Law Commons^™

Privacy, Copyright, And Letters, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

The focus of this Essay is the privacy of letters – the written manifestations of thoughts, intents, and the recollections of facts directed to a person or a narrowly defined audience. The importance of this privacy is captured in the novel Atonement by Ian McEwan and in the film based on the novel. The fulcrum from which the action springs is a letter that is read by someone to whom it was not addressed. The result is literally life-changing, even disastrous for a number of characters. One person dies, two people seemingly meant for each other are torn apart and …

Positive Proposals For Treatment Of Online Intermediaries, Margot E. Kaminski

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

In the past several years of free trade agreement negotiations, a number of proposals for establishing an international standard of liability for copyright infringement by online intermediaries have emerged. These proposals consistently lack consideration of their implications for Internet users. Building off a public stakeholder presentation given by the author at the ninth round of negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, held in Lima, Peru, this paper aims to identify both general principles and specific user-protecting provisions that should be considered when discussing proposals for intermediary liability.

The Moral Rights Act Of 2007: Finding The Melody In The Music, Aurele Danoff

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

No abstract provided.

Copyright Law And Pornography, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The government can and should stop providing financial incentives in the form of copyright protection for the production and distribution of pornographic works that cause direct harms, such as child pornography, revenge pornography, crush pornography and filmed sexual abuse. The Article proceeds in five parts. Part I provides an overview of the relationship of copyright law to pornography. Copyright law, viewed in a certain light, plays a structural role in the commoditization of sex and sexual images. In most jurisdictions in the United States, buying and selling sex is illegal, but when sex-for-hire is fixed in a tangible medium of …

Review Essay, Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, And Protesters Improve The Law Of Ownership By Eduardo Moisés Peñalver And Sonia K. Katyal, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "This book challenges the notion that rigidly fostering stability in the private ownership of property is the only appropriate goal of the legal system. The authors assert that dynamic sociopolitical responses to civil disobedience by lawbreakers sometimes propel beneficial legal reforms in a wide array of contexts. Property outlaws with clean hands and good hearts, they argue, can productively draw attention to the need to reform ossified property laws. In the words sometimes attributed to the historical rock star of successful civil disobedience Mohandas Ghandi: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then …

Websites And Intangible Asset Amortization Under 26 U.S.C. § 197: A Marriage That Bears Little Fruit, Christopher H. Bowen

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Websites are not only an important part of our electronic lives, they are an important financial and business asset in their own right. With the growth of the internet as a commercial, informational, and recreational resource, companies utilize websites as an important part of their corporate financial portfolio and structure. The increased value of websites that comes from this growth has made websites a valuable asset that companies seek to use as they would other business assets. One important consideration is how the value of websites will be treated upon sale or exchange. In other words, is the website an …

Who Owns An Avatar? Copyright, Creativity, And Virtual Worlds, Tyler T. Ochoa

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Today's massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) offer their users the ability to create or customize their own avatars with distinctive visual appearances. This Article contends that users who take advantage of that ability are exercising significant creative choices, such that they should be considered the "authors" and copyright owners of their own avatars. The Copyright Act envisions several types of collaborative authorship, including joint authorship, works made for hire, and collective works. None of these models provides a good fit for user-created avatars, because avatars meet some, but not all, of the elements for each model. Here, the two …

Acta & Access To Learning Materiols In Morocco: An Examination Of How Acta Impacts The Creation Of A Moroccan Orphan Works Regime, Caroline B. Ncube

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

This paper briefly examines the current regime of copyright law in Morocco and seeks to examine the status of orphan works in Morocco, in lieu its membership as the sole African country in the recently signed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The paper concludes that Morocco can, and ought to, enact exceptions and limitations that facilitate meaningful access to orphan works in both analogue and digital formats.

