Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* February 26, 2013 Lawyers and others with a glancing acquaintance with comparative copyright law know that civil-law countries, particularly on the European continent, protect two series of authors’ rights, economic and “moral.”  Authors’ non-pecuniary prerogatives, enshrined in the Berne Convention on the international protection of authors’ [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law October 29, 2012 The 1996 WIPO Treaties oblige Member States to protect authors’ and performers’ rights of “communication to the public,” “including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access these works from a [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* August 6, 2012 My last column, “Host Service Provider Liability for User-Posted Content: A View from the EU,” discussed two first-instance decisions from France and Germany concerning host service provider liability for “user-generated content” that infringes copyright.  In both cases, the courts confronted the EU norm [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law June 18, 2012 The Second Circuit’s April 5 decision in Viacom, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., finding YouTube covered by the DMCA host service provider safe harbor with respect to most of its hosting of repeatedly posted infringing content, now has echoes in two EU jurisdictions, in [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* April 19, 2012 On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fordham International Intellectual Property Conference, its organizer, Prof. Hugh Hansen, planned a session on “Copyright Law: Where has it been, where is it going?” and asked me to look back over the 20 years [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* February 28, 2012 The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is discussing a possible treaty that would obligate member states to adopt exceptions and limitations to assist the access of the visually impaired to works of authorship.1  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law January 23, 2012 This column1 follows on the entry of Aug. 29, 2011, which addressed the international copyright law status of works first disclosed in digital format over the Internet, and not subsequently “published” in hardcopy formats.  The prior column concluded that under the definition of [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* August 29, 2011 My previous column, “Internet Publication and U.S. Copyright Imperialism,” criticized a recent decision of a federal district court in Florida in Kernal Records OY v. Moseley, 2011 Dist. LEXIS 60666 (S.D. Fla. June 7, 2011), for ruling that a Norwegian composer’s work “published” [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law June 28, 2011 When a work is first made available over the Internet, what is its “country of origin?”  In a previous column, “Borderless Publications, the Berne Convention, and U.S. Copyright Formalities,” I addressed this question in connection with the decision in Moberg v. Leygues, 666 [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg,1 Columbia University School of Law April 20, 2011 This is the second of two columns on authors’ contracts and the U.S. copyright law.  (For the first see Part I.) In this column I will address copyright rules governing the scope of the rights that authors may grant. General presumption regarding interpretation [...]