Creativity and Culture in Copyright Theory

Creativity is universally agreed to be a good that copyright law should seek to promote, yet copyright scholarship and policymaking have proceeded largely on the basis of assumptions about what it actually is. When asked to discuss the source of their inspiration, individual artists describe a process that is intrinsically ineffable. Rights theorists of all varieties have generally subscribed to this understanding, describing creativity in terms of an individual liberty whose form remains largely unspecified. Economic theorists of copyright work from the opposite end of the creative process, seeking to divine the optimal rules for promoting creativity by measuring its marketable byproducts. But these theorists offer no particular reason to think that marketable byproducts are either an appropriate proxy or an effective stimulus for creativity (as opposed to production), and more typically refuse to engage the question. The upshot is that the more we talk about creativity, the more it disappears from view. At the same time, the mainstream of intellectual property scholarship has persistently overlooked a broad array of social science methodologies that provide both descriptive tools for constructing ethnographies of creative processes and theoretical tools for modeling them

Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It

Defenders of transformative uses have invoked the First Amendment to bolster claims that such uses should not be subject to the copyright owner’s permission. But this focus on transformation is critically incomplete, leaving unchallenged much of copyright’s scope, despite the large number of nontransformative copying activities that are also instances of free speech. The current debate leaves the way open for expansions of copyright that, while not targeted at dissenting viewpoints, nonetheless may have a profoundly negative effect on freedom of speech. In other words, transformation has limited our thinking about the free speech interests implicated by copying. This essay discusses the free speech value of pure copying, from audience interests to speaker interests in self-expression, persuasion, and affirmation of connection with a larger political, religious, or cultural group

Syllabic quantity patterns as rhythmic features for Latin authorship attribution

It is well known that, within the Latin production of written text, peculiar metric schemes were followed not only in poetic compositions, but also in many prose works. Such metric patterns were based on so-called syllabic quantity, that is, on the length of the involved syllables, and there is substantial evidence suggesting that certain authors had a preference for certain metric patterns over others. In this research we investigate the possibility to employ syllabic quantity as a base for deriving rhythmic features for the task of computational authorship attribution of Latin prose texts. We test the impact of these features on the authorship attribution task when combined with other topic-agnostic features. Our experiments, carried out on three different datasets using support vector machines (SVMs) show that rhythmic features based on syllabic quantity are beneficial in discriminating among Latin prose authors

Learning Interpretable Style Embeddings via Prompting LLMs

Style representation learning builds content-independent representations of author style in text. Stylometry, the analysis of style in text, is often performed by expert forensic linguists and no large dataset of stylometric annotations exists for training. Current style representation learning uses neural methods to disentangle style from content to create style vectors, however, these approaches result in uninterpretable representations, complicating their usage in downstream applications like authorship attribution where auditing and explainability is critical. In this work, we use prompting to perform stylometry on a large number of texts to create a synthetic dataset and train human-interpretable style representations we call LISA embeddings. We release our synthetic stylometry dataset and our interpretable style models as resources

The IP Law Book Review, v. 8#1

AUTHORS IN COURT: SCENES FROM THE THEATER OF COPYRIGHT, by Mark Rose. Reviewed by Robert Spoo, The University of Tulsa College of Law COPYRIGHT BEYOND LAW: REGULATING CREATIVITY IN THE GRAFFITI SUBCULTURE, by Marta Iljadica. Reviewed by Zahr K. Said, University of Washington School of Law CHOREOGRAPHING COPYRIGHT: RACE, GENDER, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN AMERICAN DANCE by Anthea Kraut. Reviewed by Carys Craig, Osgoode Hall Law School, York Universit

Colombia\u27s Poetic World of Authors\u27 Moral Rights: Consideration on Imprisoning a Professor for Plagiarism

The following is a translation of Carlos Castellanos Rubio’s article in the June 2011 edition of La Revista de Derecho, Comunicaciones y Nuevas Tecnologías, a Colombian legal periodical. The article discusses a 2010 Colombian Supreme Court of Justice decision that sentenced Professor Luz Mary Giraldo to two years in prison plus monetary and civil sanctions for plagiarizing a student’s thesis, “The Poetic World of Giovanni Quessep.” The decision has been controversial in Colombia for a variety of reasons, and many have accused the Court of judicial activism. Much of this criticism stems from the Court convicting Giraldo of violating the student’s moral right to publish, or not publish, her “unpublished” work, based on an expansive reading of that statute. These critics have pointed out that the student’s work was published, and sitting in her university’s library. Others have decried the severity of the sentence, as it is the first criminal moral rights conviction in Colombian history. In this article, Mr. Castellanos explains how the Court based its decision on a broad interpretation of the personhood theory of copyright, without any discussion of the theory itself or its alternatives. He then suggests potential problems with the Court’s perspective; namely, that it might grant monopolies on unoriginal expressions and ideas, and thus stifle free expression. As a solution, the article proposes that Colombian judges develop and/or adapt analytical tools for filtering out a work’s unprotectable elements from the original, protectable elements, focusing on the idea/expression dichotomy

