reference library

This article presents a brief update through 2019 of the author’s previous quantitative study of all reported federal court opinions that applied the Copyright Act’s four-factor test for copyright fair…
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Commercial publishing houses continue to make unbounded profits while exploiting the free labour of researchers through peer review. If publishers are to be compensated financially for the value that they…
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Creativity and innovation are flourishing in the entertainment industries. But the growing threat of streaming piracy presents a major challenge to the continued vitality of legitimate online video services like…
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Copyright law, which promotes the creation of cultural and artistic works by protecting these works from being copied, excuses infringement that is deemed to be a fair use. Whether an…
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Recently, state governments have begun to claim a copyright interest in their official published codes of law, in particular arguing that ancillary materials such as annotations to the statutory text…
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This paper exploits exogenous variation in the adoption of copyrights – as a result of the timing of Napoléon’s military victories in Italy – to examine the effects of copyrights…
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This Article argues that U.S. copyright law provides a competitive advantage in the global race for innovation policy because it permits researchers to conduct computational analysis — text and data…
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This paper exploits variation in the adoption of copyright laws – due to idiosyncratic variation in the timing of Napoléon’s military victories – to investigate the causal effects of copyright…
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Forty years ago, Justice Stephen Breyer expressed serious doubts about the economic soundness of extending copyright protection to computer programs in his seminal article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright. A…
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We study reward-based crowdfunding campaigns, a new class of dynamic contribution games where consumption is exclusive. Two types of backers participate: buyers want to consume the product while donors just…
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In recent years, there has been a growing push towards state legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that…
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“The 2017 Edition reflects the following principal developments: Trade Secrets: Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016, one of the most momentous changes in the history of trade…
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Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper…
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Intellectual Property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college…
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One of the great advantages of digital content has been that for the last forty years, people have had access to whatever content they want whenever they wanted it. That…
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Historically, and consistently, direct copyright infringement has been understood to be a strict liability tort. Unfortunately, some recent lower court decisions addressing infringement of copyrighted content on online platforms could…
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The United States government is taking a targeted, practical, and comprehensive approach toward addressing intellectual property policy and strategy. The goal is to ensure a level playing field for American…
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This paper raises three issues on the relationship between intellectual property and inequality. The first is a simple logical point. Patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property are public…
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This symposium piece first seeks to unpack the relationship between intellectual property infringement and property offenses, and then to understand how the connection between the two has informed when the…
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This Article critiques the excessive reliance placed on copyright treatises by judges, lawyers, and even scholars and policy makers; explains why treatises in principle are not a legitimate source of…
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The age-old clash between celebrities and paparazzi has reached a new high. With the trend moving towards the monetization of social media, evolution in mobile camera technology, and lighting-fast sharing…
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Machine learning requires the copying of extraordinary amounts of copyrighted material. That copying should generally be permitted. Most ML systems copy works not to consume the expression copyright law protects,…
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As digital networks emerge as the dominant means of distributing copyrighted works, the first sale doctrine is increasingly marginalized. The limitations first sale places on the exclusive right of distribution…
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This article explores whether authors can dedicate their copyright to the public domain. Such dedications are becoming increasingly relevant as authors now see the expansion of the public domain as…
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This article first outlines the relevant fundamental rights as guaranteed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention of Human Rights that are affected by an obligation…
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The provisions at issue in the draft Restatement of Copyright Law on which ALI membership will vote at ALI’s upcoming annual meeting are central to copyright doctrine and have been…
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We analyse whether research funding contests promote co-authorship. Our analysis combines Scopus publication records with data on applications to the Marsden Fund, the premiere source of funding for basic research…
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The purpose of this white paper is to provide background and guidance to Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries in the United States that wish to reconsider interlibrary loan…
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This project provides the first comprehensive empirical study of copyright registrations and renewals over the entire scope of American History since the Constitution. Previous pieces began the process of answering…
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When Spotify went public earlier this year, the company faced a $1.6 billion lawsuit alleging that it was streaming such hits as Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” the Doors’ “Light My…
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Following the Supreme Court’s 1991 Feist decision, intellectual property and Constitutional law scholars have debated whether extra-copyright protection of databases can be established by Congress under its Commerce Clause power….
