Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg,1 Columbia University School of Law March 15, 2011 The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to “secur[e] for limited Times to Authors  ... the exclusive Right to their ... Writings. 2  Accordingly, the U.S. Copyright Act generally vests creators with the copyright in their works.3  The Constitution makes no explicit reference to authors’ [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law January 12, 2011 The practice of online news aggregation, involving the assembly on one’s own website of information, and sometimes limited content such as headlines and lead sentences, copied from other news sources, has generated both substantial profits for the largest aggregators, such as Google News, [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law October 28, 2010 In the Paleolithic period of analog copies and communications, the boundary between the exclusive rights of reproduction and public performance was clearly marked.  The former right involved the making of physical copies; the latter did not.  Rather it entailed the direct apprehension of [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law August 18, 2010 When the United States ratified the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs) in 1994, it undertook to implement Article 18 of the Berne Convention (a provision the United States had left unaddressed when the U.S. ratified the Berne Convention in [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law June 2, 2010 Several of the IP Issues columns have addressed the Google Book Search controversy, principally from the perspective of the still-pending settlement agreement, which would regulate the online availability of digitized books (or portions of them) to U.S. Internet users.  While the proposed settlement [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* April 14, 2010 My two prior contributions to IP Issues (Feb. 26, 2010, and Dec. 8, 2009) have not exhausted the questions the 1976 Act termination right raises.  The Copyright Office recently issued a Notice of Inquiry seeking comments on a possible “gap” in the 1976 [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* February 26, 2010 In our previous column (Dec. 8, 2009) we addressed the history and policy of authors’ reversion rights in U.S. copyright law, as well as the general outlines of the 1976 Act provisions on terminations of grants of copyright.  In this column, we will [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* December 8, 2009 The last clause of the first copyright act, the 1710 English Statute of Anne, anticipated authors’ weaker bargaining position, and, so long as the author lived through the first 14-year term, re-vested a second term of copyright in the author. Fourteen years of [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* October 20, 2009 A recent audacious and, happily, unsuccessful attempt to impose U.S. copyright formalities on foreign-published works illustrates the difficulties of adapting international norms that presume the existence of national borders to a world of simultaneous and pervasive communication of works of authorship. In Moberg [...]

Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* June 11, 2009 Rob Merges’s recent (May 26) contribution on “Intellectual Property and the Culture of Giving” inspires this follow-up. Rob evoked “the right (and wrong) way to give [rights] away.” I would like to consider further whether public licenses for works other than software, such [...]