reference library

/reference library
reference library2018-06-08T14:23:35-07:00

This website features a collection of links to outside resources, many of which were cited in The Captured Economy, for readers interested in learning more about regressive regulation.

To filter the reference library by topic, please use the links on a topic page or open this page on a full-size screen and use the provided menu.

An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions Updated, 1978-2019

Barton Beebe

NYU Journal of Intellectual Property

Fall 2020

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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Time to Stop the Exploitation of Free Academic Labour

Jon Tennant

European Science Editing

July 6, 2020

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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Closing the Streaming Loophole

Adam Mossoff, Randall Rader, and Zvi Rosen

Regulatory Transparency Project

July 20, 2020

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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Market Effects Bearing on Fair Use

Jeanne C. Fromer

SSRN

June 29, 2015

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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Copyright in the Texts of the Law: Historical Perspectives

Charles Duan

Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law

May 21, 2020

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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Copyright and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Opera During the Napoleonic Age

Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser

NBER

March 2020

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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Copyright and the Progress of Science: Why Text and Data Mining Is Lawful

Michael W. Carroll

UC Davis Law Review

2019

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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Copyright and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Operas

Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser

SSRN

May 19, 2019

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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The Uneasy Case for Software Copyrights Revisited

Pamela Samuelson

The George Washington Law Review

September 2011

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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Aiming for the Goal: Contribution Dynamics of Crowdfunding

Joyee Deb, Aniko Oery, and Kevin R. Williams

NBER

May 2019

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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Intellectual Property Law and the Right to Repair

Leah Chan Grinvald and Ofer Tur-Sinai

Fordham Law Review

May 2019

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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Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age: 2017 – Chapters 1 and 2

Peter S. Menell, Mark A. Lemley, Robert P. Merges

UC Berkley Law School

2017

“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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Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

Daniel P. Gross

NBER

September 2018

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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The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property

Amy Kapczynski

Yale Law Journal

2008

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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Disappearing Content

Mark A. Lemley

SSRN

December 29, 2020

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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Volition Has No Role to Play in Determining Copyright Infringements

Randolph J. May and Seth L. Cooper

The Free State Foundation

September 2019

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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Annual Intellectual Property Report to Congress

United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator

Office of the President of the United States

February 2019

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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Is Intellectual Property the Root of All Evil? Patents, Copyrights, and Inequality

Dean Baker

Center for Economic and Policy Research

October 2018

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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Explaining Criminal Sanctions in Intellectual Property Law

Irina D. Manta

Journal of Law & Innovation

October 29, 2019

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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The Hegemony of the Copyright Treatise

Ann Bartow

University of New Hampshire

Winter 2004

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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Feeling Cute, Might [Have To] Delete Later: Defending Against the Modern Day Copyright Troll

Austin Joseph

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

2020

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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Fair Learning

Mark A. Lemley and Bryan Casey

Texas Law Review

March 2021

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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Digital Exhaustion

Aaron K. Perzanowski and Jason Schultz

UCLA Law Review

1 September 2010

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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Dedicating Copyright to the Public Domain

Phillip Johnson

The Modern Law Review

July 2008

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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Platform Liability Under Art. 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, Automated Filtering and Fundamental Rights: An Impossible Match

Christophe Geiger and Bernd Justin Jütte

GRUR International

12 March 2021

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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Retelling Copyright: The Contributions of the Restatement of Copyright Law

Jeanne C. Fromer and Jessica M. Silbey

Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts

26 February 2021

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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Research Funding and Collaboration

Benjamin Davies, Jason Gush, Shaun C. Hendy, and Adam B. Jaffe

NBER

October 2020

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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Modern Interlibrary Loan Practices: Moving beyond the CONTU Guidelines

Meg Oakley, Laura Quilter, and Sara Benson

Association of Research Libraries

August 31 2020

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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An Empirical Study of 225 Years of Copyright Registrations

Zvi S. Rosen and Richard Schwinn

Tulane Law Review

1 July 2019

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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The Same Old Song

Thomas M. Lenard and Lawrence J. White

Regulation

Summer 2018

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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How Extra-Copyright Protection of Databases Can Be Constitutional

Justin Hughes

University of Dayton Law Review

2003

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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Fair Use Across Time

