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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Right Of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.
The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores …
Commercial Speech, Commercial Use, And The Intellectual Property Quagmire, Jennifer E. Rothman
Commercial Speech, Commercial Use, And The Intellectual Property Quagmire, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
The commercial speech doctrine in First Amendment jurisprudence has frequently been criticized and is recognized as a highly contested, problematic and shifting landscape. Despite the compelling critique within constitutional law scholarship more broadly, Intellectual Property (“IP”) law has not only embraced the differential treatment of commercial speech, but has done so in ways that disfavor a much broader swath of speech than traditional commercial speech doctrine allows. One of the challenges for courts, litigants, and scholars alike is that the term “commercial” is used to mean multiple things, even within the same body of IP law. In this Article, I …
The Semiotics Of Film In Us Supreme Court Cases, Jessica Silbey, Meghan Hayes Slack
The Semiotics Of Film In Us Supreme Court Cases, Jessica Silbey, Meghan Hayes Slack
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter explores the treatment of film as a cultural object among varied legal subject matter in US Supreme Court jurisprudence. Film is significant as an object or industry well beyond its incarnation as popular media. Its role in law – even the highest level of US appellate law – is similarly varied and goes well beyond the subject of a copyright case (as a moving picture) or as an evidentiary proffer (as a video of a criminal confession). This chapter traces the discussion of film in US Supreme Court cases in order to map the wide-ranging and diverse relations …
An Intersystemic View Of Intellectual Property And Free Speech, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian
An Intersystemic View Of Intellectual Property And Free Speech, Mark Bartholomew, John Tehranian
Journal Articles
Intellectual property regimes operate in the shadow of the First Amendment. By deeming a particular activity as infringing, the law of copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity all limit communication. As a result, judges and lawmakers must delicately balance intellectual property rights with expressive freedoms. Interestingly, each intellectual property regime strikes the balance between ownership rights and free speech in a dramatically different way. Despite a large volume of scholarship on intellectual property rights and free speech considerations, this Article represents the first systematic effort to detail, analyze, and explain the divergent evolution of expression-based defenses in copyright, trademark, …
Best Intentions: Reconsidering Best Practices Statements In The Context Of Fair Use And Copyright Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
Best Intentions: Reconsidering Best Practices Statements In The Context Of Fair Use And Copyright Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
Private ordering is increasingly playing a role in determining the scope of intellectual property rights both as a de facto and a de jure matter. In this essay, I consider the best practices movement and its efforts to use private ordering to limit the scope and enforcement of copyright law. Best practices statements in the copyright context establish voluntary guidelines for what should be deemed fair uses of others’ copyrighted works. I identify some of the de facto successes of the best practices movement, but also raise a number of concerns about the project. As I have discussed elsewhere, the …
Liberating Copyright: Thinking Beyond Free Speech, Jennifer E. Rothman
Liberating Copyright: Thinking Beyond Free Speech, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
Scholars have often turned to the First Amendment to limit the scope of ever-expanding copyright law. This approach has mostly failed to convince courts that independent review is merited and has offered little to individuals engaged in personal rather than political or cultural expression. In this Article, I consider the value of an alternative paradigm using the lens of substantive due process and liberty to evaluate users’ rights. A liberty-based approach uses this other developed body of constitutional law to demarcate justifiable personal, identity-based uses of copyrighted works. Uses that are essential for mental integrity, intimacy promotion, communication, or religious …
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Rankings, Reductionism, And Responsibility, Frank Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
After discussing how search engines operate, and sketching a normative basis for regulation of the rankings they generate, this piece proposes some minor, non-intrusive legal remedies for those who claim that they are harmed by search engine results. Such harms include unwanted (but high-ranking) results relating to them, or exclusion from high-ranking results they claim they are due to appear on. In the first case (deemed inclusion harm), I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk to the hyperlink directing web users to them, which would lead to the complainant's own comment on …
The Rehnquist Court And The Groundwork For Greater First Amendment Scrutiny Of Intellectual Property, Mark P. Mckenna
The Rehnquist Court And The Groundwork For Greater First Amendment Scrutiny Of Intellectual Property, Mark P. Mckenna
Journal Articles
This contribution to the Washington University School of Law conference on the Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment addresses the Rehnquist Court's view of the role of the First Amendment in intellectual property cases. It argues that, while the Rehnquist Court was not eager to find a conflict between intellectual property laws and the First Amendment, there is reason to believe that it set the stage for greater First Amendment scrutiny of intellectual property protections. At the very least, the Court left that road open to future courts, which might be inclined to view intellectual property more skeptically.
Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
Initial Interest Confusion: Standing At The Crossroads Of Trademark Law, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
While the benchmark of trademark infringement traditionally has been a demonstration that consumers are likely to be confused by the use of a similar or identical trademark to identify the goods or services of another, a court-created doctrine called initial interest confusion allows liability for trademark infringement solely on the basis that a consumer might initially be interested, attracted, or distracted by a competitor's, or even a non-competitor's, product or service. Initial interest confusion is being used with increasing frequency, especially on the Internet, to shut down speech critical of trademark holders and their products and services, to prevent comparative …
The Constitutional Failing Of The Anticybersquatting Act, Ned Snow
The Constitutional Failing Of The Anticybersquatting Act, Ned Snow
Faculty Publications
Eminent domain and thought control are occurring in cyberspace. Through the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), the government transfers domain names from domain-name owners to private parties based on the owners' bad-faith intent. The owners receive no just compensation. The private parties who are recipients of the domain names are trademark holders whose trademarks correspond with the domain names. Often the trademark holders have no property rights in those domain names: trademark law only allows mark holders to exclude others from making commercial use of their marks; it does not allow mark holders to reserve the marks for their own …
Classroom Lecture For Copyright Law, Wendy J. Gordon
Classroom Lecture For Copyright Law, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
The differences between direct, vicarious and contributory liability, Section 512 in related matters. Alright, now let's move on to the next question, which is criminal liability. You read some material on that. And the basic lessons that I want you to take from the material are the following. First, notice that federal copyright law does not impose criminal liability easily as ordinary laws of tangible property do. And I think that that's a good thing. Remember that guy in Les Miserables who's pursued for stealing a loaf of bread. Stealing in the sense of copying one song would not make …
Fair Use In American And Continental Laws, Omar M.A. Obeidat
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 …
Cd-Rom Symposium Transcript Two - 1992, Wendy J. Gordon
Cd-Rom Symposium Transcript Two - 1992, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
MR. METALITZ: I think the point there is that amputation of authorship is really kind of an artifact of the registration process. You wouldn't be that concerned.
Notes On Natural Rights Of Intellectual Property - 1985, Wendy J. Gordon
Notes On Natural Rights Of Intellectual Property - 1985, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
In many areas courts are giving new intellectual property rights for reasons they largely leave unarticulated. Noncopyrightable stock averages are being protected by state law. Merchandising emblems and symbols are being protected in non-trademark contexts by trademark law. The right of publicity has expanded to such an extent that judges and commentators al iKe bewail the imminent dangers to the First Amendment caused by the imprecision of the new right’s boundaries. Even in federal copyright law, which explicitly says that facts and ideas should be free of protection, and where inadvertent copying is supposed to be as actionable as intentional …