Prof. Justin Hughes, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University May 6, 2009 [This is the second in a series about copyright in the 2008 presidential campaign.] The 2008 presidential election had more than its share of copyright disputes involving the candidates. In the first essay in this series (April 14) we explored the most familiar [...]
Prof. Jim Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law May 1, 2009 Given a choice, which would you prefer: A world in which it is easier to encrypt information than to decrypt it? A world in which decryption is easier than encryption? A world in which the two stand in a cost/benefit equipoise? When the [...]
Prof. Justin Hughes, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University April 14, 2009 [This is the first in a series about copyright in the 2008 presidential campaign.] Among all its other historic precedents, the 2008 presidential election provided an inordinate number of copyright disputes involving the candidates. To opponents of intellectual property, that will just be [...]
Prof. Robert P. Merges, Boalt Hall School of Law, Berkeley March 25, 2009 I take the participatory, democratic aspects of culture very seriously. I have devoted some effort to thinking through how the inherited legal structure of IP rights can be adapted and modified to encourage the many new avenues of participatory creativity – the [...]
Prof. Jim Gibson, University of Richmond March 11, 2009 A number of copyright controversies have caught the public’s eye this year — e.g., the lawsuit over the AP photo of Barak Obama, the feud between Coldplay and Joe Satriani, the debate about Facebook’s policies toward the intellectual property of its users. Yet these disputes, fascinating [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law March 4, 2009 A few months ago, Harvard Law School Professor Charlie Nesson took Joel Tenenbaum as a client. Tenenbaum was up until then just one of the thousands of individuals who had been sued by the music industry for uploading and downloading music online. But with Nesson [...]
Prof. Peter S. Menell, UC-Berkeley School of Law Feb. 24, 2009 For much of its first decade of meteoric growth, Google built its Internet search engine business without the apparent need or desire to license copyrighted content. Relying on the DMCA’s online service provider safe harbors, the fair use doctrine, and implied consent, Google 1.0 [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia Law School Feb. 19, 2009 I’d like to invite readers to take a tour of a website, www.keepyourcopyrights.org, which the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, and the Center for Law and Technology at Columbia Law School have launched in the hope of bringing some power back to [...]
“ACAP and the Online Challenges Facing Newspapers” Featuring Members of the Advisory Council Of The Media Institute’s National CyberEducation Project Reactions to a Speech by Thomas C. Rubin, Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, Microsoft Corporation BACKGROUND This “Virtual Panel Discussion” originally took place online, as a series of e-mail exchanges among members of the [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School Feb. 11, 2009 The lawsuit filed Feb. 9 by Shepard Fairey against the Associated Press raises some basic questions about what copyright does and doesn’t do. Yesterday’s New York Times describes the background and displays the two critical images. The first is a photograph snapped [...]