Justin Hughes

UCLA Law Review

2003

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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Of World Music and Sovereign States, Professors and the Formation of Legal Norms

Justin Hughes

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

2003

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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Copyright Enforcement: Evidence from Two Field Experiments

Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

Journal of Economics & Management Strategy

September 30, 2016

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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On the Logic of Suing One’s Customers and the Dilemma of Infringement-Based Business Models

Justin Hughes

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

2005

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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Size Matters (or Should) in Copyright Law

Justin Hughes

Fordham Law Review

2005

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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Copyright and Incomplete Historiographies: Of Piracy, Propertization, and Thomas Jefferson

Justin Hughes

Southern California Law Review

2006

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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Created Facts and the Flawed Ontology of Copyright Law

Justin Hughes

Notre Dame Law Review

2007

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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Copyright and Its Rewards, Foreseen and Unforeseen

Justin Hughes

Harvard Law Review Forum

2009

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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Irdeto Global Consumer Piracy Survey

Irdeto Global

2017

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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Locke’s 1694 Memorandum (and More Incomplete Copyright Historiographies)

Justin Hughes

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

2010

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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A Short History of Intellectual Property’ in Relation to Copyright

Justin Hughes

Cardozo Law Review

2012

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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The Photographer’s Copyright – Photograph as Art, Photograph as Database

Justin Hughes

Harvard Journal of Law and Technology

2012

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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Traditional Knowledge, Cultural Expression, and the Siren’s Call of Property

Justin Hughes

San Diego Law Review

2013

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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Understanding (and Fixing) the Right of Fixation in Copyright Law

Justin Hughes

Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA

2015

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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Motion Pictures, Markets, and Copylocks

Justin Hughes

George Mason Law Review

2016

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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Fair Use and Its Politics – At Home and Abroad

Justin Hughes

Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper

2015

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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Copyright and Distributive Justice

Justin Hughes and Robert P. Merges

Notre Dame Law Review

2017

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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The Basics Matter: At the Periphery of Intellectual Property

F. Scott Kieff and Troy A. Paredes

Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper

February 2004

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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Valuing Intellectual Property: An Experiment

Christopher Buccafusco and Christopher Jon Sprigman

Cornell Law Review

March 11, 2010

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 and Culture in Copyright Theory

Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

2007

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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Copyright Infringement in the Market for Digital Images

Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

American Economic Association

May 2016

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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Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

NBER

January 2019

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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Dematerialization, Pragmatism and the European Copyright Revolution

Jonathan Griffiths

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies

July 9, 2013

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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Evaluating the Demsetzian Trend in Copyright Law

Brett M. Frischmann

Review of Law and Economicse

November 2005

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 and Innovation: The Untold Story

Michael A. Carrier

Wisconsin Law Review

October 24, 2012

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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Eight Market-Oriented Proposals That Reduce Income Inequality

Dean Baker

American Enterprise Institute

January 24, 2017

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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Fashion’s Function in Intellectual Property Law

Christopher Buccafusco and Jeanne C. Fromer

Notre Dame Law Review

August 22, 2016

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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Patents, Meet Napster: 3D Printing and the Digitization of Things

Deven R. Desai and Gerard N. Magliocca

Thomas Jefferson School of Law Research Paper

October 9, 2013

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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To Promote the Creative Process: Intellectual Property Law and the Psychology of Creativity

Gregory N. Mandel

Notre Dame Law Review

January 11, 2011

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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Indefinitely Renewable Copyright

William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner

U Chicago Law & Economics

August 1, 2002

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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Defense Against the Dark Arts of Copyright Trolling

Matthew Sag and Jake Haskell

Iowa Law Review

January 1, 2018

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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Modernizing International Agreements to Combat Copyright Infringement

Randolph J. May and Seth L. Cooper

The Free State Foundation

November 16, 2018

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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A New Copyright Bargain?: Reclaiming Lost Culture and Getting Authors Paid

Rebecca Giblin

Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts

October 2018

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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Freedom of Artistic Creativity and Copyright Law: A Compatible Combination?

