Law Commons^™

Antibiotic Resistance, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

Ten years ago, when I wrote War Stories,' copyright lawyers were fighting over the question whether unlicensed personal, noncommercial copying, performance or display would be deemed copyright infringement. I described three strategies that lawyers for book publishers, record labels, and movie studios had deployed to try to assure that the question was answered the way they wanted it to be. First, copyright owners were labeling all unlicensed uses as "piracy" on the ground that any unlicensed use might undermine copyright owners' control. That epithet helped to obscure the difference between unlicensed uses that invaded defined statutory exclusive rights and other …

The Future Of Cybertravel: Legal Implications Of The Evasion Of Geolocation, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Although the Internet is valued by many of its supporters particularly because it both defies and defeats physical borders, these important attributes are now being exposed to attempts by both governments and private entities to impose territorial limits through blocking or permitting access to content by Internet users based on their geographical location—a territorial partitioning of the Internet. One of these attempts, for example, is the recent Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) proposal in the United States. This article, as opposed to earlier literature on the topic discussing the possible virtues and methods of erecting borders in cyberspace, focuses on …

Taxing Facebook Code: Debugging The Tax Code And Software, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

This article sets out to analyze both intellectual property laws and tax systems as applied to computer software. It analyzes software within intellectual property's established doctrinal framework, a difficult task due to the fact that software can encompass some combination of the traits of copyrights, trade dress, patents, and trade secrets. It then examines both the federal and state tax systems governing software. It shows that fitting software within current tax schemes presents unique challenges, as software contains both tangible and intangible elements, is subject to varying intellectual property protections, and can be delivered through various media. The article argues …

Patent Litigation And The Internet, Samantha Zyontz, John R. Allison, Emerson H. Tiller, Tristan Bligh

Faculty Scholarship

Patent infringement litigation has not only increased dramatically in frequency over the past few decades,¹ but also has also seen striking growth in both stakes and cost.² Although a relatively rich literature has added much to our understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of patent litigation during the past two decades,³ many interesting questions remain inadequately addressed. The nuances of and trends in patent litigation in different technology fields and industries, for example, are still understudied.⁴ Litigation of patents on new technologies has likewise received a dearth of attention. Here we seek to help begin …

Downstream Copyright Infringers, Yvette Joy Liebesman

All Faculty Scholarship

The advent of on-line music sales has been a boon to the recording industry as well as for musicians and the general public. Previously unknown artists have found new avenues to showcase their work, and consumers have easy access to an enormous variety of musical genres.

Yet an unintended consequence of the ability to sell songs through internet downloads is a novel, and until now, unnoticed way to infringe on copyrights - which, unless remedied, could lead to new classes of defendants never contemplated or desired to be ensnared in the Copyright Act’s protections for artists, musicians and authors. Unlike …

The In Rem Forfeiture Of Copyright-Infringing Domain Names, Andrew Sellars

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2010, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division of the Department of Homeland Security began "Operation In Our Sites," an enforcement sweep targeted towards websites allegedly dealing in counterfeit goods and copyright-infringing files. The operation targeted the websites by proceeding in rem against their respective domain names. For websites targeted for copyright infringement, ICE Agents used recently-expanded copyright forfeiture remedies passed under the 2008 PRO-IP Act, providing no adversarial hearing prior to the websites being removed, and only a probable cause standard of proof.

This Paper examines three specific harms resulting from Operation In Our Sites, and …

Acta And The Specter Of Graduated Response, Annemarie Bridy

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This short paper, prepared for a workshop on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Public Interest at American University’s Washington College of Law, considers the draft Internet provisions of ACTA in the context of concerns raised in the media that the treaty will require signatories to mandate graduated response regimes (à la France’s controversial HADOPI system) for online copyright enforcement. Although the Consolidated Text of ACTA, released in late April, confirms that mandatory graduated response is off the table for the treaty’s negotiators, the treaty in its current form both accommodates and promotes the adoption of graduated response. Moreover, …

Proving Fair Use: Burden Of Proof As Burden Of Speech, Ned Snow

Faculty Publications

Courts have created a burden of proof in copyright that chills protected speech. The doctrine of fair use purports to ensure that copyright law does not trample rights of speakers whose expression employs copyrighted material. Yet those speakers face a burden of proof that weighs heavily in the fair use analysis, where factual inquiries are often subjective and speculative. Failure to satisfy the burden means severe penalties, which prospect quickly chills the free exercise of speech that constitutes a fair use. The fair-use burden of proof is repugnant to the fair use purpose. Today, copyright holders are exploiting the burden …

