569 research outputs found

    A Matter of Facts: The Evolution of Copyright’s Fact-Exclusion and Its Implications for Disinformation and Democracy

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    The Article begins with a puzzle: the curious absence of an express fact-exclusion from copyright protection in both the Copyright Act and its legislative history despite it being a well-founded legal principle. It traces arguments in the foundational Supreme Court case (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service) and in the Copyright Act’s legislative history to discern a basis for the fact-exclusion. That research trail produces a legal genealogy of the fact-exclusion based in early copyright common law anchored by canonical cases, Baker v. Selden, Burrow-Giles v. Sarony, and Wheaton v. Peters. Surprisingly, none of them deal with facts per se but instead with adjacent and related copyright doctrines. A close look at these cases, as well as at relevant legislative history, uncovers provocative aspects of the fight over facts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This fight is really a debate over the evolving place of human labor and the contours of social progress regarding the production of facts in crucial periods of economic and political development. The nature of “facts” and their increasingly central role in governance and technological progress puts pressure on their control and manipulation, including by and for businesses and democratic institutions, such as legislatures and agencies. Revisiting this history amplifies the need for a broader copyright fact-exclusion and a richer public domain that will lead to doctrinal clarity for our digital age. It also has political implications for how to consider the contestability of facts in the twenty-first century as a matter of access to information and the stabilization of societal institutions – such as law, science, and a free press – that are critical for sustaining U.S. democracy

    Property\u27s Boundaries

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    Property law has a boundary problem. Courts are routinely called upon to decide whether certain kinds of things can be owned--cells, genes, organs, gametes, embryos, corpses, personal data, and more. Under prevailing contemporary theories of property law, questions like these have no justiciable answers. Because property has no conceptual essence, they maintain, its boundaries are arbitrary--a flexible normative choice more properly legislative than judicial. This Article instead offers a straightforward descriptive theory of property\u27s boundaries. The common law of property is legitimated by its basis in the concept of ownership, a descriptive relationship of absolute control that exists outside of the law. Ownership\u27s limits thus lie at the limits of absolute control--that which cannot in principle be the subject of human dominion cannot be owned. In short, this Article both offers a comprehensive explanation for why a conceptual theory of property\u27s limits matters and how one can be possible, and defends a substantive theory of the concept of ownership as control. Under this theory, cells, organs, gametes, embryos, and corpses can be owned. But information--like genes and personal data--that cannot be controlled cannot be owned. Viewed through this lens, intellectual property-- a challenge for any theory of property that appears to entail ownership in information--can be understood either as a statutory analogy or a rough approximation of the real but temporary control of information exercised by those who create or discover it

    A Premier Paradigm Shift: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on U.S. Intellectual Property Laws

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    Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the United States are constitutionally prescribed for the express purpose of encouraging human innovation. The patent and copyright systems fulfill this purpose by incentivizing authors and inventors to disclose their efforts to the public, which disseminates the knowledge to the public and thereby works to maximize the creative potential of humanity. In turn, human creativity has sparked successive eras of technological and industrial revolution, altering every aspect of human experience and redefining our everyday experiences and our vision of the future. However, the old guard of established industry—whose market is most susceptible to displacement by revolutionary technology—utilize the IP systems to police the innovative efforts of others and consequently stem the tides of progress. Seeds of discontent have sprouted among a public who increasingly regard IP with ambivalence, and the march of progress is certain to stumble if these seeds are left unchecked. The digital age in particular revealed a deficiency of the current IP system, as the increasingly efficient exchange of information was countered by using IP as a regulatory system, rather than an incentive. This has revealed how the rights granted by successive amendments to the copyright system may be exploited by a select few while burdening society far longer than objectively justifiable. Moreover, the sum of human knowledge follows a course of exponential acceleration, far faster than our existing laws and intellectual property systems are prepared to accommodate. Proactive policies are necessary to mitigate the legal implications of new industries, and existing systems of all types must be prepared to change alongside the society in which they operate. However, recent government inquiries and international discussions reveal a misguided belief that our current system can adapt to this revolution, despite decades of litigation that suggest the opposite conclusion. The resulting legal uncertainty among inventors counteracts IP’s express purpose of “promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” and failure to rectify the situation renders the current system both unconstitutional and harmful to society. Modern technological advancements in data-intensive fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence show both great potential for societal benefit and immense conflict with the current IP system. These technologies challenge our conceptions about innovation and creativity and foreshadow a future where the current IP system is not only undesirable, but also unenforceable. Regardless of whether the products of these technologies would fit within the current system, their very existence provides an ultimatum for policymakers—the time for change is upon us. While IP rights do not have to be entirely sacrificed to accommodate this new paradigm, they must be lessened. Their existence is only constitutionally justified to the extent that their benefit to society is proportional to the burden imposed. Furthermore, the relationship between creators and the public is certain to shift significantly over the coming decades, and our policies must be prepared to adapt to the demands of the coming age. The United States should not continue to warp IP into a regulatory web that counteracts its constitutional purpose of encouraging human innovation

    Understanding The Necessity Of Rebooting Copyright Laws In Context Of The Advancement Of AI

