Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

What Would Grandma Say? How To Respond When Cyber Hackers Reveal Private Information To The Public, Jason P. Ottomano

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Copyright For Literate Robots, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Almost by accident, copyright has concluded that copyright law is for humans only: reading performed by computers doesn't count as infringement. Conceptually, this makes sense: copyright's ideal of romantic readership involves humans writing for other humans. But in an age when more and more manipulation of copyrighted works is carried out by automated processes, this split between human reading (infringement) and robotic reading (exempt) has odd consequences and creates its own tendencies toward a copyright system in which humans occupy a surprisingly peripheral place. This essay describes the shifts in fair use law that brought us here and reflects on …

There's No Such Thing As A Computer-Authored Work - And It's A Good Thing, Too, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Treating computers as authors for copyright purposes is a non-solution to a non-problem. It is a non-solution because unless and until computer programs can qualify as persons in life and law, it does no practical good to call them "authors" when someone else will end up owning the copyright anyway. And it responds to a non-problem because there is nothing actually distinctive about computer-generated works.

There are five plausible ways in which computer-generated works might be considered meaningfully different from human-generated works: (1) they are embedded in digital copies, (2) people create them using computers rather than by hand, (3) …

Principles Of The Law Of Software Contracts: Some Highlights, Robert A. Hillman, Maureen O'Rourke

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The final draft of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts ("Principles") was unanimously approved by the American Law Institute membership in May of 2009. The goal of the project is to “clarify and unify the law of software transactions.” However, the Principles will not become law in any jurisdiction unless and until a court adopts them, so only time will tell whether the project will accomplish this goal. Nevertheless, one thing is certain. The current law of software transactions, a mish-mash of common law, Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and federal intellectual property law, among other …

Contract Law In Context: The Case Of Software Contracts, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The membership of The American Law Institute unanimously approved the “Principles of the Law of Software Contracts” in May of 2009. In this essay for a symposium in the Wake Forest Law Review, I draw on my experience as Reporter on the ALI project to add my perspective on an interesting general question: Is specialization of contract law wise and, if so, in what contexts? I certainly cannot definitively answer the question of whether in the abstract society is better off with general or specialized law, but my experience in drafting the software rules, along with Associate Reporter, Maureen O'Rourke, …

The Google Book Search Settlement: Ends, Means, And The Future Of Books, James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann

For the past four years, Google has been systematically making digital copies of books in the collections of many major university libraries. It made the digital copies searchable through its web site--you couldn't read the books, but you could at least find out where the phrase you're looking for appears within them. This outraged copyright owners, who filed a class action lawsuit to make Google stop. Then, last fall, the parties to this large class action announced an even larger settlement: one that would give Google a license not only to scan books, but also to sell them.

The settlement …

Rethinking Consideration In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Maureen O'Rourke

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Our fast-paced age of electronic agreements that ostensibly govern transactions as diverse as downloading software, ordering goods, and engaging in collaborative development projects raises questions regarding the suitability of contract law as the appropriate legal framework. While this question arises in many settings, we focus here on the free and open source software (FOSS) movement because of the maturity and success of its model and the ubiquity of its software. We explore in particular whether open source licenses are supported by consideration, and argue that they are, and that open source licenses are contracts. We further argue that a contractual …