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This Article proposes that, as a copyright work ages, the scope of fair use, especially as to derivative works and uses, should expand. This is because the “market” for a…
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Let us consider three ways in which legal academics may have missed the mark. The first, discussed in Part II, bears on the formation of copyright norms for the Internet…
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Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive data set of copyright…
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Before mid-2003, the recording industry’s legal attack against peer-to-peer (P2P) systems was limited to the purveyors of P2P. End users were left untouched, the conventional wisdom being that it’s not…
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American copyright law has a widely recognized prohibition against the copyrighting of titles, short phrases, and single words. Despite this bar, effective advocacy has often pushed courts into recognizing independent…
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This article describes how historical claims frequently made in arguments about the propertization of copyright are incomplete, focusing on three examples: that intellectual property is a much older phrase than…
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It is black letter doctrine in copyright law that facts are not copyrightable: facts are discovered, not created – so they will always lack the originality needed for copyright protection….
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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…
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A battle is waging in the media & entertainment industry. No longer is it only legal offerings competing against each other for market share, they now face a formidable foe…
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This is a reproduction of John Locke’s 1694(-5) memorandum opposing renewal of the Licensing Act, along with a short introduction. In the memorandum, Locke strongly attacks the monopoly held by…
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Following work published in 2006, this article explores the history of the phrase ‘intellectual property’ as it was used in the 19th century and early 20th century by jurists speaking…
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This Article explores the interaction between copyright law and photography, the 19th century technological development that most challenged copyright’s conceptual underpinnings. Prior to this article, neither courts nor commentators have…
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This paper was presented at a symposium at the University of San Diego in 2012. After providing a brief historical review of international efforts to establish intellectual property rights over…
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In 1994, the United States established laws prohibiting the making and distribution of “bootleg” recordings of live music concerts. While strongly criticized by many commentators, these provisions establishing a “right…
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This article discusses what has arguably been the world’s greatest naturally occurring experiment in cultural production without copyright: the burgeoning audiovisual industry of Nigeria, aka “Nollywood.” Although Nigeria has a…
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The manuscript explores how U.S. fair use – a “standard” in a world of statutory copyright rules – has become an arena of ideological struggle over IP policy. At the…
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Is our copyright system basically fair? Does it exacerbate or ameliorate the skewed distribution of wealth in our society? Does it do anything at all for disempowered people, people at…
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Controversies often arise at the interfaces where intellectual property (“IP”) law meets other topics in law and economics, such as property law, contract law, and antitrust law. Participants in the…
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In this article we report on the results of an experiment we performed to determine whether transactions in intellectual property (IP) are subject to the valuation anomalies commonly referred to…
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Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what…
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Digital technologies for sharing creative goods create new opportunities for copyright infringement and challenge established enforcement methods. We establish several important facts about the nature of copyright infringement and efforts…
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Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are…
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Over the last three centuries, a particular model of copyright law has evolved in the United Kingdom. Under this “dematerialised” model, the law’s attention is directed towards an immaterial, malleable…
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Copyright law provides an excellent case study with which to study and evaluate Harold Demsetz’s theory of property rights. Regardless of how one feels about the relationship between property and…
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Copyright has an innovation problem. Judicial decisions, private enforcement, and public dialogue ignore innovation and overemphasize the harms of copyright infringement. Just to pick one example, “piracy,” “theft,” and “rogue…
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Debates over economic policy are often framed as conservatives supporting market-oriented policies, while progressives support government interventions. However, there are many market-oriented policies that can lead to more equality, an…
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Clothing designs can be beautiful. But they are also functional. Fashion’s dual nature sits uneasily in intellectual property law, and its treatment by copyright, trademark, and design patent laws has…
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Digitization has reached things. This shift promises to alter the business and legal landscape for a range of industries. Digitization has already disrupted copyright-based industries and laws. As cost barriers…
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Though a primary goal of intellectual property law is to promote creativity in technology and the arts, intellectual property doctrine pays remarkably little attention to psychology research on how to…
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In this paper we raise questions concerning the widely accepted proposition that economic efficiency requires that copyright protection be limited in its duration (often shorter than the current term). We…
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In this Article, we offer both a legal and a pragmatic framework for defending against copyright trolls. Lawsuits alleging online copyright infringement by John Doe defendants have accounted for roughly…
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Intellectual property is a critical driver of economic prosperity. But there is a serious problem that our government needs to address to enhance the protection of IP and, thereby, to…
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Despite having put authors at the forefront of expansionary rhetoric for generations, copyright can’t seem to find a way of actually getting them paid. At the same time, current approaches…
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Copyright was originally intended to serve creators as an engine of free expression, protecting them from the interference of others and from all risk of censorship. To this end, a…
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We investigate the impact of reporting regulation on corporate innovation activity. Exploiting thresholds in Europe’s regulation and a major enforcement reform in Germany, we find that forcing a greater share…
