Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Australian Band Men At Work To Pay For Copyright Infringement, Jack Korba

Intellectual Property Brief

No abstract provided.

Thailand Thumbs Nose At Ustr, Makes Affordable Aids Treatment Top Priority, Greg Lultschik

Intellectual Property Brief

No abstract provided.

Judge To Inventor: You Can’T Trademark A Circle, Eric Perrot

Intellectual Property Brief

No abstract provided.

Court Closes The Door On Inventors, Open A Window For Business-Method Patents, Kristin Wall

Intellectual Property Brief

No abstract provided.

Whose Burden Is It Anyway? Addressing The Needs Of Content Owners In Dmca Safe Harbors, Greg Janson

Federal Communications Law Journal

Much of today's network neutrality debate addresses concerns that cable providers will limit access to competing Web-based services delivering multimedia content. While proposals to mandate nondiscrimination for all Internet traffic surely will help create a competitive environment where online entertainment providers can prosper, ISP interference is not the only threat. Online entertainment sites that relay user-generated content are threatened by crippling litigation brought by copyright holders for actions taken by third parties using their services. Reliance on the safe harbors provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has, in most cases, proved unsuccessful. This Note addresses the concerns of both …

Traditional Knowledge: Is Perpetual Protection A Good Idea, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Overly Active Corpse Of Red Lion, Thomas W. Hazlett, Sarah Oh, Drew Clark

Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property

No abstract provided.

Even More Complex After All These Years: What The Complexity Of The “How?” Question Of Tailoring Claim Scope Has To Say About The “Who?” Question, Kevin E. Collins

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Life In The Fast Lane: Of Presumptions, Defenses, And Burdens, William Mcgeveran

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Complex Economics And Patent Remedies, John M. Golden

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Markets For Patent Scope, Ted M. Sichelman

IP Theory

A recurring issue in intellectual property theory is how the scope of patent rights affects invention and commercialization. Traditionally, there has been a dichotomous debate: one view stemming from Ed Kitch, promoting broad “prospect”-style patents in the hands of a single inventor, and another view from Robert Merges and Richard Nelson, advocating relatively narrow scope to encourage competition in innovation. More recently, a variety of scholars have set forth more nuanced positions. My thesis here is that the variance in these views can be traced to differing empirical attitudes about how well the market functions relative to a patent system …

The Role Of Patent Eligibility In Policing Claim Scope, Christopher M. Holman

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Formalism, Realism, And Patent Scope, Tun-Jen Chiang

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Substantive Claim Construction As A Patent Scope Lever, Peter Lee

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Patent Claiming In The United States: Central, Peripheral, Or Mongrel?, Martin J. Adelman

IP Theory

No abstract provided.

Imagining The Law: Art, Christine Haight Farley

Contributions to Books

Law’s relations to art--to its creation, its production, and dissemination, its restriction as well as to commercial and contractual agreements about art works—are as multiform and complex as the category of art itself. Acknowledging that there is no discrete body of law that governs art, the author defines art law as “the survey of legal issues raised by art, artist, and the art world” and surveys four central themes: the law as art, the law of art, the law of creativity, and the collision of art and law. Any legal dispute about art usually evokes a plea for special legal …

Eighth Circuit Trademark Opinions, Kenneth L. Port

Faculty Scholarship

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals’ trademark jurisprudence has been truly fair and balanced since the 1946 passage of the Lanham Act. The court has created this fair and balanced jurisprudence by creating firm standards and sticking to them. Although not the most popular circuit in which to find a trademark case, the Eighth Circuit has kept a constant vigil to assure that trademark plaintiffs do not dominate over trademark defendants. This balanced approach to trademark law is consistent with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which recently held that “advertising injury” included trademark infringement, and therefore the defendant’s insurance carrier had …

Grey Literature In Library And Information Studies, Dominic J. Farace, Joachim Schöpfel

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

CONTENTS

Introduction Grey Literature (Farace and Schöpfel)

Part I – Producing, Processing, and Distributing Grey Literature

Section One: Producing and Publishing Grey Literature

Chapter 1 Grey Publishing and the Information Market: A New Look at Value Chains and Business Models (Roosendaal)

Chapter 2 How to assure the Quality of Grey Literature: the Case of Evaluation Reports (Weber)

Chapter 3 Grey Literature produced and published by Universities: A Case for ETDs (Južni)

Section Two: Collecting and Processing Grey Literature

Chapter 4 Collection building with special Regards to Report Literature (Newbold and Grimshaw)

Chapter 5 Institutional Grey Literature in the University Environment …

Technology And Judicial Reason: Digital Copyright, Secondary Liability, And The Problem Of Perspective, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Theories abound about how to understand and explain the development copyright law. Few, however, have focused specifically on the development of secondary liability in digital copyright law. Fewer still have analyzed or theorized the factors that may have driven or influenced that development, particularly judicial reasoning, beyond the obvious point that technology or the Internet has played a role. This essay aims to help fill this gap by investigating the nature of judicial reasoning about technology in secondary liability and digital copyright cases. I will argue that two underlying and competing approaches to technology have deeply influenced judicial reasoning and …

Why Cherry Picking Never Leads To Harmonisation: The Case Of The Limitations On Copyright Under Directive 2001/29/Ec, Lucie Guibault

