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Full-Text Articles in Law

Recording Artists, Work For Hire, Employment, And Appropriation, Matt Stahl Jan 2008

Recording Artists, Work For Hire, Employment, And Appropriation, Matt Stahl

Studio for Law and Culture

Authorship and ownership exist in a curious relation in U.S. copyright law. In theory and common sense, authorship underwrites and is the condition of ownership, but in practice ownership can establish authorship retroactively. Distinctions between proprietary and non-proprietary creative cultural workers, in this view, turn in no essential way on evidence of “creativity” or the investment of “personality” in cultural creation. This paper examines a legislative struggle between recording artists and the recording industry over the status of their stock-in-trade, sound recordings. In 2000, recording artists obtained the repeal of a 1999 law allocating authorship and ownership of recordings to …


Kernochan Center News - Fall 2008, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts Jan 2008

Kernochan Center News - Fall 2008, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

No abstract provided.


Tolerated Use, Tim Wu Jan 2008

Tolerated Use, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

"Tolerated use" is a term that refers to the contemporary spread of technically infringing, but nonetheless tolerated, use of copyrighted works. Such patterns of mass infringement have occurred before in copyright history, though perhaps not on the same scale, and have usually been settled with the use of special laws, called compulsory licensing regimes, more familiar to non-copyright scholars as liability rules. This paper suggests that, in present times, a different and slightly unusual solution to the issue of widespread illegal use is emerging-an "opt-in" system for copyright holders, that is in property terms a rare species of ex post …


Kernochan Center News - Spring 2008, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts Jan 2008

Kernochan Center News - Spring 2008, Kernochan Center For Law, Media And The Arts

Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts

No abstract provided.


Separating The Sony Sheep From The Grokster Goats: Reckoning The Future Business Plans Of Copyright-Dependent Technology Entrepeneurs, Jane C. Ginsburg Jan 2008

Separating The Sony Sheep From The Grokster Goats: Reckoning The Future Business Plans Of Copyright-Dependent Technology Entrepeneurs, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

In MGM v. Grokster, the U.S. Supreme Court established that businesses built from the start on inducing copyright infringement will be held liable, as judges will frown on drawing one's start-up capital from other people's copyrights. The Court's elucidation of the elements of inducement suggests that even businesses not initially built on infringement, but in which infringement comes to play an increasingly profitable part, may find themselves liable unless they take good faith measures to forestall infringements. This Article addresses the evolution of the U.S. judge-made rules of secondary liability for copyright infringement, and the possible emergence of an obligation …


Rethinking Copyright: Property Through The Lenses Of Unjust Enrichment And Unfair Competition, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Jan 2008

Rethinking Copyright: Property Through The Lenses Of Unjust Enrichment And Unfair Competition, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

For some time now, scholars have come to recognize the existence of numerous structural infirmities deeply embedded within the modern copyright system. Most of these infirmities have been attributed to internal tensions within copyright law and policy, including the competing philosophies of access and control, use and exclusion, and rights and exceptions. Professor Stadler’s insightful article documents these tensions and proposes a new way of mediating them. She argues that copyright law is best understood as instantiating a restriction
on unfair competition and, consequently, that it should do little more than protect creators of original works from “competitive harm” in …


"See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Hea[R] Me" (And Maybe Smell And Taste Me, Too): I Am A Trademark – A Us Perspective, Jane C. Ginsburg Jan 2008

"See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Hea[R] Me" (And Maybe Smell And Taste Me, Too): I Am A Trademark – A Us Perspective, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

The preceding chapter, “Between a sign and a brand,” addresses the current law in the UK and the EU regarding which signs can be a registered trademark, and the scope of protection a trademark receives. Jennifer Davis also considers the extent to which that scope does or should cover the more ineffable subject matter of “brand values.” This comment from the perspective of United States trademark law will follow a similar plan. It first will address what is (and is not) a trademark, focusing on the extensions of trademarks beyond traditional word marks and design marks (logos; trade dress [get-up]) …


Our Uniform Patent System, Clarisa Long Jan 2008

Our Uniform Patent System, Clarisa Long

Faculty Scholarship

Patent reform arouses passions among the affected industries, whether they are plaintiffs or defendants, willing users or unwilling participants in the patent system. The key question, therefore, is: How should we structure the patent system in order to best promote innovation in the U.S. economy?