Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

These Boots Were Made For Copyrighting: A Comparative Analysis Of Copyright Protection For The Shoe Industry In The European Union And United States And How It Is Impacting The “Dupe” Market, Annalee Gunderson

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

Copyright protection for fashion designs has always been slim, especially when it comes to shoes. Times seem to be changing as calls for increased protection in the industry have generated a new focus on changing the nature of copyright laws to better protect designs and designers. Two of the world’s fashion meccas, the United States and European Union, have their own different approaches to this issue. In the last decade, each territory’s most influential court, the United States Supreme Court in Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands and the Court of Justice in the European Union in Cofemel v. G–Star Raw, …

Framing The Dialogue By Revisiting Fundamental Principles For Indirect Copyright Liability In China: History, Economics And Tort Law Analysis, Xiao Ma

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

The issue of indirect copyright liability has been debated for many years, particularly with the rise of technological advancements like cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). China has frequently revised its laws and regulations to address copyright–related cases, often drawing from the experience of the common law system. However, this has sparked stakeholder disagreement on implementing filtering obligations for online services, raising the duty of care for online intermediaries, and whether safe harbor rules are still relevant.

This Article argues that the current regime of digital copyright liability rests on three pillars: historical, economic, and tort law theories. The author …

Trips, World Trade, Social Progress, And The Public Interest, Hannibal Travis

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement arrived in the 1990s amidst great fanfare for a suite of comprehensive reforms to a trading system that had failed the world time and again. It bore a title that sounded less like a pact on outsourcing or multinational corporatism and more like a fair trade pledge for products of the mind and the personality. TRIPs was introduced as a pillar of the New World Order, a post-Cold War vision in which the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Chinese economy would augur an era of harmonious commerce. …

Greenhat’S Greenlight To The Cftc: The Case For A Jurisdictional Shift Of Financial Transmission Rights From The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission To The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Timothy K. Shaw Ii

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

Regional Transmission Organizations and Independent System Operators are a relatively new platform to buy and sell wholesale electricity and transmission service of that electricity. These groundbreaking organizations have been around since 1996 after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) issued Order 888. FERC regulates the physical electricity wholesale sale and transmission service market managed by a Regional Transmission Organization (“RTO”) or Independent System Operator (“ISO”),through its Federal Power Act mandate. Many RTOs and ISOs offer a product called a Financial Transmission Right (“FTR”). Traditionally, FTRs assist the holder by providing price certainty, or a hedge, in the capacity market. This …

Choosing The Best Entity For Investments Trading After Understanding The Tax Limitations And Restrictions, Ray A. Knight, Joseph Lakatos

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

The trading of various securities is subject to market rules. However, when securities trading is completed within a business entity, the entity is subject to tax limitations and restrictions. The tax benefits cannot be the dominant purpose for the entity structure; economic substance including profit motive and business purpose for each transaction must be able to be shown.

The trading of investment securities must be housed in the right entity to gain the best economic results as well as to minimize the tax burden. The entity selection process must first consider the characteristics and nature of the securities (e.g., currencies, …

Volume 23 - Front Matter

DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Iconic Voices And Ai: The Legal Battle Against Voice Cloning, Ezra Ashkenazi

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

In a recent interview with The Guardian, the legendary Hollywood actor, Morgan Freeman, expressed his distaste with AI’s use of his voice. Freeman went on to say, “I get paid for doing stuff like that, so if you’re gonna do it without me, you’re robbing me.” Freeman went further and said that his lawyers “[A]re already ‘very, very busy’ tackling unauthorized artificial intelligence uses of his voice.” While that is the last we have heard from Freeman and his legal team on the matter, this article will analyze the potential legal arguments one can bring to enjoin a company’s …

Impact Of The 23andme Bankruptcy On Preserving The Public Benefit Of Scientific Data, Jonathan E. Lotempio Jr., Chistopher R. Donohue, Jonatahan D. Moreno, Ana Santos Rutschman, Joshua Sarnoff, Michael S. Sinha, Thomas Stoeger, Jorge L. Contreras

Faculty Publications

The bankruptcy of 23andMe was an inflection point for the direct-to-consumer genetics market. Although the privacy of consumer data has been highlighted by many as a concern, we discuss another key tension in this case: the corporate enclosure of scientific data that has considerable potential value for biomedical research and public health.

Lynk Labs: How The Least-Vetted Documents Destroy Issued Patents, Dennis D. Crouch

Faculty Publications

The Lynk Labs petition presents the Supreme Court with an opportunity to restore the temporal coherence that Congress built into § 311(b)'s evidentiary framework. By treating "printed publication" as synonymous with any reference that eventually becomes public, the Federal Circuit has transformed IPR into a forum where unexamined, abandoned patent applications can destroy patents that survived the very scrutiny those applications failed to complete. The Court should grant certiorari and hold that a printed publication must be printed and published before the critical date to serve as the basis for an IPR challenge.

