Law Commons^™

Copyright, Fair Use, And Author Rights, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

From the promotional flyer for this talk:

Copyright is a battlefield, and an author's control over his/her own work can easily become collateral damage or go missing in action. Many publishers believe they have an inherent right to own the intellectual property arising from your grant-funded research and to live off the earnings of written works that you had little choice but to give them for free or pay them to publish.

In this session, you will learn more about U.S. Copyright Law, authors' rights, fair use, and protecting your intellectual property. You will learn how to make copyright law …

Backward C Inside A Circle: Free Culture In Zines, Alycia Sellie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored.

The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with …

Function Over Form: Bringing The Fixation Requirement Into The Modern Era, Megan M. Carpenter, Steven Hetcher

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the ways that contemporary creativity challenges copyright’s fixation requirement. In this Article, we identify concrete problems with the fixation requirement, both practically and in light of the fundamental purpose and policy behind copyright law, and argue for a change that would amend the fixation requirement to better function in the modern era.

Specifically, we conclude that a fair appraisal of the justifications for the fixation requirement provides little, if any, rationale for fixation except to the extent that fixation helps to separate idea from expression in determining the “metes and bounds” of creative expression. Recent case law …

Copyright And The Tragedy Of The Common, Tracy Reilly

Tracy Reilly

In his 1968 article, The Tragedy of the Commons, biologist Garret Hardin first described his theory on the ecological unsustainability of collective human behavior, claiming that commonly held real property interests would not ultimately be supportable due to the competing individual interests of all who use the property. In the legal field, Hardin’s article is frequently cited to support various theories related to real property and environmental law issues such as ownership, redistribution of wealth, pollution, over population, and global warming. Most scholars claim that a tragedy of the commons does not exist in intellectual property-related goods due to the …