Facing human rights attributes of copyright in Europe in the context of the EU Digital Single Market

The principle of equality as a fundamental norm in law and political philosophy, Jurysprudencja 8., Wojciechowski B., Bekrycht T., Cern K.M., (eds.), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2017The project was financed by National Science Centre Poland (decision no. DEC-2012/05/B/HS5/01111)

Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law

Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largely unexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyright protections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when evaluating the impacts and performance of intellectual property laws

AI-Generated Fashion Designs: Who or What Owns the Goods?

As artificial intelligence (“AI”) becomes an increasingly prevalent tool in a plethora of industries in today’s society, analyzing the potential legal implications attached to AI-generated works is becoming more popular. One of the industries impacted by AI is fashion. AI tools and devices are currently being used in the fashion industry to create fashion models, fabric designs, and clothing. An AI device’s ability to generate fashion designs raises the question of who will own the copyrights of the fashion designs. Will it be the fashion designer who hires or contracts with the AI device programmer? Will it be the programmer? Or will it be the AI device itself? Designers invest a lot of talent, time, and finances into designing and creating each article of clothing and accessory it releases to the public; yet, under the current copyright standards, designers will not likely be considered the authors of their creations. Ultimately, this Note makes policy proposals for future copyright legislation within the United States, particularly recommending that AI-generated and AI-assisted designs be copyrightable and owned by the designers who purchase the AI device

Piracy in Russia and China: A Different U.S. Reaction

Both Russia and China refused to adopt international copyright agreements until pressured by other countries, particularly the US. The US has pursued China\u27s copyright abuses more aggressively than it has pursued similar abuses by Russia. Neigel attempts to explain the reasons for this disparate treatment

Copyright

Copyright is the branch of Intellectual Property Law that governs works of expression such as books, paintings and songs, and the expressive aspects of computer programs. Intellectual products such as these have a partially public goods character: they are largely inexhaustible and nonexcludable. Intellectual Property Law responds to inexcludability by giving producers legal rights to exclude nonpayers from certain usages of their intellectual products. The goal is to provide incentives for new production at fairly low transaction costs. However, the copyright owner will charge a price above marginal cost and this, coupled with the inexhaustibility of most copyrighted products, creates deadweight loss. Various copyright doctrines (such as the idea/expression dichotomy, the limited duration of the copyright ownership term and the doctrine of ‘fair use’) work to reduce deadweight loss and other costs within a larger structure that creates incentives. Copyright Law, unlike Patent Law, gives owners rights only against those who actually copy the work. This limitation, too, may serve to reduce both transaction costs and deadweight loss. Empirically it is unclear how successful copyright has been in creating incentives for production, reducing transaction costs and keeping deadweight costs low

Computer Programs, User Interfaces, and Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976: A Critique of Lotus v. Paperback

The Supreme Court\u27s landmark ruling Lotus Development Corp vs Paperback Software International is critiqued. The ruling did not resolve the issue of whether copyright law protects user interfaces

Credit Where It’s Due: The Law and Norms of Attribution

The reputation we develop by receiving credit for the work we do proves to the world the nature of our human capital. If professional reputation were property, it would be the most valuable property that most people own because much human capital is difficult to measure. Although attribution is ubiquitous and important, it is largely unregulated by law. In the absence of law, economic sectors that value attribution have devised non-property regimes founded on social norms to acknowledge and reward employee effort and to attribute responsibility for the success or failure of products and projects. Extant contract-based and norms-based attribution regimes fail optimally to protect attribution interests. This article proposes a new approach to employment contracts designed to shore up the desirable characteristics of existing norms-based attribution systems while allowing legal intervention in cases of market failure. The right to public attribution would be waivable upon proof of a procedurally fair negotiation. The right to attribution necessary to build human capital, however, would be inalienable. Unlike an intellectual property right, attribution rights would not be enforced by restricting access to the misattributed work itself; the only remedy would be for the lost value of human capital. The variation in attribution norms that currently exists in different workplace cultures can and should be preserved through the proposed contract approach. The proposal strikes an appropriate balance between expansive and narrow legal protections for workplace knowledge and, in that respect, addresses one of the most vexing current debates at the intersection of intellectual property and employment law

Sold Downstream: Free Speech, Fair Use, and Anti-Circumvention Law

[Excerpt] “Here’s a hypo. Living in Asia, I purchased a shameful amount of music and movies, all legit purchases through reputable stores, HMV and Tower Records, but little of which will get reissued. I wanted to preserve my collection but software in the discs prevented me from ripping backup copies to my computer. Lacking the technological savvy to get around this software myself, I purchased and used a product to help me circumvent these controls. Discuss. Courts agree that copying the music and movies here is infringement but that fair use may provide a defense. However, courts do not agree as to whether or not fair use provides a defense when determining the liability of selling products that enable me to access and copy my CDs to my computer. This article examines a line of cases in the Ninth Circuit that hold that fair use or lawfulness of copying is irrelevant in calculating liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and another line of cases in the Federal Circuit which hold that fair use should be relevant. In particular, this article argues that calculating fair use into the analysis is crucial in maintaining the balance between the First Amendment’s protection of free speech rights and copyright’s regulation of speech. Part I will outline the relationship between free speech rights and copyrights, noting the important role that fair use plays in keeping this relationship harmonious. Part II will outline the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and argue that these broad brush provisions chill speech. Part III will discuss two streams in the current law: first, the Ninth Circuit’s decisions 321 Studios v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios, Inc.1 and Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc. v. Divineo; 2 and, second, the Federal Circuit’s decisions in The Chamberlain Group, Inc. v. Skylink Technologies, Inc.3 and Storage Technology Corporation v. Custom Hardware Engineering & Consulting, Inc.4 Part IV will argue that the Federal Circuit’s approach to fair use is favored. However, an alternate analysis toward their conclusion would have more constitutional integrity. Namely, the DMCA, as applied to software, should be seen as a content-based restriction on speech and should not be read to prohibit circumvention of access controls where the circumvention would not constitute a copyright violation.