Generational Impact: How U.S. Government Generative A.I. Use Reinvigorates Copyright-Based Takings Concerns, Sophia Tully

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Note argues (1) that the unique character of government copyright infringement supports a copyright holder’s use of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, as opposed to reliance on the Copyright Act for downstream Gen A.I. suits; (2) that Gen A.I. developers may wage similar claims once asserting authorship rights and copyright over their outputs; and (3) that the viability of federal government copyright infringement as a regulatory taking could change the way legal actors deal with copyrighted material. More modestly assessed, an answer on whether the Takings Clause protects copyrights would offer much needed guideposts as intellectual property …

Did Copyright Fail Music Artists?, Rachel Landy

Articles

Music soundtracks our lives, supports over two million domestic jobs annually, and is listened to more than ever before. The record industry is thriving, having made over $17 billion in 2024. Yet, many professional artists are barely surviving. Artists signed to record deals lament royalty payments that amount to a fraction of a penny for each stream of their songs. So where is all the money going, and who, or what, is to blame? Public rhetoric and existing legislative proposals implicate copyright as a guilty party. But are those concerns justified?

This Article unpacks the music supply chain. It builds …

Balancing A Circular Economy With Brand Protection: How Luxury Fashion Houses Can Regulate Upcycling Through Trademark Licensing, Olivia Dinkins

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The growing demand for sustainable fashion, particularly among younger consumers, has led to a surge in upcycling practices that repurpose pre-existing materials, often featuring luxury brand trademarks. While upcycling may support a circular economy and artistic innovation, it poses complex legal challenges for trademark owners, especially concerning consumer confusion, dilution, and the use of counterfeit materials. This Note explores the intersection of trademark law and sustainability in the luxury fashion sector, highlighting the tension between environmental responsibility and intellectual property protection. This Note first analyzes the way various courts have confronted these issues and the limitations of doctrines like first …

Rethinking The Key Role Of Private Antitrust Enforcement, Filippo Lancieri

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article focuses on the institutional design of American competition policy. It argues that any long-term effective revival of U.S. antitrust policy requires a better acknowledgement of the key and irreplaceable role played by private litigation and proposes a rethink of private anti-trust enforcement policy.

To unpack the nuanced interconnection between public and private competition enforcement, the Article begins by tracing the rise and fall of private antitrust. It builds on a novel, hand-coded, and comprehensive analysis of the entire Supreme Court antitrust track record—all 474 decisions over 130 years—to outline how an ideologically …

Copyright In The Generative Ai Era: Reimagining Creativity And Fairness, Huijuan Peng, David Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the need for copyright reform in response to the transformative impact of generative artificial intelligence. It identifies key legal challenges, including the absence of clear criteria for authorship and the infringement risks associated with both inputs (training of large language models) and outputs (AI-generated content). The authors argue that two overarching themes—creativity and fairness—will drive the future development of copyright law. Through a comparative analysis of how three jurisdictions—the United States, China, and Singapore—have addressed these challenges, the article offers practical and forward-looking insights for navigating the complex copyright landscape of the generative AI era.

This article …

Copyright, Incentives, And Popular Music Composition, Glynn S. Lunney Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The rise of file sharing and the subsequent collapse in sales of recorded music offer a rare glimpse into a counterfactual world where copyright, for a time, was weakened. Comparing creative output before and after this exogenous shock allows us to test empirically whether incentives to copyright owners were correlated with creative output. In this article, I extend previous work on this issue from recording artists to songwriters and search for a correlation between incentives and popular music composition. In particular, I test three hypotheses. First, I test whether more incentives were associated with more or better popular musical compositions. …

More Than Medals: Protecting The Olympic Brand, Olivia M. Zykoff

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical for brand protection. When a country is given the power to host an event as grand as the Olympic Games, it takes on immense responsibility to protect all aspects of the Games ahead. Importantly, as an international event that travels to a new host country every two years, the Olympic brand requires centralized protection, to be overseen by a leading body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This Note reviews the foundational protections given to the Olympic brand by the IOC and examines the country-specific treatment and protections granted to Olympic properties at …

Frankenstein Sinatra: The Argument For A Federal Postmortem Right Of Publicity In The Ai-Era, Ian Samide

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Artificial Intelligence has fundamentally revolutionized the way media is generated and presents new and unique threats to the right of publicity. By enabling users to create high-quality, realistic deep fakes of individuals’ voices, images, or likenesses, Artificial Intelligence has created novel risks to the right of publicity. Additionally, right of publicity is currently governed by state law. This system is proving to be flawed in the internet age, as content is rarely confined to a single jurisdiction, resulting in unpredictability and juridical disputes. This note argues that a federal right of publicity is necessary to regulate Artificial Intelligence effectively and …

The Supreme Court Is About To Hear A Case That Could Rewrite Internet Access, Michael Goodyear

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Did The Dodgers Ruin Baseball? Why Mlb’S Antitrust Exemption Stands In The Way Of A More Competitive League, Jack Ross

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal (AELJ) Blog

After the Los Angeles Dodgers’ series win over the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, Dodgers manager, Dave Roberts, remembered that, “[b]efore the season started, they said, ‘The Dodgers are ruining baseball … Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball. Let’s go!’” Because of this win, Roberts and the Dodgers made good on their promise by going on to win their second straight World Series. No, the Dodgers did not ruin baseball, but their dominance is representative of the growing disparity in competition between large and small-market teams.

Readers Are Authors, Especially In The Ai Age, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Abraham Drassinower updates the argument in his 2015 book What’s Wrong With Copying (Harvard University Press) with an elaboration of the nature of copyright’s public domain: it is a domain of unauthorized yet lawful copying. As in his book, Drassinower explains that the public domain is not properly understood as a problem of balancing between copyright’s public benefits and private rewards. Instead, he understands the public domain as part of authorship and thus inseparable from copyright’s construction.