Law Commons^™

Fixing Fair Use, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

The fair use doctrine in copyright law balances expressive freedoms by permitting one to use another’s copyrighted expression under certain circumstances. The doctrine’s extreme context-sensitivity renders it of little value to those who require reasonable ex ante certainty about the legality of a proposed use. In this Article, Professor Carroll advances a legislative proposal to create a Fair Use Board in the U.S. Copyright Office that would have power to declare a proposed use of another’s copyrighted work to be a fair use. Like a private letter ruling from the IRS or a “no action” letter from the SEC, a …

A Battle Between Geography Indication And Trademark, Jia Xu

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

In 2005, Administration for Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) issued “Administrative Regulation on Indications of Original Source and Regulation on Protection of Products from Original Sources,” but “Implementing Rules of the Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China” has included the protection of Geography Indication into the trademark law. The two separate tracks of protection of GI have caused much confusion to the intellectual property right holders regarding their property rights. This thesis introduces and compares the concept of trademark and geography indications, analyzes the current protection mode both in China and abroad and discusses how to eliminate …

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 …

The Movement For Open Access Law, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

My claim in this contribution to this important symposium is that the law and legal scholarship should be freely available on the Internet, and copyright law and licensing should facilitate achievement of this goal. This claim reflects the combined aims of those who support the movement for open access law. This nascent movement is a natural extension of the well-developed movement for free access to primary legal materials and the equally well-developed open access movement, which seeks to make all scholarly journal articles freely available on the Internet. Legal scholars have only general familiarity with the first movement and very …

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 …

The Movement For Open Access Law, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

My claim in this contribution to this important symposium is that the law and legal scholarship should be freely available on the Internet, and copyright law and licensing should facilitate achievement of this goal. This claim reflects the combined aims of those who support the movement for open access law. This nascent movement is a natural extension of the well-developed movement for free access to primary legal materials and the equally well-developed open access movement, which seeks to make all scholarly journal articles freely available on the Internet. Legal scholars have only general familiarity with the first movement and very …

Creative Commons And The New Intermediaries, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This symposium contribution examines the disintermediating and reintermediating roles played by Creative Commons licenses on the Internet. Creative Commons licenses act as a disintermediating force because they enable end-to-end transactions in copyrighted works. The licenses have reintermediating force by enabling new services and new online communities to form around content licensed under a Creative Commons license. Intermediaries focused on the copyright dimension have begun to appear online as search engines, archives, libraries, publishers, community organizers, and educators. Moreover, the growth of machine-readable copyright licenses and the new intermediaries that they enable is part of a larger movement toward a Semantic …