Made In America: A Comparative Analysis Of Copyright Law Protections For Fashion Design In Asia And The United States, Alexandra Mackey

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Museum Policies And Art Images: Conflicting Objectives And Copyright Overreaching, Kenneth D. Crews

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images of art. The images are often intellectually essential for scholarly study and teaching, and they are sometimes economically valuable for production of the coffee mugs and note cards sold in museum shops and elsewhere. Though the law is unclear regarding copyright protection afforded to such images, many museum policies and licenses encumber the use of art images with contractual terms and license restrictions often aimed at raising revenue or protecting the integrity of the art. This article …

The Future Of Cybertravel: Legal Implications Of The Evasion Of Geolocation, Marketa Trimble

Scholarly Works

Although the Internet is valued by many of its supporters particularly because it both defies and defeats physical borders, these important attributes are now being exposed to attempts by both governments and private entities to impose territorial limits through blocking or permitting access to content by Internet users based on their geographical location—a territorial partitioning of the Internet. One of these attempts, for example, is the recent Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) proposal in the United States. This article, as opposed to earlier literature on the topic discussing the possible virtues and methods of erecting borders in cyberspace, focuses on …

Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Scholarship

A transcribed conversation about moral rights in the digital age — in respect of some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Professor Jane Ginsburg's 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?, 19 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L. J. 9 (2001).

Copyright Law And Pornography, Ann Bartow

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Sex-for-hire is usually illegal, unless it is being filmed. Debates about pornography tread uneasily into legal terrain that implicates freedom of expression under the First Amendment, the specter of censorship, and genuine concerns about the function and role of pornography in persistent gender inequality. It is less common for conversations about pornography to include a discussion of copyright law. Yet copyright law is a powerful tool that operates to protect the financial interests of pornographers. Owners of copyrighted pornography frequently threaten public exposure of an alleged infringer’s consumption habits in order to force a financial settlement. Thus copyright law operates …

Open Connectivity, Open Data: Two Dimensions Of The Freedom To Seek, Receive And Impart Information In The New Zealand Bill Of Rights, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recently, ideas about "rights" to Internet access or connectivity have received growing recognition from governments, legal institutions, and other political actors in several countries, including New Zealand Despite this emerging political and legal recognition, there are few, if any, systematic studies exploring such ideas. This paper aims to change this. First, it offers a theoretical exploration of the idea of a "right" to Internet access, including the diferent versions of such rights talk. Secondly, it examines whether there is any legal basis for such rights claims in New Zealand and ultimately argues that section 14 of the New Zealand Bill …

Open Connectivity, Open Data: Two Dimensions Of The Freedom To Seek, Receive And Impart Information In The New Zealand Bill Of Rights, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Recently, ideas about "rights" to Internet access or connectivity have received growing recognition from governments, legal institutions, and other political actors in several countries, including New Zealand Despite this emerging political and legal recognition, there are few, if any, systematic studies exploring such ideas. This paper aims to change this. First, it offers a theoretical exploration of the idea of a "right" to Internet access, including the diferent versions of such rights talk. Secondly, it examines whether there is any legal basis for such rights claims in New Zealand and ultimately argues that section 14 of the New Zealand Bill …

The Press Exception In The Dutch Copyright Act, Lucie Guibault

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

No abstract provided.

Trademark Tension, Part Ii, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

In the previous entry in this series, I discussed the narrow foundations of trademark law and its more recent expansion – in particular, how new approaches to trademark liability have departed from the law’s traditional focus on disputes about the source of competing goods. I continue that theme now by considering a tension that emerges from this expansion. Although trademark liability has expanded beyond source-identification, other aspects of trademark law have not, and these more traditional aspects can rise up and trap the unwary mark owner, or at least turn its expanded rights into expanded costs.

To understand the tension …

Orphan Works As Grist For The Data Mill, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

The phenomenon of library digitization in general, and the digitization of so-called “orphan works” in particular, raises many important copyright law questions. However, as this Article explains, correctly understood, there is no orphan works problem for certain kinds of library digitization.