What Blogging Might Teach About Cybernorms, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Since the dawn of the information age, scholars have debated the viability of regulating cyberspace. Early on, Professor Lawrence Lessig suggested that “code is law” online. Lessig and others also examined the respective regulatory functions of laws, code, market forces, and social norms. In recent years, with the rise of Web 2.0 interactive technologies, norms have taken center-stage as a regulatory modality online. The advantages of norms are that they can develop quickly by the communities that seek to enforce them, and they are not bound by geography. However, to date there has been scant literature dealing in any detail …

Ramifications Of Joint Infringement Theory On Emerging Technology Patents, W. Keith Robinson

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Two cases decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit articulate the standards for joint infringement. In BMC Resources, Inc. v. Paymentech, L.P., the court ruled that to find liability in situations where steps of a method claim are performed by multiple parties, the entire method must be performed at the control or direction of the alleged direct infringer — the mastermind. Approximately one year later, in Muniauction, Inc. v. Thomson Corp., the Federal Circuit clarified that “the control or direction standard is satisfied in situations where the law would traditionally hold the accused direct infringer vicariously …

Bad Faith In Cyberspace: Grounding Domain Name Theory In Trademark, Property And Restitution, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

The year 2009 marks the tenth anniversary of domain name regulation under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). Adopted to combat cybersquatting, these rules left a confused picture of domain name theory in their wake. Early cybersquatters registered Internet domain names corresponding with others’ trademarks to sell them for a profit. However, this practice was quickly and easily contained. New practices arose in domain name markets, not initially contemplated by the drafters of the ACPA and the UDRP. One example is clickfarming – using domain names to generate revenues from click-on …

Technology And Intellectual Property: New Rules For An Old Game?, Elizabeth A. Rowe

UF Law Faculty Publications

This foreword to the first issue of 2009 for the Journal of Technology Law and Policy discusses the questions presented by the merger of technology and intellectual property and considers how best the two areas should co-exist.

Demystifying The Right To Exclude: Of Property, Inviolability, And Automatic Injunctions, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

The right to exclude has long been considered a central component of property. In focusing on the element of exclusion, courts and scholars have paid little attention to what an owner's right to exclude means and the forms in which this right might manifest itself in actual property practice. For some time now, the right to exclude has come to be understood as nothing but an entitlement to injunctive relief- that whenever an owner successfully establishes title and an interference with the same, an injunction will automatically follow. Such a view attributes to the right a distinctively consequentialist meaning, which …

Pornography, Coercion, And Copyright Law 2.0, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The lack of regulation of the production of pornography in the United States leaves pornography performers exposed to substantial risks. Producers of pornography typically respond to attempts to regulate pornography as infringements upon free speech. At the same time, large corporations involved in the production and sale of pornography rely on copyright law's complex regulatory framework to protect their pornographic content from copying and unauthorized distribution. Web 2.0 also facilitates the production and distribution of pornography by individuals. These user-generators produce their own pornography, often looking to monetize their productions themselves via advertising revenues and subscription models. Much like their …

A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …

The Public Domain: Enclosing The Commons Of The Mind, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

Our music, our culture, our science and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In his award-winning book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, …

Billowing White Goo, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The title of this symposium is the question: "Fair Use: "Incredibly Shrinking" or Extraordinarily Expanding?" I'd argue that the answer to the question is "no." Fair use isn't doing either. The size of the fair use footprint has stayed remarkably constant over the past 30 or even 50 years. What has expanded, extraordinarily, is the size of rights granted by the copyright law. It may seem as if fair use is either expanding or shrinking, because the greater reach of copyright has made a bunch of uses potentially fair that weren't even potentially infringing 50 years ago. In order to …

Restricting Access To Books On The Internet: Some Unanticipated Effects Of Us Copyright Legislation, Paul A. David, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

It is today a commonplace observation that the technical possibilities of accessing enormous global resources of cultural and scientific information have been and are continuing to be greatly [...] One manifestation of the trend towards the strengthening of copyright protection that has been noticeable during the past two decades is the secular extension of the potential duration during which access to copyrightable materials remains legally restricted. Those restrictions carry clear implications for the current and prospective costs to readers seeking 'on-line' availability of the affected content in digital form, via the Internet. This paper undertakes to quantify one aspect of …

Introducing A Takedown For Trade Secrets On The Internet, Elizabeth A. Rowe

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores, for the first time, an existing void in trade-secret law. When a trade-secret owner discovers that its trade secrets have been posted on the Internet, there is currently no legislative mechanism by which the owner can request that the information be taken down. The only remedy to effectuate removal of the material is to obtain a court order, usually either a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. When a trade secret appears on the Internet, the owner often loses the ability to continue to claim it as a trade secret and to prevent others from using …

