza, Michelle Choe, Karyn Temple Claggett

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The objective of the discussion document is: to review the issues raised over the past decade of revision work; to outline the Office’s current views and proposals on the various revision issues; and to present and explain model statutory language for a new section 108. Although the model statutory language should not be seen as the Office’s final view on section 108, the Office believes that it is important to provide a more concrete framework for further discussion. Additionally, the Discussion Document includes copious illustrative examples of how the Office envisions the proposals might work in practice.

CONCLUSION

Libraries, archives, …

Who Owns Our Ancestors Voices? Tribal Claims To Pre-72 Sound Recordings, Trevor Reed

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

A familiar story is told in Indian Country: a researcher arrives on a Native American reservation and begins recording ceremonial songs and oral histories; years later tribal members find, often to their horror, that these sensitive materials are available for sale, download, or streaming to the public. This scenario aptly describes the life of numerous sound recordings made on federally recognized Indian reservations prior to 1972, whose ownership status remains uninterrogated due to the complex overlap and ambiguities of copyright and federal Indian law. Yet recently, owing to an increased sense of self-determination and autonomy, Native American tribes have begun …

U.S. State Copyright Laws: Challenge And Potential, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

With copyright law in the United States lying primarily in the realm of federal law, the laws of the U.S. states concerning copyright do not typically attract significant attention from scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. Some recent events have drawn attention to state copyright laws – for example, litigation against a satellite radio provider for infringement of state common-law public performance rights in pre-1972 sound recordings. However, in general, state copyright laws remain largely in the shadow of federal copyright law, and state law is typically not viewed as a particularly useful vehicle for pursuing the policies that copyright law …

The Role Of The Author In Copyright, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Two encroachments, one long-standing, the other a product of the digital era, cramp the author’s place in copyright today. First, most authors lack bargaining power; the real economic actors in the copyright system have long been the publishers and other exploiters to whom authors cede their rights. These actors may advance the figure of the author for the moral luster it lends their appeals to lawmakers, but then may promptly despoil the creators of whatever increased protections they may have garnered. Second, the advent of new technologies of creation and dissemination of works of authorship not only threatens traditional revenue …

Functionality Screens, Christopher Buccafusco, Mark A. Lemley

Articles

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and design patents are much easier to obtain than utility patents, and they often last much longer. Accordingly, to prevent claimants from obtaining “backdoor patents,” the other IP doctrines must screen out functionality. As yet, however, courts and scholars have paid little systematic attention to the ways in which these functionality screens operate across and within IP law.We have four tasks in this …

Testing Tarnishment In Trademark And Copyright Law: The Effect Of Pornographic Versions Of Protected Marks And Works Of Pornographic Versions Of Protected Marks And Work, Christopher Buccafusco, Paul J. Heald, Wen Bu

Articles

Federal and state law both provide a cause of action against inappropriate and unauthorized uses that ‘tarnish’ a trademark. Copyright owners also articulate fears of ‘tarnishing’ uses of their works in their arguments against fair use and for copyright term extension. The validity of these concerns rests on an empirically testable hypothesis about how consumers respond to inappropriate unauthorized uses of works. In particular, the tarnishment hypothesis assumes that consumers who are exposed to inappropriate uses of a work will find the tarnished work less valuable afterwards. This Article presents two experimental tests of the tarnishment hypothesis, focusing on unauthorized …

Fashion's Function In Intellectual Property Law, Christopher Buccafusco, Jeanne C. Fromer

Articles

Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has often been perplexing. Much of this difficulty arises from an unclear understanding of the nature of functionality in fashion design. This Article proposes a robust account of fashion’s function. It argues that aspects of garment designs are functional not only when they affect the physical or technological performance of a garment but also when they affect the perception of the wearer’s body. Generally, clothes are not designed or chosen simply …

Kernochan Center News - Summer 2017, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

No abstract provided.

Kernochan Center News - Spring 2017, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

No abstract provided.

Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

Our copyright laws encourage authors to create new works and communicate them to the public, because we hope that people will read the books, listen to the music, see the art, watch the films, run the software, and build and inhabit the buildings. That is the way that copyright promotes the Progress of Science. Recently, that not-very-controversial principle has collided with copyright owners’ conviction that they should be able to control, or at least collect royalties from, all uses of their works. A particularly ill-considered manifestation of this conviction is what I have decided to call copy-fetish. This is the …