The distinction between expressive and non-expressive works is already well recognized in copyright law as the gatekeeper to copyright protection—novels are protected by copyright, while telephone books and other uncreative compilations of data are not. The same distinction should generally be made in relation to potential acts of infringement. Preserving the functional force of the idea-expression distinction in the …

Appropriate Testing And Resolution: How To Determine Whether Appropriation Art Is Transformative Fair Use Or Merely In Unauthorized Derivative., Eric D. Gorman

St. Mary's Law Journal

This Article addresses the copyright concerns in appropriation art today and concludes that copyright law should be amended to address the complex issues found in this area of the law. Part II provides a background on appropriation art and the different facets of copyright law, including the doctrine of fair use. Part III analyzes whether appropriation art can even be considered “fair use” under the current exceptions of copyright infringement. Part IV discusses various legal tests to determine whether appropriation art that utilizes copyrighted material can exercise the doctrine of fair use against alleged copyright infringement. It also proposes a …

Trademark Tension, Part I, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

In this Intellectual Property Viewpoints series, we tend to focus on copyright and patent law – the “big two” IP regimes that govern innovation in the arts and sciences. But there is a third IP regime, a cousin to copyright and patent, which is important to almost any enterprise, even if its business has nothing to do with innovation. That’s trademark law.

Over the last several decades, trademark law has grown from its modest roots and experienced an expansion that rivals that of its more high-profile cousins. In this essay and the next, I will discuss this phenomenon, and in …

The Librarian’S Copyright Companion, James S. Heller, Paul Hellyer, Benjamin J. Keele

Library Staff Publications

The transition from print to digital continues. The Copyright Act has changed a little, but not for the better. This book begins with the premise that copyright exists to promote the dissemination of information, and while creators have certain rights, so do users. This new edition updates every chapter and adds a new chapter on the library as a publisher. Also included is information on recent developments such as Creative Common licenses and the use of digital video (e.g. YouTube) in the classroom.

Top Tens In 2011: Patent, Trademark, Copyright And Trade Secret Cases, Stephen M. Mcjohn

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

This paper discusses notable intellectual property law cases in the United States in 2011. Patent cases addressed such issues as the scope of patent subject matter (the patentability of human genes and methods for testing for genetic links to cancer), the standards for challenges to the validity of patents (such as where technology that was not considered by the patent office is put in evidence), and the breadth of patent protection (especially with respect to the scope of protection for software patents). Other cases tested the borders of trademark protection – distinctiveness, functionality, and the interplay between trademark law and …

Mge Ups Systems, Inc. V. Ge Consumer & Industrial, Inc., Alexander Hill

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Personal Jurisdiction And Joinder In Mass Copyright Troll Litigation, Jason R. Lafond

Maryland Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Gaylord V. United States, Jeffrey Lawhorn

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property And The Incentive Fallacy, Eric E. Johnson

Faculty Articles

The enterprise of intellectual property law has long been based on the premise that external incentives – such as copyrights and patents – are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations. This article argues that this foundational belief is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, along with empirical investigations of industry, it is now possible to construct a compelling case that the incentive theory, as a general matter, is mistaken, and that natural and intrinsic motivations will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied …

Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Publications

This piece is the transcription of a conversation between two law faculty members speaking about moral rights in the digital age. Prof. Subotnik questions Prof. Ginsburg about some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Prof. Ginsburg’s 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?. "If moral rights have come of digital age, should their realization be achieved by conveying more information about the copy, or by controlling the copy itself?" This question is now asked from the vantage point of 2012, ten years since Prof. Ginsburg first posed it.

Cross-Border Extended Collective Licensing: A Solution To Online Dissemination Of Europe’S Cultural Heritage, Johan Axhamn, Lucie Guibault

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The ever increasing use of the Internet and of digitisation technologies have opened up new possibilities for distributing and accessing creative content online, including for cultural heritage institutions. However, the digitisation and dissemination of a substantial proportion of the collections held by European cultural institutions may be considerably hindered due to high transaction costs related to clearance of copyright and related rights. This holds equally true for the cultural institutions taking part in the Europeana project. This study examines whether the Nordic “extended collective licensing” (ECL) model could provide a viable solution to the problems of digitisation and dissemination of …

Curbing Consumer Complicity For Counterfeits In A Digital Environment, Peggy E. Chaudhry

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Better Mousetraps: Licensing, Access, And Innovation In The New Music Marketplace, Casey Rae-Hunter

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.