Asserting Copyright\u27s Democratic Principles in the Global Arena

In a seeming blink of an eye, international bodies applying international law have effectively become the arbiters of domestic copyright law. World Trade Organization ( WTO ) dispute settlement panels may now determine whether a nation\u27s copyright law comports with the newly adopted Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property ( TRIPS ),\u27 and may authorize trade sanctions upon a finding of non-compliance. Of like import, the United Nations\u27 World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO ) increasingly serves as a favored venue for copyright industry and user groups to further their legislative agendas. Recent WIPO treaties have accordingly set the tone for proposed domestic legislation designed to bring copyright law into the digital age. Given the ongoing integration of world communications and markets for cultural expression, the continuing globalization of copyright law is inevitable. For that reason, the question of the future direction and shape of international copyright law has become a matter of considerable and growing controversy. Most pointedly, to the profound consternation of numerous commentators, recent years have seen a dramatic move to reconceptualize copyright in terms of international trade. TRIPS epitomizes that move. It aims to ratchet up worldwide copyright protection and enforcement in order to remove barriers to copyright industry exports. United States and European Union officials have aggressively promoted the view of cultural expression as a commodity of trade in other contexts as well. At the behest of their constituent producers and purveyors of sound recordings, films, television programs, and software, they have insisted that countries be required to minimize limitations on copyright holder rights, arguably riding roughshod over venerable copyright values and the public interest in the process. This Article presents an alternative framework for copyright globalization. It builds upon the argument, recently advanced by myself and others, that copyright law serves fundamentally to underwrite a democratic culture: By according creators of original expression a set of exclusive rights to market their literary and artistic works, copyright fosters the dissemination of knowledge, supports a pluralist, nonstate communications media, and highlights the value of individual contributions to public discourse.\u27 In this view, copyright\u27s constitutive, democratic purpose is both a primary rationale for according authors proprietary rights in original expression and the proper standard for delimiting those rights. Copyright holder rights should be sufficiently robust to support copyright\u27s democracy-enhancing functions, but not so broad and unbending as to chill expressive diversity and hinder the exchange of information and ideas

Market Hierarchy and Copyright in Our System of Free Expression

If trends of the past two decades persist, a vast inequality of wealth may well become a fundamental, defining characteristic of political and social life in many Western democracies, particularly the United States.\u27 Among its potentially pernicious effects, massive wealth disparity threatens the integrity of the democratic process. Liberal democracy aspires to political equality, which demands that opportunities to acquire and assert political power be widespread and broadly distributed. Political equality does not require economic equality. But political equality may be undermined by severe disparities of wealth. Absent preventive regulation, private wealth buys political power. It enables those with greater private means to exercise a disproportionate influence over legislation and to steer the course of public debate. For that reason, substantial inequalities of wealth may prove fundamentally incompatible with liberal democratic governance

Guidelines for OLAC Video Game Genre Terms (olacvggt)

A thesaurus of video game genre terms with a corresponding MARC authority record

Primary Sources on Copyright revisited: a copyright history webinar on Papal Privileges and the Stationers' Register

This working paper presents an edited transcript of a copyright history webinar held on 15 December 2021, marking 15 years since the conception of the Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) 1 digital archive. Giles Bergel (University of Oxford) and Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University) introduce Stationers’ Register Online (SRO)2 – a new resource that digitises the entries for the literary, musical and artistic works made in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company of London3 between 1557 and 1640. Jane Ginsburg (Columbia Law School) presents a new section on Vatican sources which she (and her team of Latinists) contributed to the Primary Sources digital archive, edited by Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge) and Martin Kretschmer (CREATe, University of Glasgow). The project presentations were followed by a panel discussion, joined by Elena Cooper (CREATe, University of Glasgow) and Neil Netanel (University of California at Los Angeles), two of the national editors of Primary Sources on Copyright. This working paper offers a reference point of wider interest. What should be the ambitions of a primary sources project? Can the history of copyright law be re-written? What is the role of history for policy