Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Building A Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution In Libraries, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law libraries are losing ground in the effort to preserve information in the digital age. In part, this is due declining budgets, user needs, and a caution born from the great responsibility libraries feel to ensure future access instead of selecting a form that may not survive. That caution, though, has caused others, such as Google, to fill the silence with their vision. Libraries must stand and contribute actively to the creation of digital collections if we expect a voice in future discussion. This article presents a vision of the start of a collaborative, digital academic law library, one that …

Negativing Invention, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

Since 1952, the patent statute has forbidden courts from discriminating against, or “negativing,” inventions according to how they were made, be it “long toil and experimentation” or a “flash of genius.” Now, in addressing whether an invention is “obvious,” courts must only examine whether the invention was obvious according to the arts pertinent to that invention — the “analogous” rather than “nonanalogous” arts. This article shows that this dichotomy has actually promoted method-of-invention discrimination in patent law because the subjectivity of the analogous art inquiry has increasingly “analogized” wide fields of prior art as technology has progressed. This, in turn, …

Competition Within Intellectual Property Regimes: The Instance Of Patent Rights, Rudolph J.R. Peritz

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

A Right Is Born: Celebrity, Property, And Postmodern Lawmaking, Mark Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article challenges the standard account of the creation of the right of publicity. In the legal literature, the prevailing narrative is of the right of publicity being intimately linked to the commodification of celebrity. Ultimately, however, there is more to the story of the right of publicity than the decision to protect something of economic value. It took decades after it had become clear that celebrities could be valuable commercial spokespersons for lawmakers to agree to make the right inheritable, separate from the dignitary right of privacy, and potentially applicable to any economic, secondary use that invoked the celebrity …

The Elephantine Google Books Settlement, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The genius - some would say the evil genius - of the proposed Google Books settlement was the way it fuses legal categories. The settlement raised important class action, copyright, and antitrust issues, among others. But just as an elephant is not merely a trunk plus legs plus a tail, the settlement was more than the sum of the individual issues it raised. These “issues” were really just different ways of describing a single, overriding issue of law and policy - a new way to concentrate an intellectual property industry.

In this essay, I argue for the critical importance of …

Overcoming The "Impossible Issue" Of Nonobviousness In Design Patents, Janice M. Mueller, Daniel Harris Brean

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Parchment, Pixels, & Personhood: User Rights And The Ip (Identity Politics) Of Ip (Intellectual Property), John Tehranian

University of Colorado Law Review

This Article challenges copyright's prevailing narrative on personhood, which has typically focused on the identity interests that authors enjoy in their creative output. Instead, the analysis explores the personhood interests that consumers possess in copyrighted works. Drawing on a wide range of examples-from flag burning as copyright infringement, the "Kookaburra"c ontroversy, and the crowd-sourced origins of the Serenity Prayer to the reported innumeracy of the enigmatic Piraha Amazonians, the apocryphal source of ancient Alexandria's Royal Library and the unusually fragile nature of digital media-the Article advances a Hegelian refutation to intellectual property maximalism and a theory of copyright that recognizes …

Masthead, Volume 2 Issue 1 (2011)

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Pay Per Click: Keyword Advertising And The Search For Limitations Of Online Trademark Infringement Liability, Thomas H. Watson

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Masthead, Volume 2 Issue 2 (2011)

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Masthead, Volume 3 Issue 1 (2011)

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

When Everyone Is The Judge's Pal: Facebook Friendship And The Appearance Of Impropriety Standard, Daniel Smith

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Volume 2 Issue 1 (2011), Journal Of Law, Technology, & The Internet

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Volume 2 Issue 2 (2011), Case Western Reserve Journal Of Law, Technology & The Internet

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Short-Sighted Value Of Inefficiency: Why We Should Mind The Gap In The Reimbursement Of Outpatient Prescription Drugs, The, Jennifer L. Herbst

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of The Producer-Novelist: Shifting Perceptions Of Authorship In Transmedia Publishing, Michael Jon Anderson

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

2 Obscenity Standards, 1 Neat Solution: How Geotargeting Extends Traditional Obscenity Law To The Internet, Mason J. Kjar

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

No abstract provided.

