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 …

Trademark Law And Status Signaling: Tattoos For The Privileged, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

The motivations for buying a good or service are highly complex. At the most basic level, people buy goods because of what the goods do or because of the aesthetic elements they embody. More technically, buyers derive utility from the "functional" quality of these goods. Another motivation relates to what the goods "say" about the buyer. Here, the good is a signaling device. Signaling is not new, of course, and can indicate anything from social class to political leanings.

This Essay addresses the issue of whether it should be public policy to subsidize this type of person-to-person status signaling. This …

Liberating Estates Law From The Constraints Of Copyright, Lee-Ford Tritt

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article addresses a disturbing statutory phenomenon of enormous importance to any artist, composer, writer, scholar, scientist or innovator. The phenomenon, which I have termed “estate-bumping,” has driven an unintended wedge between copyright law and estates law by effectively preventing authors of copyrights from disposing of their copyright interests through common estate planning mechanisms. Current copyright law imposes a unique restraint on the testamentary freedom of copyright authors, a restraint not imposed on any other type of property owner. In effect, this restraint enables unintended beneficiaries to rewrite, or “bump”, an author’s estate plan. Thus, it is copyright law – …

A Positive Externalities Approach To Copyright Law: Theory And Application, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

The basic goal of copyright law is, at a general level, fairly well understood, yet the law itself seems untethered to any consistent analytical approach designed to achieve that goal. This Article has two goals. The first is to explain in some detail what copyright law might look like if it reflected economic reasoning. The second is to put to the test the question of whether copyright law is as far out of sync with economic guidelines as White-Smith Music and Eldred suggest.

In order to understand the economic approach and the inconsistency of copyright law, as well as the …