Copyright, Culture, and Community in Virtual Worlds

Communities that interact on-line through computer games and other virtual worlds are mediated by the audiovisual content of the game interface. Much of this content is subject to copyright law, which confers on the copyright owner the legal right to prevent certain unauthorized uses of the content. Such exclusive rights impose a limiting factor on the development of communities that are situated around the interface content, because the rights, privileges, and\ud exceptions associated with copyright generally tend to disregard the cultural significance of copyrighted content. This limiting effect of copyright is well illustrated by examination of the copied content appropriated by virtual diaspora communities from the game Uru: Ages of Myst. Reconsideration of current copyright law would be required in order to accommodate the cohesion of on-line\ud communities and related cultural uses of copyrighted content

Patents and State Constitutionally Protected Speech

Recent American patent scholarship has begun to explore the intersection of the patent system and guarantees of expressive freedom, noting that patents may impinge on the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution and chill or prohibit protected speech. But guarantees of expressive freedom are not limited to the Federal Constitution; they are also found in state constitutional provisions, some of which offer broader protection than that guaranteed in the First Amendment. In this essay I examine the relationship between federally issued patents and the guarantees of expressive freedom found in state constitutions. State constitutions vary in their wording and interpretation, so my primary focus will be on those states that have viewed their state constitutional provisions as extending beyond the protections offered by the federal First Amendment. While the Supremacy Clause prevents states from overriding federal patent law, I argue here that state constitutional provisions can alter, shape, or even prohibit certain types of patent assertions, just as state law may moderate other uses of personal property. The discussion of this interaction highlights several previously unexplored aspects of the vertical relationship between federal patent policy and state law, and offers an alternative route to vindicating expressive rights encumbered by patents

Inventing Around Copyright

Patent law has long harbored the concept of “inventing around,” under which competitors to a patent holder may be expected, and even encouraged, to design their technologies so as to skirt the boundaries defined by patent claims. It has become increasingly clear that, for better or for worse, copyright also fosters inventing around. Copyright is not based on written claims, but because copyright links exclusive rights to technological actions such as reproduction, distribution, or transmission, the language of the copyright statute, and judicial readings of the statute, create boundaries around which potential infringers may technologically navigate. For example, the Aereo case recently decided by the Supreme Court involves technology that was explicitly designed to conform to noninfringing definitions of private transmission found in previous court decisions. But in copyright, unlike patent, there has been little analysis of the tendency to foster alternative technological development. This Essay draws upon previous analyses of inventing around in patent law to assess the benefits and detriments of inventing around in copyright

Trademarks Along the Infobahn: A First Look at the Emerging Law of Cybermarks

Use of the global Internet computer network is rising exponentially. As Internet subscription increases disagreements between users are expected to arise, just as where any sizeable number of human beings interact, disagreements may be expected to arise. To date, on-line disputes have been primarily dealt with via informal solutions, such as the polite conventions of netiquette shared by Internet users. However, as the community of Internet users grows increasingly diverse, formal dispute resolution mechanisms, embodied as law and legal institutions, may be called upon by the parties to resolve disagreements. For example, several acrimonious disputes have already arisen over the use of particular domain names on the Internet. This paper discusses how established principles of trademark law may be applied to resolve such controversies. Such a discussion properly begins with a review of the nature and function of the global Internet

Patent Silences

A great deal has been said in recent years about patent disclosure. But to say that there is a disclosure function in the patent system implies that there is non-disclosure functioning in the patent system as well. For some information to be disclosed in a patent, other information must go undisclosed; for some things to be included, other things must be excluded. In this article I review the surprising number of doctrines that allow and encourage patent applicants to remain silent about aspects of their inventions. I find that some silences in patents are inadvertent, while some are deliberate; some are necessary, while some are strategic. I conclude that a combination of such explicit and tacit silences allows patents to function as boundary objects, that is, as artifacts that have sufficiently definite meaning to be useful in disparate social worlds, but which simultaneously are sufficiently ambiguous to become objects of collaboration between disparate social worlds. Because innovation is known to occur when localized knowledge is transferred across social boundaries, this function of the patent document is critical to its stated purpose, and occurs largely because of its open rhetorical spaces. Thus, rather than fixating on enhanced disclosure, I argue that much of the critical work of the patent system can and should occur in the open rhetorical spaces where patents are silent