Intergenerational Progress, Brett Frischmann, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This Essay prepared for the Wisconsin Law Review’s symposium on Intergenerational Equity lays the groundwork for a broader understanding of the goals of IP law in the United States by arguing that there is room for a normative commitment to intergenerational justice. First, we argue that the normative basis for IP laws need not be utilitarianism. The Constitution does not require that we conceive of IP in utilitarian terms or that we aim only to promote efficiency or maximize value. To the contrary, the IP Clause leaves open a number of ways to conceive of Progress; courts’ and scholars’ overwhelming …

Strategic Spillovers, Daniel B. Kelly

Journal Articles

The conventional problem with externalities is well known: Parties often generate harm as an unintended byproduct of using their property. This Article examines situations in which parties may generate harm purposely, in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting. Such “strategic spillovers” have received relatively little attention, but the problem is a perennial one. From the “livery stable scam” in Chicago to “pollution entrepreneurs” in China, parties may engage in externality-generating activities they otherwise would not have undertaken, or increase the level of harm given that they are engaging in such activities, to profit through bargaining or subsidies. This …

Culture, Creativity, & Copyright, David A. Simon

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

Recent literature in copyright law has attacked the traditional theory that economic incentives motivate people to create. Although the onslaught of criticism has come from different directions, it all shares a similar goal. to move copyright law in a direction that reflects actual creative processes and motivations. This Article adds to and diverts from these accounts, arguing that creativity may be a product of memes: units of culture, analogous to genes, that replicate by human imitation.

A memetic theory of creativity focuses on memes as the reference point for thinking about creativity. Under this view, the creator is a brain …

Joining Or Changing The Conversation - Catholic Social Thought And Intellectual Property, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Music To Everyone's Ears: Binding Mediation In Music Rights Disputes, Matthew H. Ormsbee

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Litigation has been the mainstay of copyright disputes since America's earliest copyright statute first permitted a cause of action for copyright infringement in 1790. While alternative dispute resolution ("ADR") has become more prevalent in other areas of the law, many copyright attorneys and their clients do not typically consider ADR processes a viable option because these processes are still relatively new to copyright law.

This Note proposes greater use of binding mediation, a specialized ADR process, in music rights disputes, which are fundamentally copyright infringement disputes. Section I discusses the background of copyright litigation and modern application of ADR in …

The "Hot News" Misappropriation Doctrine, The Crumbling Newspaper Industry, And Fair Use As Friend And Foe: What Is Necessary To Preserve "Hot News"?, Jeena Moon

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Gray-Market Goods And Copyright's Gray Area, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

Copyright law generally gives authors no control over the aftermarket for their goods. Suppose I write a book, and I sell you a copy of it. You are free to resell the book, or lend it to a friend, or give it away. That’s because as long as your copy is “lawfully made under this title” (that is, made with my authorization under U.S. law), then copyright has nothing to say about its further distribution – who owns it, who sells it to whom, etc.

This notion is known as the first sale doctrine. It is so named because at …

The Dmca And Repeat Infringers, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

The recent agreement between big media companies and big Internet service providers (ISPs) concerning online copyright infringement has the law and technology world abuzz. ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to implement a system under which subscribers who repeatedly and illegally download copyrighted content will have their Internet access impeded and maybe even terminated.

This is big news, and it will probably receive more attention in this IP Viewpoints series. But the purpose of this column is to put this agreement in context, because much of what the companies have agreed to do appears to be …

Copyrights And Creditors: What Will Be Left Of The King Of Pop's Legacy?, Jessica Bozarth

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Moving Beyond New Kids And Century 21: A New Test For Nominative Fair Use In The Domain Name Context, Robert Isabella

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Adventures Of 'Superman': A Narrative Worth Mediating, Jeffrey Zeman

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Summer, 2013. The world will believe, again, a man can fly. Most likely, anyway. Maybe. Fingers crossed.

The rights to Superman and his stories are the subject of a long-developing and heated dispute between publisher DC Comics ("DC") and the estate of Jerry Siegel, co-creator of the iconic character. While a much-talked-about reboot of the movie franchise enters preproduction, the latest round of lawsuits involves DC suing the Siegel family's attorney. The publisher claims attorney Marc Toberoff has wrongfully interfered with "contractual rights and other interests" by advising the families of Siegel and his cocreator, Joe Schuster, to reclaim the …

The Present (User-Generated Crisis) Is The Past (1909 Copyright Act): An Essay Theorizing The "Traditional Contours Of Copyright" Language, W. Ron Gard, Elizabeth Townsend Gard

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Reframing Indigenous Cultural Artifacts Disputes: An Intellectual Property-Based Approach, Cortelyou C. Kenney

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.