Partnership research with older people: moving towards making the rhetoric a reality

As nursing develops closer partnerships with older people in delivering care, it also needs to develop partnerships in order to create the knowledge base for practice in a way that challenges professional hegemony and empowers older people. However, the process of developing partnerships in research takes place against a background of academic research traditions and norms, which can present obstacles to collaboration. This paper is a reflection on the issues that have arisen in three projects where older people were involved in research at different levels, from sources of data to independent researchers. It points to some of the areas that need further exploration and development

Copyright Infringement and Poetry: When is a Red Wheelbarrow THE RED WHEELBARROW?

Copyright does not protect facts or ideas, but only an author\u27s original expression. Often, though, it is difficult to distill protected expression from unprotected ideas or facts that reside in the public domain. Copyright protection for poetry is particularly problematic because a poem\u27s ideas are often intertwined with a poem\u27s sounds, shape, and images. It is often not only difficult to extract ideas from a poem\u27s surface, but once ideas are discovered, it may even be difficult to articulate exactly what these main ideas or themes are. William Carlos Williams\u27 poem, The Red Wheelbarrow, one of the most famous twentieth century poems, provides a good example of the problems inherent in distinguishing idea and expression in poetry. Williams\u27 deceptively simple poem exemplifies the melding of idea and expression into syntax and form so that the poem itself becomes the meaning. In The Red Wheelbarrow, it is impossible to separate Williams\u27 idea of a red wheelbarrow from the context of his poem\u27s words, line breaks, and even his distribution of white space on the page, all of which describe and give meaning to Williams\u27 vision. Copyright currently protects poetry just like it protects any other kind of writing or work of authorship. Poetry, therefore, is subject to the same minimal standards for originality that are used for other written works, and the same tests determine whether copyright infringement has occurred. The low threshold of originality that determines if a work is eligible for copyright embodies the notion that judges should not make aesthetic determinations of what is or is not art. This low standard serves poetry with the same sweeping graciousness that it serves other genres, ensuring that no one kind or style of poetry receives special treatment in terms of protectibility. However, the tests for copyright infringement that courts use are not adequate in deducing if one poem is impermissibly similar to another. In an infringement action, once copying has been established, improper appropriation or infringement is determined by a substantial similarity test that compares the two works in question.1 Courts currently apply a variety of substantial similarity tests that attempt to separate the copyrightable elements in a work from the non-copyrightable elements and then determine if the copier has taken a substantial amount of copyrightable elements. Many of the tests designed to determine substantial similarity between works have been criticized for their vague standards and unpredictable applications. These tests become even more problematic when applied to poetry because poetry communicates its ideas differently than genres such as fiction or non-fiction. Poetry is a genre in which language is carefully manipulated into lines, stanzas, and rhythms, all of which add meaning to a poem. Despite the particular expressive means available in different genres, courts currently use the same tests for substantial similarity for different types of literary works. Copyright infringement actions are usually determined by examining the substantial similarity between two written works by comparing aspects like plot, character, and descriptions. Courts applying copyright law need to recognize how poetry operates as a distinct genre and protect it based on all the elements of original expression that are available for poets to use. In this paper, I will first summarize the background principles and purposes of copyright. Then, in Part II, I will explain the tests for substantial similarity that are currently used by courts to determine misappropriation. Part III of my paper will outline the ways poetry can be expressive, focusing particularly on Williams\u27 The Red Wheelbarrow as an example. In Part IV, using my discussion of poetry\u27s expressive elements as a springboard, I will show how the current tests for improper appropriation are not suited for poetry. In Part V of my paper, I will argue for a new improper appropriation test for poetry that compares not only two poems\u27 words but also the words\u27 arrangement and layout on the page. I will explain how this \u27\u27expressive elements test works and how its application would better serve poetry within the purposes of copyright