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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Costs Of Trademarking Dolls, Jessica Silbey
The Costs Of Trademarking Dolls, Jessica Silbey
Faculty Scholarship
Professor Curtin’s article, Zombie Cinderella and the Undead Public Domain, takes a recent case from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) as the basis for an argument that trademark doctrine needs stronger protection against the exclusive commercial appropriation of characters that are in the public domain. In that case, a doll manufacturer sought to register the term “Zombie Cinderella” for a doll that was zombie-ish and princess-like. The examiner refused registration because the term “Zombie Cinderella” for this kind of doll was confusingly similar to the mark for Walt Disney’s Cinderella doll. Although the TTAB overturned the examiner’s …
All Your Works Are Belong To Us: New Frontiers For The Derivative Work Right In Video Games, J. Remy Green
All Your Works Are Belong To Us: New Frontiers For The Derivative Work Right In Video Games, J. Remy Green
Faculty Scholarship
In copyright law, the author of an original work has the exclusive right to prepare further works derivative of that original. Video game developers’ works are protected by the Copyright Act. As video games take advantage of more advanced technology, however, players are doing more creative, interesting, and original things when they play games. Certain things players do create independent economic value and are the kinds of acts of original authorship our copyright system is designed to encourage. However, since the author of the video game is entitled to the full panoply of rights under the laws of the American …
Preserving Film Preservation From The Right Of Publicity, Christopher J. Buccafusco, Jared Vasconcellos Grubow, Ian J. Postman
Preserving Film Preservation From The Right Of Publicity, Christopher J. Buccafusco, Jared Vasconcellos Grubow, Ian J. Postman
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Liability For Providing Hyperlinks To Copyright-Infringing Content: International And Comparative Law Perspectives, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo
Liability For Providing Hyperlinks To Copyright-Infringing Content: International And Comparative Law Perspectives, Jane C. Ginsburg, Luke Ali Budiardjo
Faculty Scholarship
Hyperlinking, at once an essential means of navigating the Internet, but also a frequent means to enable infringement of copyright, challenges courts to articulate the legal norms that underpin domestic and international copyright law, in order to ensure effective enforcement of exclusive rights on the one hand, while preserving open communication on the Internet on the other. Several recent cases, primarily in the European Union, demonstrate the difficulties of enforcing the right of communication to the public (or, in U.S. copyright parlance, the right of public performance by transmission) against those who provide hyperlinks that effectively deliver infringing content to …
Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Copyright As Market Prospect, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
For many decades now, copyright jurisprudence and scholarship have looked to the common law of torts – principally trespass and negligence – in order to understand copyright’s structure of entitlement and liability. This focus on property – and harm-based torts – has altogether ignored an area of tort law with significant import for our understanding of copyright law: tortious interference with a prospective economic advantage. This Article develops an understanding of copyright law using tortious interference with a prospect as a homology. Tortious interference with a prospect allows a plaintiff to recover when a defendant’s volitional actions interfere with a …
Intellectual Property As Seen By Barbie And Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship Of Copyright And Trademark Law, Jane C. Ginsburg
Intellectual Property As Seen By Barbie And Mickey: The Reciprocal Relationship Of Copyright And Trademark Law, Jane C. Ginsburg
Faculty Scholarship
Some years ago, caselaw on trademark parodies and similar unauthorized “speech” uses of trademarks could have led one to conclude that the law had no sense of humor. Over time, however, courts in the US and elsewhere began to leaven likelihood of confusion analyses with healthy skepticism regarding consumers’ alleged inability to perceive a joke. These decisions did not always expressly cite the copyright fair use defense, but the considerations underlying the copyright doctrine seemed to inform trademark analysis as well. The spillover effect may indeed have been inevitable, as several of the cases in which the fair use defense …
A (Nude) Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words — But How Many Dollars?: Using Copyright As A Metric For Harm In ‘Revenge Porn’ Cases, J. Remy Green
A (Nude) Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words — But How Many Dollars?: Using Copyright As A Metric For Harm In ‘Revenge Porn’ Cases, J. Remy Green
Faculty Scholarship
So-called “Revenge Porn” — pornography published without the subject’s permission — is a growing issue. While much discussion exists about how best to outlaw the practice, less has been said about precisely how to measure the harm done. This paper is grounded in an in-depth analysis of the particular way that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines prioritize financial harms and non-financial harms, specifically looking at how many dollars of harm it takes to buy each additional sentencing point. I graph the enforcement priorities for financial and non-financial harm using the numbers federal agencies use for the value of a statistical life. …