Law Commons^™

Lawful Personal Use, Jessica D. Litman

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Whenever someone makes a copy of a copyrighted work, that copy is either authorized by the copyright owner, permitted by some express provision of the copyright statute (such as the ephemeral copy provision in section 112 or the fair use provision in section 107), or infringing. That's what we tell our colleagues and what we teach our students. But most of us don't actually believe it, and this article argues that that understanding of the copyright law is wrong.

I make this argument by examining the copyright law through the lens of personal use. Unlike many other jurisdictions, the United …

War And Peace: The 34th Annual Donald C. Brace Lecture, Jessica D. Litman

Other Publications

I'd like to thank the Copyright Society and the Brace committee for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I am honored that you invited me to give this lecture. I want to talk a little bit about war - copyright war - and then I want to talk a little bit about peace. It's become conventional that we're in the middle of a copyright war.' I tried to track down who started calling it that, and what I can tell you is that about ten years ago, about the time that copyright lawyers everywhere were arguing about the …

Foreword To Berkeley Law And Technology Law Journal 21, No. 1, Aaron Perzanowski, Tara Wheatland

Other Publications

Through the scholarship it publishes, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal - formerly the High Technology Law Journal - has tracked the evolution of technology and intellectual property law for more than two decades. In keeping with this tradition, the Annual Review of Law & Technology, now in its ninth volume, catalogs the year's most significant developments in a wide range of topic areas, which this year include intellectual property, cyberlaw, constitutional law, and telecommunications. The summaries and analyses presented here aim to provide practitioners, judges, policymakers, scholars, and students a concise and thorough encapsulation of the year in technology and …

The Story Of Diamond V. Chakrabarty: Technological Change And The Subject Matter Boundaries Of The Patent System, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Book Chapters

Technological change often exposes unstated assumptions lurking in the law and makes them problematic, and patent law is no exception. Although the core mission of the patent system is to promote technological progress, path-breaking new technologies have not always been easily assimilated within its boundaries. The first wave of patent applications on advances in biotechnology in the 1970s illustrate some of the difficulties. Before that time, living organisms had generally been assumed to fall outside the range of patent-eligible subject matter under a timehonored exclusion for "products of nature." But genetically engineered organisms, although derived from naturally occurring life forms, …

The Story Of Sony V. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets The Boston Strangler., Jessica Litman

Book Chapters

Sony v. Universal Studios may be the most famous of all copyright cases. People who know nothing about copyright know that the Sony-Betamax case held that home videotaping of television programs is fair use. Paradoxically, although the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case to decide whether the copyright law permitted consumers to engage in private home copying of television programs, the majority ended up crafting its analysis to avoid answering that question definitively. Instead, it ruled that even if consumers sometimes violated the copyright law when they taped television programs off the air, that violation did not make the …

Harnessing And Sharing The Benefits Of State-Sponsored Research: Intellectual Property Rights And Data Sharing In California's Stem Cell Initiative, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Arti K. Rai

Articles

This Article discusses data sharing in California's stem cell initiative against the background of other data sharing efforts and in light of the competing interests that CIRM is directed to balance. We begin by considering how IP law affects data sharing. We then assess the strategic considerations that guide the IP and data policies and strategies of federal, state, and private research sponsors. With this background, we discuss four specific sets of issues that public sponsors of data-rich research, including CIRM, are likely to confront: (1) how to motivate researchers to contribute data; (2) who should have access to the …

The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman

Articles

The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. Recently, we have seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a …