Law Commons^™

What's In A Name Or, Better Yet, What's It Worth?: Cities, Sports Teams And The Right Of Publicity, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Working Paper Series

This article examines the harm that accompanies real and threatened in-market relocations of professional sports teams and proposes a federal statutory remedy that will protect the interest of city residents given the reality that city governments have demonstrated their inability to adequately protect their electorate through contract law alone. Although, as this article discusses, there have been myriad bills proposed by Congress in response to several high profile out-of-market sports franchise relocations (mostly those involving NFL teams and mostly during the 1990’s), in-market relocations have historically occurred much more frequently, inflicting similar harms to the spurned city residents. Moreover, as …

Patent Injunctions And The Problem Of Uniformity Cost, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

In eBay v. MercExchange, the Supreme Court correctly rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to patent injunctions. However, the Court's opinion does not fully recognize that the problem of uniformity in patent law is more general and that this problem cannot be solved through case-by-case analysis. This Essay provides a field guide for implementing eBay using functional analysis and insights from a uniformity-cost framework developed more fully in prior work. While there can be no general rule governing equitable relief in patent cases, the traditional four factor analysis for injunctive relief should lead the cases to cluster around certain patterns that often …

Chain Reaction: How Property Begets Property, Sabrina Safrin

Sabrina Safrin

Classic theories for the evolution of property rights consider the emergence of private property to be a progressive development reflecting a society's movement to a more efficient property regime. This article argues that instead of this progressive dynamic, a more subtle and damaging chain reaction dynamic can come into play that traditional theories for intellectual and other property rights neither anticipate nor explain. The article suggests that the expansion of intellectual and other property rights have an internally generative dynamic. Drawing upon contemporary case studies, the article argues that property rights evolve in reaction to each other. The creation of …

Bollywood Is Coming! Copyright And Film Industry Issues Regarding International Film Co-Productions Involving India, Timm Neu

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

The Indian film industry produces more movies than any other and is characterized as being on the threshold of emerging as a big market internationally with an expected growth rate of close to 20% per year. Its regulatory and legal mechanisms are developing rapidly to keep pace. This article is dedicated to the Indian film industry and its international potential. It analyzes the copyright aspects of film co-productions involving India and compares the characteristics of the national film industries of Germany, the U.S. and especially India (Bollywood) from a legal perspective. It points to key copyright issues in the field …

Creative Commons As Conversational Copyright, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

Copyright law's default settings inhibit sharing and adaptation of creative works even though new digital technologies greatly enhance individuals' capacity to engage in creative conversation. Creative Commons licenses enable a form of conversational copyright through which creators share their works, primarily over the Internet, while asserting some limitation on user's right with respect to works in the licensed commons. More specifically, this chapter explains the problems in copyright law to which Creative Commons licenses respond, the methods chosen, and why the machine-readable and public aspects of the licenses are specific examples of a more general phenomenon in digital copyright law …

Private Copyright: Digital Rights Management Systems And The Consumer, Victor Nicholas Knipe

ExpressO

Digital Rights Managements (DRM) systems impact the digital content and software marketplace on several levels. The issues include copyright law, contract law, privacy, antitrust, and consumer protection. This paper examines how DRM systems affect the consumer and what changes can be made to bring about a more sensible and transparent market in the United States.

The Government Giveth, And The Government Taketh Away: Patents, Takings, And 28 U.S.C. § 1498, Justin Torres

ExpressO

The argument over whether patents are protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause has largely been confined to normative grounds. To the extent that these arguments reference the 1910 Patent Act, the statute that enables patentees to recover “reasonable and entire” compensation for infringement by the government (later codified as 28 U.S.C. § 1498), they conclude that the provision adds little to the argument. And in Zoltek Corp. v. United States, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit determined that the very existence of § 1498 indicates that there is no Fifth Amendment claim for patent infringement, since an …

Claim Construction, Appeal, And The Predictability Of Interpretive Regimes, Jeffrey A. Lefstin

