Copyright and Its Rewards, Foreseen and Unforeseen
The Harvard Law Review rarely publishes articles on copyright law, so there was considerable buzz among intellectual property academics when the Review accepted a piece from a young scholar who had not yet even joined a law school faculty. Shyam Balganesh’s Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives is an interesting, carefully reasoned piece of scholarship. Pursuing the dominant, instrumentalist justification of copyright, Professor Balganesh makes a simple proposal: if the exclusive rights of copyright are justified because they create an ex ante incentive, then the exclusive rights — and the financial yields that follow — should be limited to the uses of the copyrighted work that were foreseen by the creator at the time of the work’s creation.
Loading...