Amateur-to-Amateur

Copyright, it is commonly said, matters in society because it encourages the production of socially beneficial, culturally significant expressive content. Our focus on copyright\u27s recent history, however, blinds us to the social information practices that have always existed. In this Article, we examine these social information practices, and query copyright\u27s role within them. We posit a functional model of what is necessary for creative content to move from creator to user. These are the functions dealing with the creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content. We demonstrate how centralized commercial control of information content has been the driving force behind copyright\u27s expansion. All of the functions that copyright industries once controlled, however, are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation. Different aspects of information technology, notably the digitization of information, widespread computer ownership, the rise of the Internet, and the development of social software, threaten the viability and desirability of centralized control over every one of the content functions. These functions are increasingly being performed by individuals and disaggregated groups. This raises an issue for copyright as the main regulatory force in information practices: copyright assumes a central control requirement that no longer applies for the development of expressive content. We examine the normative implications of this shift for our information policy in this new post-copyright era. Most notably, we conclude that copyright law needs to be adjusted in order to recognize the opportunity and desirability of decentralized content, and the expanded marketplace of ideas it promises

Amateur-to-amateur: The rise of a new creative culture

This 2006 article argues: It is commonly said that copyright matters because it encourages the production of socially beneficial, culturally significant expressive content. Excessive focus on copyright law and policy, however, can obscure other information practices that also produce beneficial and useful expression. The functions that make up the creative cycle -- creation, selection, production, dissemination, promotion, sale, and use of expressive content-- have historically been carried out and controlled by centralized commercial actors. However, all of those functions are undergoing revolutionary decentralization and disintermediation. Different aspects of information technology, notably the digitization of information, widespread computer ownership, the rise of the Internet, and the development of social networking software, threaten both the viability and the desirability of centralized control over the steps in the creative cycle. Those functions are being performed increasingly by individuals and disorganized, distributed groups. This raises questions about copyright as the main regulatory force in creative information practices. Copyright law assumes a central control structure that applies less well to the creative content cycle with each passing year. Copyright law should be adjusted to recognize and embrace a distributed, decentralized creative cycle and the expanded marketplace of ideas it promises

Barbie doll

THE BARBIE DOLL is a remarkable object— wasp-waisted, flesh-toned, the Venus of Hawthorne, CA, Mattel Inc.'s birthplace. But she is also a lesson in how copyright, trademark, patent can be used by companies to maintain desire. And just as Barbie is the very embodiment of unrequited desire, so too do intellectual property laws constrain consumers in their access to the objects of their lust. Barbie is, then, much more than a doll—she is an object lesson in the connection between lust, laws, money, and flesh-toned plastic.Born on 9 March 1959, Barbie sprang forth from the imagination of Ruth Handler, one of the founders of the Mattel company and the mother of two children who were, improbably, also named Barbara and Ken. The official Mattel narrative holds that Barbie Millicent Roberts is a wholesome Midwestern gal, a “teenage fashion model” from Willows, Wisconsin. But the creation story of Barbie is more inflected than this, and less wholesome. Barbie was patterned on another doll, “Lilli,” which Ruth Handler chanced upon while on a European tour with her family. Spied in a toy store window in Lucerne, Switzerland, the dollwhich- would-become-Barbie was anything but a sweet teenage fashionista: she was the embodiment of a lewd cartoon character, created by Reinhard Beuthien for a tabloid German newspaper, Bild-Leitung. The character Lilli was an under-employed secretary who hooked on the side, or at least spent a great deal of time “socializing” with rich sugar daddies to supplement her income—a stereotype distressingly familiar in postwar Europe.The Lilli dolls, developed by O&M Hausser, were released in 1955 and featured Lilli in various outfits, many of them racy. The dolls weren't intended for children, and were apparently bought by men as gag gifts for bachelor parties, as dashboard adornments, or as suggestive gifts for their girlfriends and mistresses.On hearing that Lilli was a working girl, some commentators have tut-tutted at the sinful nature of Barbie's birth. But the sin emanated not from the doll, but from her creator. Mattel took the Lilli doll and knocked her off as the Barbie doll, with at best a slight cosmetic alteration: her hairline was adjusted to have a less pronounced widow's peak, and her eyebrows became less severely arched. Apart from these minor changes, the dolls were identical, even down to the sideways-glancing eyes on both dolls

Virtual worlds: A primer

Abstract not available

The laws of the virtual worlds

What if you could check out of your world, and enter a place where the social environment was different, where real world laws didn't apply, and where the political system could be anything you wanted it to be? What if you could socialize there with family and friends, build your own palace, go skiing, and even hold down a job there? And what if there wasn't one alternate world, there were hundreds, and what if millions of people checked out of Earth and went there every day? Virtual worlds - online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize - are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail. First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply - sometimes more strongly - in the virtual worlds. Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance. The issues of virtual property and avatar rights constitute legal challenges for our online future. Though virtual worlds may be games now, they are rapidly becoming as significant as real-world places where people interact, shop, sell, and work. As society and law begin to develop within virtual worlds, we need to have a better understanding of the interaction of the laws of the virtual worlds with the law of this world

BarbieTM

Intellectual property laws are the means by which corporations allow access to their products. Mattel Inc.’s Barbie doll is highly dependent on the intellectual property system, and this Essay provides the first serious account of the development of Barbie as an object of intellectual property. It demonstrates the significance of Barbie as an intellectual property object, and it traces how intellectual property laws emerged as such a powerful technology of control in the period from Barbie’s birth in 1959 to the present. The Essay also shows that the great unrecognized feature of the intellectual property system is its ability to manipulate desire