ExpressO

Interpretation is central to patent law, because most adjudications require association of written claims with non-linguistic subject matter. By some accounts, the lack of predictability in the law of claim interpretation has reached crisis proportions, and has prompted calls for far-reaching changes in the way patent issues are adjudicated. However, the actual evidence that questions of interpretation are more problematic than other aspects of patent law is sparser than is commonly recognized. Moreover, while the controversy over claim interpretation centers around the predictability of interpretation between trial and appeal, what is important is to be able to predict outcomes before …

When Second Comes First: Correcting Patent’S Poor Secondary Incentives Through An Optional Patent Purchase System, Jordan Barry

ExpressO

As research has advanced, technologies have become more closely knit, and the relationships between them—both complementary and competitive—have become increasingly important. Unfortunately, the patent system’s use of monopoly power to reward innovators creates inefficient results by overly encouraging the development of substitute technologies and discouraging the development of complementary technologies. This paper explains how an optional patent purchase system could help ameliorate such problems and discusses the implications of such a system.

Internationalizing Copyright: How Claims Of International, Extraterritorial Copyright Infringement May Be Brought In U.S. Courts, Elliot Cook

ExpressO

This Comment assesses the use of the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) as a jurisdictional basis for claims of international copyright infringement occurring outside of the United States. Under the ATS, aliens may sue in United States district courts for torts that amount to violations of treaties or the law of nations.

Given that copyright infringement is a tort, an alien may only be able to establish ATS jurisdiction in a suit of extraterritorial infringement if the infringement violated a treaty or the law of nations. This comment argues that extraterritorial copyright infringement does indeed amount to a violation of the …

The Need For Software Innovation Policy, Christopher Riley

ExpressO

This paper examines the current legal treatment of software innovation. It argues that recent judicial standards for the regulation of software innovation do not adequately protect innovation. It presents an original standard for the regulation of software innovation, one intended to guide judicial decisions in contributory copyright liability, in interpretations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in every courtroom where a developer is on trial for the mere creation and distribution of software. The standard presented in this paper separates the questions of liability and remedy in order to produce an optimal dynamic balance of interests.

Chain Reaction: How Property Begets Property, Sabrina Safrin

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

Classic theories for the evolution of property rights consider the emergence of private property to be a progressive development reflecting a society’s movement to a more efficient property regime. This article argues that instead of this progressive dynamic, a more subtle and damaging chain reaction dynamic can come into play that traditional theories for intellectual and other property rights neither anticipate nor explain. The article suggests that the expansion of intellectual and other property rights have an internally generative dynamic. Drawing upon contemporary case studies, the article argues that property rights evolve in reaction to each other. The creation of …

Youtube Or Youlose? Can Youtube Survive A Copyright Infringement Lawsuit, Jason C. Breen

ExpressO

YouTube, and similar video web hosting services, have already been targets of copyright infringement lawsuits. YouTube’s liability is most likely dependant on whether the service meets the requirements of the DMCA safe harbor for service providers under 17 U.S.C.A. § 512(c). This paper briefly examines how YouTube would fare under the different theories of copyright infringement and discusses whether the DMCA safe harbor would be available to YouTube if they were found liable as an infringer. The limited case law available indicates that the DMCA safe harbor will likely facilitate YouTube’s continued existence, unlike services like Grokster, although YouTube would …

Design Patents: An Alternative When The Low Standards Of Copyright Are Too High?, Ryan G. Vacca

ExpressO

The standard for copyright protection is notoriously low – the work must be independently created and possess a minimal degree of creativity. Nonetheless, even with that generous standard, the courts and the Copyright Office recognize that certain works do not contain even that minimum level of creativity such that they are categorically refused copyright protection. Blank forms, and other forms that do not convey information, fall within this category. In contrast, and for good reason, the standard for design patent protection is much more burdensome. The field of design patents protects new, original, ornamental, and non-obvious designs. This more difficult …

Copyright's Empire: Why The Law Matters, Alina Ng

Alina Ng

Two separate and distinct movements have colonized research in the field of intellectual property. Law and economics has deepened our understanding of the justification for granting monopoly rights over intellectual property. In recent years, economic theories have been used to support the growth of the commons – the free environment, where intellectual property plays little role in generating new creative works and innovation. The second movement is law and technology that has sought to increase understanding of intellectual property through the exploration of how technologies either provide freedoms or impose limitations to how creative works and innovation are created and …