Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

Copyright Law: Essential Cases And Materials, Alfred Yen, Joseph Liu

Joseph P. Liu

Normalizing Copyright In The Electronic Environment, Vicenç Feliú

Vicenç Feliú

This article is an update of an article written by Professor Ann Bartow in 2003 entitled Electrifying Copyright Norms and Making Cyberspace More Like a Book. In Electrifying Bartow examined the social norms applied when using copyrighted works in the analog world, she explains how social norms develop, coalesce, and become de facto rules of behavior. She proposed that, at the time the article was written, real world copyright norms were not making their way into cyberspace because copyright holders were using their own normative view to exercise control of works embodied in electronic formats. She focused on non-profit libraries …

When Real People Become Fictional: The Collision Of Trademark, Copyright, And Publicity Rights In Online Stories About Celebrities, Stacey M. Lantagne

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

"Fanficion is frequently defined as the writing of fiction involving the characters or setting of someone else’s creation. However, there is a subset of fanfiction that is known as Real Person Fiction, or RPF. This subset writes stories not about other people’s fictional creations but about real people, whether they be hockey players or movie stars, and it has long been the scene of heated debate in the fan community. Some fans who readily and enthusiastically engage with fanfiction draw strict “squick” lines about RPF and call it “creepy” and “disturbing.” "Perhaps for this reason, scholars have paid little attention …

Copyright Competition: The Shifting Boundaries Of Convergence Between U.S. And Canadian Copyright Regimes In The Digital Age, David Amar

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The great copyright debate between protecting creators and encouraging information-sharing has always been a contentious and likely unresolvable battle. However, with the crafting of new legislation designed to rein in unscrupulous sharing in the age of online sharing and piracy, the discussion grows ever more heated. The economies of Canada and the U.S. have always been intertwined, and in a copyright context, this has never been clearer. Since Canada began to appear on the U.S. “Special 301” piracy reports, the two nations have been locked into a system of promulgating ever-more restrictive copyright policy, the logical extreme of which may …