Prof. Peter S. Menell, Koret Professor of Law and Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) January 13, 2014 As I explored in a 2010 commentary1 and 2011 article,2 copyright enforcement actions against file-sharers brought the scope of the Copyright Act’s Section106(3) “distribution right” to [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School January 7, 2014 If you have been following this blog carefully, you know that I have been preparing for my first day of my Winter 2014 Copyright course through a series of blog posts (here, here, and here, and you can see the syllabus for the [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law December 30, 2013 In a prior column, “Take Down/Stay Down: RIP in France?”, I commented on a July 2012 decision of the French Supreme Court rejecting the “takedown/stay down” remedy that some lower courts had imposed on service providers hosting infringing “user-generated” content. The plaintiffs had [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law December 20, 2013 The fair use doctrine is one of the most important statutory constraints on copyright protection. As readers here surely know, the doctrine empowers courts to excuse, on policy grounds, certain acts that would otherwise constitute copyright infringement. The doctrine ensures the viability of a whole [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School December 12, 2013 For the first time in four years, starting in January, I am teaching Copyright. It is good to separate from courses to gain the perspective that comes with distance, but I am also eager to shake off the rust to rethink old cases [...]
Prof. Robert P. Merges, University of California at Berkeley School of Law December 9, 2013 Introduction In recent years, intellectual property (IP) scholars have described a number of fascinating trades and pursuits where people get along quite well without the protection of formal, enforceable IP rights. From French chefs1 to standup comics,2 and from fashion [...]
Prof. Rodney A. Smolla, Duke University School of Law November 26, 2013 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Those words are from William Faulkner, in his part-play part-novel Requiem for a Nun. They are spoken by the character Gavin Stevens, county attorney for Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The words are among Faulkner’s [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law November 20, 2013 It’s back: Google Books, our favorite topic in this Intellectual Property Viewpoints series. Google Books is the project through which Google has brought its search capability to the text of more than 20 millions books (with the number still growing). To do so, [...]
Prof. Rodney A. Smolla Duke University School of Law October 29, 2013 In a prior IP Viewpoints piece, I wrote about a colorful copyright infringement case brought by a professional photographer, Patrick Cariou, against the well-known and highly successful “appropriation artist” Richard Prince, a case in which the photographer Cariou prevailed against the artist Prince [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law October 16, 2013 Review of Robert Levine, Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back (Doubleday 2011) [Author’s note: Although Free Ride was published two years ago, the more recent Spanish edition, and a request to [...]