Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School July 19, 2012 On July 3, 2012, the European Court of Justice issued an important ruling on the question of the sale of used digital works. The case raises questions at the intersection of copyright and contract, and we are seeing different approaches taken in the [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School May 22, 2012 One of the nice things about teaching is that you are constantly forced to confront the fundamentals of whatever subject you have in front of you. For me, when I teach copyright, I start the class with a blank piece of paper. Really [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School March 26, 2012 As I am fond of reminding people, faculty offices at my work home, The University of Chicago Law School, surround the library. I walk out of my office into book stacks. So it can hardly come as a surprise when I say that [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School December 23, 2011 Possible copyright legislation has been in the news with the House Judiciary Committee’s on-again, off-again mark up of H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act.” SOPA, and its Senate cousin, the PROTECT IP Act, are designed to limit intellectual property infringement at [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School October 3, 2011 Over the last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided three interesting cases at the intersection of copyright, contract, and the first-sale doctrine. Last September, in Vernor v. Autodesk, the court found that the underlying software transaction [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School August 8, 2011 L. Frank Baum set out to create “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” So said Baum writing in Chicago, in April 1900, in the introduction to his book [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School June 20, 2011 This past Wednesday, I attended a terrific conference at George Washington University Law School on “Can the Google Book Settlement be Fixed?” After more than a year of silence, on March 22, 2011, Judge Denny Chin rejected the proposed settlement in the [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School April 27, 2011 Law professors rarely have labs the way that other scientists do. For us, our classrooms are the places that we go to run our experiments to see what happens when a couple of unusual legal concoctions are mixed together. It is a [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School January 19, 2011 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit opened the New Year by revisiting a copyright classic, namely, is a legend stamped on a copyrighted work effective to control it? In UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Augusto, the Ninth Circuit concluded that [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School December 21, 2010 I was standing in line Sunday to order a sandwich – Italian beef, one of the Holy Trinity of Chicago food (deep-dish pizza and hot dogs, if you are so poorly informed that you have to ask) – and there he was: [...]