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The article examines whether the norms laid down in the Directive in relation to the exceptions and limitations on copyright and related rights can be conducive to a sensible degree of harmonisation across the European Union. Before discussing the degree of harmonisation achieved so far by the Directive, the first part gives a short overview of the main characteristics of the list of exceptions and limitations contained in Article 5 of the Directive. A comprehensive review of the implementation of each limitation by the Member States is beyond the scope of this article. The following section takes a closer look …

The Canadian Public Domain: What, Where, And To What End?, Carys J. Craig

Articles & Book Chapters

This essay explores the important body of scholarship that has emerged on the substance, nature, and role of the public domain in intellectual property law. I offer some concrete definitions of the public domain in the copyright context, identify some ongoing sources of debate in the literature, and highlight some particularly significant voices in public domain discourse. In doing so, my aim is twofold: first, I mean to present a reasonably comprehensive but concise review of the academic public domain movement, which has been directed towards substantiating and politicizing the concept of the public domain, second, I hope to re-situate …

User-Generated Content Sites And Section 512 Of The Us Copyright Act, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter considers the liability of entrepreneurs of ‘user-generated content’ (UGC) sites. These immensely popular fora, such as YouTube and My Space, enable their participants to post and view a great variety of content, not all of it in fact generated by the posting user. The legislative compromise worked out between telecommunications providers and content owners in the 1998 ‘Digital Millennium Copyright Act’ provides the statutory framework, at once insulating the operators of UGC sites from debilitating copyright sanctions, while still affording meaningful relief to copyright owners. The statutory criteria to qualify for the section 512(c) safe harbor are …

The Pragmatic Incrementalism Of Common Law Intellectual Property, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property is today thought to be principally of statutory origin. Discussions of the subject invariably revolve around a close scrutiny of the federal statutes involved. Indeed, the frequency with which Congress amends the patent and copyright statutes seems to leave little doubt that it alone determines intellectual property's precise content and coverage. Nevertheless, there exists a rather robust body of state law that is almost entirely the creation of state courts and is directed at creating entitlements in information, ideas, expression, goodwill, one's image, and other related intangibles. These rights regimes are in turn collectively referred to as “common …

Determining Uniformity Within The Federal Circuit By Measuring Dissent And En Banc Review, Christopher A. Cotropia

Law Faculty Publications

This Article adds to the empirical literature examining how the Federal Circuit treats patent-law issues internally by comparing the decision making of the Federal Circuit with that of other courts of appeals. It does so by measuring two statistics from overall written opinions: the percentage of dissents and the percentage of en bane reviews. The data is taken from the Third, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, District of Columbia, and Federal Circuits between 1998 and 2009. The data in the study show that the Federal Circuit has the second-highest percentage of dissents among the circuits studied (behind only the Ninth Circuit) and …

Who's Afraid Of The Berne Convention?, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

A few months ago, I wrote an essay for this series that argued for reinstatement of formalities as a prerequisite to copyright protection. I left unaddressed one of the main objections to such a system: the fact that international law is unfriendly to formalities. I address that objection here.

The most pertinent international law is the Berne Convention, a multilateral treaty that dates to the 1800s. Since 1908, Article 5(2) of the treaty has prevented any signatory nation from requiring formalities such as registration and notice as a condition of copyright protection. It was the United States’ accession to the …

The Grammar Of Trademarks, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

How do people talk when they talk about trademarks? If trademarks have
become, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg suggests, our “new global tongue,”
perhaps we should pay greater attention to the grammar we use when we
talk about them. We use “Coke” to refer to the Coca-Cola beverage in the
North, and “coke” to refer to any kind of soda in the South, yet we still
manage to get the drinks we desire. We use trademarks as verbs—we
“xerox” a document or “tivo” a television program—without losing sight
of the fact that “Xerox” and “TiVo” are brands of particular products.
We …

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Robert Michaux

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present the fourth issue of the 2009–2010 academic year. In this issue, we explore the ever expanding duties of counsel responsible for electronically stored information, the application of 3D imaging technology to improve arson investigation, and the need for expanding copyright protection over the lawless Darknet.

The Darknet: A Digital Copyright Revolution, Jessica A. Wood

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

We are in the midst of a digital revolution. In this “Age of Peer Production,” armies of amateur participants demand the freedom to rip, remix, and share their own digital culture. Aided by the newest iteration of file sharing networks, digital media users now have the option to retreat underground, by using secure, private, and anonymous file sharing networks, to share freely and breathe new life into digital media. These underground networks, collectively termed “the Darknet[,] will grow in scope, resilience, and effectiveness in direct proportion to [increasing] digital restrictions the public finds untenable.” The Darknet has been called the …

Introduction: Contains Cover, Table Of Contents, Letter From The Editor, And Masthead, Francis C. Oroszlan

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

The Richmond Journal of Law and Technology is proud to present the first issue of the 2010–2011 academic year. This issue addresses topics ranging across the legal and technological spectrums, and tackles subject matter at the forefront and future of legal debate.

Rca V. Whiteman: Contested Authorship, Copyright, And The Racial Politics Of The Fight For Property Rights In Musical Recordings In The 1930s, Kurt Newman

Studio for Law and Culture

Between the Progressive Era and World War II, African American jazz music became the source of big profits for some white entrepreneurs in the United States. The encounter between whites and jazz was both a propertization and a privatization of African American group resources. While new technologies of recording and radio broadcasting were critical factors facilitating these cultural enclosures, the sine qua non was the embeddedness of American intellectual property law in the logic of white supremacy. In this paper, I focus on the popular jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, best known to most contemporary legal scholars as the defendant in …