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The process of authorship, however, is more equivocal than that romantic model admits. To say that every new work is in some sense based on the works that preceded it…
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“Suing actual infringers is passe in copyright law. In the digital environment, the real stakes lie in suing those who facilitate infringement by others. There is of course a good…
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In this paper we scrutinize the moral case for copyright and patent laws and find it wanting. “Intellectual property” is a misleading description of those laws in their current form;…
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Artists have always loved to hate the art market. They want to sell their work, but only on their own terms. Unfortunately, they usually lack the means to explain what…
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The United States (‘US’) extended most copyright terms by 20 years in 1998, and has since exported that extension via ‘free trade’ agreements to countries including Australia and Canada. A…
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This Article explores how copyright law addressed the issue of innocent infringement in its early years. Part I discusses how copyright law, from its beginnings in England in 1709 and…
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Suing actual infringers is passe in copyright law. In the digital environment, the real stakes lie in suing those who facilitate infringement by others. There is of course a good…
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Why should a property interest exist in an intangible item? In recent years, arguments over intellectual property have often divided proponents – who emphasize the importance of providing incentives for…
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Copyright infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, but may also reveal demand. Motivated by this fact, we run a field experiment in which we contact firms that are…
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This paper studies the effects of the USPTO’s patent secrecy program in World War II, under which approximately 11,200 U.S. patent applications were issued secrecy orders which halted examination and…
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This Article advocates the restoration of the natural law to our copyright jurisprudence. Although eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers were keenly aware of copyright’s natural law dimensions, modern copyright jurisprudence…
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Taking works off copyright promotes their availability, but it also allows generic entry to dissipate producer surplus. This paper examines the effect of a copyright on the availability and price…
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Libertarians are inclined to view property as best dealt with through contract. They are hostile to IP rights in general, and copyright and patent rights in particular, because these aren’t…
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The 1976 Copyright Act inextricably mediates our relationship with cyberspace and new media. Yet three decades have passed since the Act went into effect, and without dispute, tremendous economic, technological,…
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Part I introduces general Lockean concepts, focusing on the impacts of the nonrivalry of intangible goods on the common and the waste prohibition. Part II applies Lockean concepts in an…
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Defenders of strong intellectual property rights or of a non-utilitarian basis for those rights often turn to Locke for support. This paper criticizes that move. My major claim is twofold:…
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My project in this Article is to examine the notion that people might deserve to own the products of their intellectual labor in an especially strong way-stronger than any way…
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The optimal term of copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. Based on a novel approach we derive an explicit formula which characterises the optimal…
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Recorded music revenue has fallen sharply since Napster’s appearance, by about 70 percent in North America and Europe, raising a serious question about the viability of continued investment in new…
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For years, university administrators have faced a growing challenge: fighting copyright infringement on campus networks. Confronting this challenge has not been easy and neither has choosing the right tool for…
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The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing is entwined, for better or worse, with copyright law. Copyright owners have already targeted not only the makers of file-sharing clients like Napster, Scour, Audiogalaxy,…
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The vast majority of books [Google is publishing online] belong to a third category: still protected by copyright, or of uncertain status, and out of print. These books are at…
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Since 2003, EFF has championed an alternative approach that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal: voluntary collective licensing. The concept is simple: the music industry forms several “collecting…
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[M]ost copyrighted works have a short commercial life. Only a tiny fraction of books, songs, movies, and software are so successful that they enjoy multiple printings and continue to sell…
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On September 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people…
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In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’ revenue but the…
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This wasn’t the first time the DMCA had interfered with my security research. Back in 2001, my colleagues and I had had to withdraw a peer-reviewed paper about CD copy…
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Proponents of stronger copyright terms have argued that stronger copyright terms encourage creativity by increasing the profitability of authorship. Empirical evidence, however, is scarce, because data on the profitability of…
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Open networks provide Internet access to the public. Users do not need to subscribe—they simply connect their devices, often over a wireless connection. For instance, the City of San Francisco…
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In most areas of the law, we try to avoid this kind of unfairness [in payouts from civil litigation] and uncertainty by making sure that we tie penalties to the…
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The “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. The law was ostensibly intended…
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Streaming music services have exploded in popularity in the past few years, variously raising optimism and concern about their impacts on recorded music revenue. On the one hand, streaming services…
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We explore the consequence of quality unpredictability for the welfare benefit of new products, using recent developments in recorded music as our context. Digitization has expanded consumption opportunities by giving…
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Effective dispute resolution is important for reducing private and social costs. We study how resolution responds to changes in price and communication using a new, extensive dataset of copyright infringement…
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