ANTICIPATORY HEDGING WITH TREASURY BILLS: THE CASE OF A BANK FOR COOPERATIVES

Agricultural cooperatives find it difficult to forecast their interest costs and net income. If input and output prices are fixed, anticipatory hedging of future interest costs is appropriate. Banks for Cooperatives obtain funds in maturities longer than the three months of Treasury bills. Hence, anticipatory hedging of interest rates may require selling a "strip" of more than one Treasury bill futures contract. Adapting Peck's model of hedges against forecast error, hedge ratios generally exceed one-for-one, "naïve" hedging, with effectiveness generally above 95 percent. Hedges closed out just before a delivery date have the highest effectiveness.Agribusiness, Financial Economics,

The History and Principles of American Copyright Protection for Fashion Design: On Originality

As discussed in the previous installment of this five-part series, A Strange Centennial, lawyers and non-lawyers alike have often parroted the refrain that U.S. copyright does not apply to articles of fashion design. The American legal system's actual treatment of fashion articles is far more nuanced. If pressed for an accurate generalization, one might reasonably state that certain components of fashion design are copyright-eligible, but even those elements tend to receive less consistent and robust protection than that accorded to most other types of "artistic" or "expressive" works under the law

Copyright as a Rule of Evidence

Many copyright doctrines serve to exclude from the copyright regime cases particularly prone to evidentiary complexity. The implicit logic is that, for these cases, the social costs of litigation would likely outweigh the social benefits derived from offering copyright protection in the first place. Doctrines that serve this evidentiary function include some doctrines for which an evidentiary purpose is readily apparent (for example, the requirement that eligible works be fixed in tangible form), and some for which the link is quite subtle (for example, the rule against protecting work that lacks creativity). Understanding these doctrines in this light helps to refine their proper scope and application. It also makes clear a problem facing copyright law more generally: the increasing divergence between the logical justifications for various copyright doctrines and their actual use by courts and commentators