Antibiotic Resistance

In this essay, written for the 30th Anniversary of Cardozo’s Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, I revisit the ruinous litigation strategy copyright owners pursued after Napster to secure control of the market for personal uses of copyrighted works, which I wrote about ten years ago in War Stories, 20 Cardozo Arts & Ent. L.J. 337 (2002). The litigation campaign had effects that copyright owners now have reason to regret. Medical experts tell us that powerful antibiotics are highly effective in killing off both good and bad bacteria, but at a significant risk. Bugs that survive the treatment grow bigger, stronger, and resistant to antibiotics. They become much more dangerous because they are harder to kill. Copyright owners’ indiscriminate litigation against new entrants into the entertainment and information marketplace killed off a broad swath of potential competitors and partners. The ones who were left faced a less crowded field because old media had helpfully cleared it for them. The scorched-earth litigation strategy temporarily cleared the field, and made room both for tepid, content-industry-controlled efforts to distribute music, books, and video online, and for new entrants with the stamina and resources to survive copyright infringement suits. Apple, Amazon, and Google took advantage of that environment to grow into dominant distributors who are obligatory partners for any serious online content distribution plan, and who insist on calling the shots on price, format, and other matters that content owners believe should rightfully be under their own control.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90848/1/AntibioticResistance.pd

Copyright and Information Policy

The basic principle that copyright protects neither ideas nor information has eroded recently. Recent court decisions and government policies that expand copyright laws are discussed

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When copyright lawyers gather to discuss fair use, the most common refrain is its alarming expansion. Their distress about fair use’s enlarged footprint seems completely untethered from any appreciation of the remarkable increase in exclusive copyright rights. In the nearly forty years since Congress enacted the 1976 copyright act, the rights of copyright owners have expanded markedly. Copyright owners’ demands for further expansion continue unabated. Meanwhile, they raise strident objections to proposals to add new privileges and exceptions to the statute to shelter non-infringing uses that might be implicated by their expanded rights. Copyright owners have used the resulting uncertainty over the scope of liability for new uses to litigate some new businesses into bankruptcy before their legality could be determined. These developments push fair use to shelter new uses and users. When lawyers for copyright owners complain that fair use has stretched beyond their expectations, they fail to acknowledge their own responsibility for its growth. This Article takes up these questions with particular attention to the thirty-one-year-old decision in Sony v. Universal Studios, and Congress’s assumptions about individual and contributory liability for personal copying before and after the Sony case

What We Don\u27t See When We See Copyright as Property

It is becoming increasingly clear that the supposed copyright wars that copyright scholars believed we were fighting – nominally pitting the interests of authors and creators against the interests of readers and other members of the audience – were never really about that at all. Instead the real conflict has been between the publishers, record labels, movie studios, and other intermediaries who rose to market dominance in the 20th century, and the digital services and platforms that have become increasingly powerful copyright players in the 21st. In this essay, adapted from the 13th annual University of Cambridge Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law International Intellectual Property Lecture, I argue that it would make good sense for at least some of us to leave the fight between 20th century publishers and 21st century platforms to the many lawyers that represent both sides, and to focus on some of the issues that aren’t as likely to attract their attention. While copyright scholars have been writing about whether authors\u27 interests or readers\u27 interests should be paramount, we’ve missed the opportunity to look more closely at the issues that the copyright wars obscured. Here is one: For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximize their own revenue while shrinking their payouts to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because — as lawyers — we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which created statutory copyrights and consolidated them in the hands of publishers and printers, with the 1887 Dawes Act, which served a crucial function in the American divestment of Indian land. I draw from the stories of the two laws the same moral: Constituting something as a freely alienable property right will almost always lead to results mirroring or exacerbating disparities in wealth and bargaining power. The legal dogma surrounding property rights makes it easy for us not to notice

Choosing Metaphors

The copyright law on the books is a large aggregation of specific statutory provisions; it goes on and on for pages and pages. When most people talk about copyright, though, they don\u27t mean the long complicated statute codified in title I7 of the U.S. Code. Most people\u27s idea of copyright law takes the form of a collection of principles and norms. They understand that those principles are expressed, if sometimes imperfectly, in the statutory language and the case law interpreting it, but they tend to believe that the underlying principles are what count. It is, thus, unsurprising that the rhetoric used in copyright litigation and copyright lobbying is more often drawn from the principles than the provisions

Lawful Personal Use

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56223/3/Litman.proof.final.pd

Reforming Information Law in Copyright\u27s Image

Symposium: Copyright Owners\u27 Rights and Users\u27 Privileges on the Interne

Imaginary Bottles

Denna studie handlar om hur krisledningsgruppen i Kramfors samverkade under översvämningen som drabbade kommunen hösten 2013. Varför en översvämning och Kramfors valdes var på grund av att det är intressant att studera samverkan efter en inträffad händelse. Dessutom är det en händelse som har skett i Västernorrland och passade bra att studera på grund av det geografiska läget. Glasbergens samverkanstrappa valdes ut som teoretiskt ramverk i uppsatsen. Den valdes då den kan användas för att förstå strukturerna inom krisledningsgruppen. Totalt finns det fem olika analysnivåer i samverkanstrappan och tre av dessa valdes ut för att analysera denna händelse, nivå två, tre och fem. Dessa nivåer innefattar bland annat vilken gemensam grund som finns i krisledningsgruppen, hur formell krisledningsgruppens samverkan är samt vilka effekter samverkan hade för gruppens fortsatta arbete. Materialet samlades in i form av intervjuer med utvalda aktörer i krisledningsgruppen. Under analysen av intervjuerna framkom det att samtliga aktörer känner ett ömsesidigt beroende gentemot varandra och att samtliga anser att det är viktigt att samverka. Vilken form av samverkan det handlade om skiljde sig mellan aktörerna. Svaren gällande frågan om rollfördelningen inom gruppen skiljde sig också. Det handlade om vem som har beslutanderätt i gruppen och om exempelvis externa aktörer ska bjudas in eller inte. Resultatet visar att aktörerna inte var överens om sin egen roll eller om det fanns någon som hade beslutanderätt i krisledningsgruppen. Detta ger frågetecken kring hur formell gruppen egentligen är. Aktörerna ansåg att samverkan och hanteringen av översvämningen fungerade bra med några få invändningar. Dessa handlade främst om hur samverkan med externa aktörer gick men även om interna faktorer som exempelvis hur snabbt mötesanteckningarna spreds vidare till förvaltningarna. De interna faktorerna har lett till förändringar i krisledningsgruppens interna arbete, alltså har översvämningen haft effekt på gruppens arbete