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Full-Text Articles in Law
Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the "injurer-innovator problem." Patent law incentivizes injurers --often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs--by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own innovations. When the cost of self-implementation …
Understanding Intellectual Property: Expression, Function, And Individuation, Mala Chatterjee
Understanding Intellectual Property: Expression, Function, And Individuation, Mala Chatterjee
Faculty Scholarship
Underlying the fundamental structure of intellectual property law — specifically, the division between copyright and patent law — are at least two substantive philosophical assumptions. The first is that artistic works and inventions are importantly different, such that they warrant different legal systems: copyright law on the one hand, and patent law on the other. And the second is that particular artistic works and inventions can be determinately individuated from each other, and can thereby be the subjects of distinct and delineated legal rights. But neither the law nor existing scholarship provides a comprehensive analysis of these categories, what distinguishes …
Knowing How To Know: Secondary Liability For Speech In Copyright Law, Laura A. Heymann
Knowing How To Know: Secondary Liability For Speech In Copyright Law, Laura A. Heymann
Faculty Publications
Contributory copyright infringement has long been based on whether the defendant, "with knowledge of the infringing activity," induced, caused, or materially contributed to another's infringing conduct. But few court opinions or scholarly articles have given due consideration to what it means to "know" of someone else's infringing conduct, particularly when the unlawfulness at issue cannot truly exist until a legal judgment occurs. How can one "know," in other words, that a court or jury will deem a particular use infringement rather than de minimis or fair use? At best, contributory defendants engage in a predictive exercise--in some cases, a more …
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 …
The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Right Of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined For New York?, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay is based on a featured lecture that I gave as part of the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal’s 2 symposium on a proposed right of publicity law in New York. The essay draws from my recent book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press. Insights from the book suggest that New York should not upend more than one hundred years of established privacy law in the state, nor jeopardize its citizens’ ownership over their own names, likenesses, and voices by replacing these privacy laws with a new and independent …
Copyright Owners' Putative Interests In Privacy, Reputation, And Control: A Reply To Goold, Wendy J. Gordon
Copyright Owners' Putative Interests In Privacy, Reputation, And Control: A Reply To Goold, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
My own view is that Goold overstates the explanatory role of tort law. But even were that not the case, the courts need to reach some kind of “settled” understanding on these various interests before a cause of action is created or definitively rejected, and that no such consensus on the three matters mentioned yet exists, whether they are viewed as forms of tort or otherwise. Goold’s work may nevertheless be an important step toward reaching closure on these and other open questions in copyright law.
Bruised Soul Of The Artist: A Tribute To Sheldon W. Halpern, Anita L. Allen
Bruised Soul Of The Artist: A Tribute To Sheldon W. Halpern, Anita L. Allen
All Faculty Scholarship
In an unusual case, Scottish-born painter Peter Doig was accused of wrongfully denying the authenticity of a painting he insisted he did not paint, to the financial detriment of the work’s owner. Doig won the case against him, which commenced in 2013 and continued for three years. United States District Judge Gary Feinerman ultimately ruled that the evidence presented in a week-long trial proved “conclusively” that Doig did not paint the plaintiff owner’s painting. The case raised concerns about whether a living artist should ever be required by law to authenticate a work of art ascribed to him or her …
Copyright And Tort As Mirror Models: On Not Mistaking For The Right Hand What The Left Hand Is Doing, Wendy J. Gordon
Copyright And Tort As Mirror Models: On Not Mistaking For The Right Hand What The Left Hand Is Doing, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman
All Faculty Scholarship
This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …
The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
All Faculty Scholarship
Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …
Trespass-Copyright Parallels And The Harm-Benefit Distinction, Wendy J. Gordon
Trespass-Copyright Parallels And The Harm-Benefit Distinction, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Currently, the elements of a plaintiff’s cause of action for copyright largely follow the tort of trespass to land in that volitional entry (for land) or volitional copying (for copyright) gives rise to liability regardless of proof of harm and without any need for the plaintiff to prove the defendant acted unreasonably. Many scholars have criticized copyright law for following the strict liability model of real property trespass, and have suggested alternatives that would more resemble conditional causes of action such as unfair competition, nuisance, or negligence. In Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives, Professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh argues that copyright plaintiffs …
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
Torts And Innovation, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein
All Faculty Scholarship
This Essay exposes and analyzes a hitherto overlooked cost of the current design of tort law: its adverse effect on innovation. Tort liability for negligence, defective products, and medical malpractice is determined by reference to custom. We demonstrate that courts’ reliance on custom and conventional technologies as the benchmark of liability chills innovation and distorts its path. Specifically, the recourse to custom taxes innovators and subsidizes replicators of conventional technologies. We explore the causes and consequences of this phenomenon and propose two possible ways to modify tort law in order to make it more welcoming to innovation.
“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk
“An Ingenious Man Enabled By Contract”: Entrepreneurship And The Rise Of Contract, Catherine Fisk
Faculty Scholarship
A legal ideology emerged in the 1870s that celebrated contract as the body of law with the particular purpose of facilitating the formation of productive exchanges that would enrich the parties to the contract and, therefore, society as a whole. Across the spectrum of intellectual property, courts used the legal fiction of implied contract, and a version of it particularly emphasizing liberty of contract, to shift control of workplace knowledge from skilled employees to firms while suggesting that the emergence of hierarchical control and loss of entrepreneurial opportunity for creative workers was consistent with the free labor ideology that dominated …
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 …
International Jurisdiction And Enforcement Of Judgments In The Era Of Global Networks: Irrelevance Of, Goals For, And Comments On The Current Proposals, Jonathan A. Franklin, Roberta J. Morris
International Jurisdiction And Enforcement Of Judgments In The Era Of Global Networks: Irrelevance Of, Goals For, And Comments On The Current Proposals, Jonathan A. Franklin, Roberta J. Morris
Librarians' Articles
Last fall a Symposium at Chicago-Kent College of Law entitled "Constructing International Intellectual Property Law: The Role of National Courts," held on October 18-19, 2001, brought together scholars interested in a group of problems related to the relationship between harmonized rules of international civil procedure and diverse nationally-based rules of intellectual property. Subsequently, extensive discussions between the authors developed this Article into its present form.
Of Harms And Benefits: Torts, Restitution, And Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Of Harms And Benefits: Torts, Restitution, And Intellectual Property, Wendy J. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
Copyright and patent take the form of ordinary property. As tangible property has physical edges, intellectual property statutes create boundaries by defining the subject matters within their zone of protection. As real property owners have rights to prevent strangers from entering their land, intellectual property statutes and case law grant owners rights to exclude strangers from using the protected work in specified ways. As tangible property can be bought and sold, bequeathed and inherited, so can copyrights and patents.
Note On Materials For Arfuller - 1986, Wendy J. Gordon
Note On Materials For Arfuller - 1986, Wendy J. Gordon
Scholarship Chronologically
1/18/86 draft of "Towards a Unified Theory"
The Uncertain Search For A Design Defect Standard, Steven A.G. Davison
The Uncertain Search For A Design Defect Standard, Steven A.G. Davison
All Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.