Lessons From The Trademark Use Debate, Mark D. Janis, Graeme B. Dinwoodie

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In their response to our article Confusion Over Use: Contextualism in Trademark Law, Professors Dogan and Lemley discard more all-encompassing versions of the trademark use requirement. Instead, they seek to delineate and defend a "more surgical form" of trademark use doctrine. In this reply, we demonstrate that the language of the Lanham Act does not impose a trademark use requirement even when that requirement is defined "surgically" and sections 32 and 43(a) are read "fluidly," as Dogan and Lemley suggest. Moreover, their interpretation still renders section 33(b)(4) redundant and unduly limits appropriate common law development of trademark law. We also …

Saving Trade Secret Disclosures On The Internet Through Sequential Preservation, Elizabeth A. Rowe

UF Law Faculty Publications

When an employee discloses an employer's trade secrets to the public over the Internet, does our current trade secret framework appropriately address the consequences of that disclosure? What ought to be the rule that governs whether the trade secret owner has lost not only the protection status for the secret, but also any remedies against use by third parties? Should the ease with which the Internet permits instant and mass disclosure of secrets be taken into consideration in assessing the fairness of a rule that calls for immediate loss of the trade secret upon disclosure? Given that trade secret law …

Confusion Over Use: Contextualism In Trademark Law, Mark D. Janis, Graeme B. Dinwoodie

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This paper tackles an intellectual property theory that many scholars regard as fundamental to future policy debates over the scope of trademark protection: the trademark use theory. We argue that trademark use theory is flawed and should be rejected. The adoption of trademark use theory has immediate practical implications for disputes about the use of trademarks in online advertising, merchandising, and product design, and has long-term consequences for other trademark generally. We critique the theory both descriptively and prescriptively. We argue that trademark use theory over-extends the search costs rationale for the trademark system, and that it unhelpfully elevates formalism …

The Rule Of Intellectual Property Law In The Internet Economy, Joel R. Reidenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that the technological attacks on intellectual property are a movement against democratically chosen intellectual property rules. They form a basic challenge to the rule of law and to the control of the rules wired into the network. In making this argument, the Article first maintains that intellectual property rights have an important public function in democracy in that they mark political, economic, and social boundaries. Next, the Article shows that the public law, as enacted by governments, has reallocated intellectual property rights to adapt to the information economy. While many aspects of this new allocation of rights …

Common Law Property Metaphors On The Internet: The Real Problem With The Doctrine Of Cybertrespass, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

All Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of cybertrespass represents one of the most recent attempts by courts to apply concepts and principles from the real world to the virtual world of the Internet. A creation of state common law, the doctrine essentially involved extending the tort of trespass to chattels to the electronic world. Consequently, unauthorized electronic interferences are deemed trespassory intrusions and rendered actionable. The present paper aims to undertake a conceptual study of the evolution of the doctrine, examining the doctrinal modifications courts were required to make to mould the doctrine to meet the specificities of cyberspace. It then uses cybertrespass to …

The Privacy Gambit: Toward A Game Theoretic Approach To International Data Protection, Horace E. Anderson

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article briefly explores several scenarios in which economic actors compete and cooperate in order to capture the value in personal information. The focus then shifts to one particular scenario: the ongoing interaction between the United States and the European Union in attempting to construct data protection regimes that serve the philosophies and citizens of each jurisdiction as well as provide a strategic economic advantage. A game theoretic model is presented to explain the course of dealings between the two actors, including both unilateral and bilateral actions. Part I ends with an exploration of opportunities for seizing competitive advantage, and …

Keeping Up To Date With Ip News Services And Blogs: Drowning In A Sea Of Sameness?, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

It seems like so many IP related Websites you visit invite you to join their free email list to keep you up to date. Sources span a wide spectrum including governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, educational institutions, consulting services, law firms, commercial publishers and more. These sources span the spectrum from free, to low fee to premium pricing. With all of this information overload and choices, how do you differentiate and choose news sources?

The goals of this article are twofold. Goal one is to present a survey of types and categories of IP news tools available to IP researchers. Since …

Once And Future Copyright, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Copyright is like a well-meaning but ultimately bothersome friend, eager to help but nearly impossible to get rid of. It attaches indiscriminately to the simplest acts of expression, without regard for whether the author needs or wants its protection. This automatic propertization made sense in the print era, when mass distribution of information was an expensive process rarely undertaken by those with no plans to profit from their creativity. It makes little sense today. The following article shows that copyright's overly solicitous nature is the source of several seemingly unrelated and intractable problems - e.g., closed code, copyright as censorship, …

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 …

Introduction: The State Of Play, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

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 …