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Full-Text Articles in Law
The New Separability, Lili Levi
The New Separability, Lili Levi
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the Supreme Court recently unveiled a new approach to separability. Because copyright law protects expression, not function, aesthetic features of useful articles are eligible for copyright protection only if they are separable from the functional work in which they are incorporated. But the Copyright Act does not define separability, and Star Athletica is the latest judicial effort to try to fill that void. Unfortunately, the new separability is open to a wide range of critiques. Relatively low-hanging fruit are the vagueness and indeterminacy of the new test, the Court's unsatisfactory attempts to avoid defining …
Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea--Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters, Tze Ping Lim
Beyond Copyright: Applying A Radical Idea--Expression Dichotomy To The Ownership Of Fictional Characters, Tze Ping Lim
Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law
Copyright protection for fictional characters in the United States is expanding on an uncertain and incoherent basis. With the event of the case Towle v. DC Comics, courts have now applied three different tests to discern a character's copyrightability. Towle was a significant decision because it was the first time a US court had held that a car (the Batmobile) was a copyrightable character. Although courts have utilized the ideas-expression dichotomy to differentiate unprotectable character "ideas" from protectable character 'expressions', the dichotomy is unlikely to alleviate the law's uncertainty and incoherence. Both the US ideas-expression dichotomy and character copyrightability doctrines …