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    John McCarthy coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1956, but this term remains undefined legally. It's machines ability to do clever things and it is the science of letting computers perform tasks that people do with intelligence. AI is the ability of computers to think, perceive, learn, problem-solve, and make decisions. AI has hindered Intellectual Property Rights especially Copyright. When computers were invented, copyright laws were not envisioned. AI now completes task without human intervention. Before then, computers were tools that required human input. Copyright protects human creativity. Copyright protects moral and economic rights. Authors create copyrightable works. There are many restrictions to safeguard human work, but when AI creates copyrightable material, the laws need to be changed. The international community must develop a solution for AI-generated work's authorship and ownership under copyright law. AI-generated works will suffer from non-human authorship. The sui generis system or AI-specific copyright laws may solve this challenge. AI-generated works ought to be more strictly regulated, and human invention should be prioritised above machine creativity. Hence, a comprehensive strategy must be established immediately. This research paper elaborates the necessity of revamp copyright laws for AI and AI-generated works

    The Perks of Being Human

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    The power of artificial intelligence has recently entered the public consciousness, prompting debates over numerous legal issues raised by use of the tool. Among the questions that need to be resolved is whether to grant intellectual property rights to copyrightable works or patentable inventions created by a machine, where there is no human intervention sufficient to grant those rights to the human. Both the U. S. Copyright Office and the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office have taken the position that in cases where there is no human author or inventor, there is no right to copyright or patent protection. That position has recently been upheld by a federal court. This article argues that the Constitution and current statutes do not compel that result, that the denial of protection will hinder innovation, and that if intellectual property rights are to be limited to human innovators that policy decision should be made by Congress, not an administrative agency or a court

    Lindenwood University Employment Policies, 2023-2024

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    In 2021-2022, Lindenwood University made the Employee Guidebook, online only. This is a compilation of the documents from all of the links in the 2023-2024 Employee Policies site

    The challenge of three-dimensional printing : questioning established concepts in intellectual property law

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    Defence date: 9 January 2019Examining Board Professor Giovanni Sartor, EUI; Professor Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School, External Supervisor; Professor Peter Drahos, EUI; Professor Raquel Xalabarder, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.Over the last years, academics, practitioners and policy makers have focused their attention on an emerging technology: three-dimensional printing (“3DP”). 3DP is often portrayed as a game changer, showing the potential to disrupt established socioeconomic paradigms and exert profound implications in disparate areas of law. 3DP not only is well integrated in the manufacturing industry, but also increasingly adopted at consumer level. Recent developments have made it possible for ordinary people to take an active role in the production, customization and distribution of goods, and likewise paved the way for the proliferation of new market entrants, such as 3DP online platforms. Against this background, this thesis aims to shed some light on the implications that 3DP may have for Intellectual Property Law. In particular, this work attempts to predict and grasp the consequences that the digitization of real world things may carry in the area of IP law, both from the side of protection and infringement. This contribution is intended to create general awareness about the current state of the art and likewise delineate possible future scenarios in the 3DP ecosystem. The research question at the core of the analysis is whether the current legal framework of different IPRs already offers suitable means for regulating the thin dividing line between the digital and the analogue world, or rather needs to be amended, in order to cope with such a fascinating reality. To this end, the analysis contributes insights to the best legal treatment that CAD files shall receive, in case such files embed products protected by copyright, designs, patents and trademarks. Hence, it addresses right owners’ concern that the online transmission of CAD files, combined with the ease of converting such files into the final printout, will facilitate mass-scale and worldwide infringement of all IPRs.Chapter 1, 'The magic world of three-dimensional printing becomes reality' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as a chapter: 'Tracing the historical roots of collaborative production: emerging challenges posed by three-dimensional printing' in the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Internet, Law and Politics, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: "Collaborative Economy: Challenges & Opportunities". Chapter 4, 'Three-Dimensional printing and European design law' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article: 'CAD files and European design law' in the journal JIPITEC. Chapter 6, 'EU trademark law and Three-Dimensional printing: opportunities and challenges' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as a chapter: 'The transfer of Computer-Aided Design files in the era of 3D printing : trademark infringement under the current European framework' in the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Internet, Law and Politics, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya: "Building a European digital space.

    That Thing Ain\u27t Human: The Artificiality of Human Authorship and the Intelligence in Expanding Copyright Authorship to Fully-Autonomous AI

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    The U.S. Copyright Review Board (the Board ) decided that works entirely created by fully-autonomous artificial intelligence ( AI ) are not entitled to copyright protections. The Board based its decision on a copyrightability requirement referred to as “human authorship.” However, the Copyright Act of 1976 (the Act ) never mentions a “human” requirement to copyright authorship, nor do most of the Board’s cited authorities. Denying authorship to intellectually-impressive and economically-valuable works under a poorly-established legal subelement is antithetical to copyright law’s history and to Congress’s constitutional mandate to “promote . . . [the] useful [a]rts . . . .” It leaves creators who use AI to create works with no protections for their creations. But this Note argues that, when properly interpreting various copyright-law authorities that allegedly establish a “human authorship” requirement, copyright law does not require “human authorship,” but “intellectual labor.” Under this standard, AI-produced works are entitled to copyright protections
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