Christophe Geiger

UC Irvine Law Review

September 26, 2017

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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Intellectual Property: The Law and Economics Approach

Matthias Breuer, Christian Leuz, Steven Vanhaverbeke

NBER

September 2019

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 Public Domain

Jessica Litman

Emory University School of Law

1990

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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Faith-Based Intellectual Property

Mark A. Lemley

Stanford Law School

June 2012

“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 “Intellectual Property” is a Misnomer

Daniel Takash and Brink Lindsey

Niskanen Center

September 10, 2019

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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Art in the Age of Contractual Negotiation

Christopher G. Bradley and Brian L. Frye

Kentucky Law Journal

June 19, 2019

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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What Happens When Books Enter the Public Domain? Testing Copyright’s Underuse Hypothesis Across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada

Jacob Flynn, Rebecca Giblin, and Francois Petitjean

SSRN

June 10, 2019

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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Innocent Infringement in U.S. Copyright Law: A History

R. Anthony Reese

Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts

March 6, 2008

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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Reducing Digital Copyright Infringement Without Restricting Innovation

Mark Lemley and R. Anthony Reese

Stanford Law Review

April 2004

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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Justifying Intellectual Property: Chapter 1

Robert P. Merges

Harvard University Press

September 10, 2011

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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Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

NBER

January 2019

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…
Read more

Annual Intellectual Property Report to Congress

United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator

Office of the President of the United States

February 2019

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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Restoring the Natural Law: Copyright as Labor and Possession

Alfred C. Yen

Ohio State Law Journal

Janurary 1990

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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Copyright and Generic Entry in Book Publishing

Imke Reimers

AEA

July 2019

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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Why Libertarians Shouldn’t Be (Too) Skeptical About Intellectual Property

Richard A. Epstein

Progress & Freedom Foundation

February 2006

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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Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap

John Tehranian

Utah Law Review

2007

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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Limiting Locke: A Natural Law Justification for the Fair Use Doctrine

Benjamin G. Damstedt

The Yale Law Journal

February 2003

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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Clearing the Rubbish: Locke, the Waste Proviso, and the Moral Justification of Intellectual Property

Gordon Hull

Public Affairs Quarterly

January 2009

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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Deserving to Own Intellectual Property

Lawrence C. Becker

Chicago-Kent Law Review

April 1993

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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Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term

Author name here

Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues

July 19, 2009

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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Revenue, New Products, and the Evolution of Music Quality since Napster

Luis Aguiar, Néstor Duch-Brown, and Joel Waldfogel

Institute for Prospective Technological Studies Digital Economy Working Paper

2015

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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When Push Comes to Shove: A Hype-Free Guide to Evaluating Technical Solutions to Copyright Infringement on Campus Networks

NA

EFF

June 23, 2005

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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IAAL*: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law

Fred von Lohmann

EFF

January 10, 2006

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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Google’s Moon Shot

Jeffrey Toobin

New Yorker

February 5, 2007

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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A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing

Fred von Lohmann

EFF

April 1, 2008

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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Save the Orphan (Works)

Timothy B. Lee

The Cato Institute

June 30, 2008

[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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RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later

NA

EFF

September 30, 2008

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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Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster

Joel Waldfogel

NBER

March 2011

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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The Chilling Effects of the DMCA

Edward Felten

Slate

March 29, 2013

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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Copyright and the Profitability of Authorship: Evidence from Payments to Writers in the Romantic Period

Megan MacGarvie and Petra Moser

NBER

October 2013

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 Wi-Fi and Copyright: A Primer for Network Operators

Corynne McSherry

EFF

June 3, 2014

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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Collateral Damages: Why Congress Needs To Fix Copyright Law’s Civil Penalties

Mitch Stoltz

EFF

July 24, 2014

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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Unintended Consequences – 16 Years Under the DMCA

NA

EFF

September 16, 2014

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 Reaches Flood Stages: Does Spotify Stimulate or Depress Music Sales?

Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel

International Journal of Industrial Organization

October 2015

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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Quality Predictability and the Welfare Benefits from New Products: Evidence from the Digitization of Recorded Music

Luis Aguiar and Joel Waldfogel

NBER

April 2016

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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Copyright Enforcement: Evidence from Two Field Experiments

Hong Luo, Julie Holland Mortimer

Journal of Economics and Management Strategy

August 2016

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…
Read more