For quite some time, too long perhaps, a considerable amount of academic scholarship has trended toward focus on copyright’s negative effects, or at least doubt its positive effects, without adequate analysis of the creative process itself. When viewing the market, and especially creators, many academic views I have encountered appear to look solely at finished works, how the market interacts ...
It’s another Independence Day weekend, and I can’t help but notice that we find ourselves this year grappling with some unfortunate consequences of liberty run amok. We’ve got open-carry nuts sporting assault rifles in department stores and coffee shops to prove how free they are; and we’ve got the supreme court granting business owners the right to discriminate against employees ...
This week, I sat on a panel at Harvard University as part of on-going series of roundtable discussions hosted by the USPTO about a variety of copyright issues in the digital age. The topic of our conversation was whether first sale doctrine ought to be expanded in the digital age. In case you don’t speak lawyer, first sale doctrine has ...
NOTE: Apologies in advance for the American-centric post, but what follows can only universally apply in the context of U.S. copyright law. Certain prominent figures making proposals for more limited copyright protections like to repeat the slogan, “We are all authors/creators now,” meaning now that we have the Internet and social applications designed to facilitate easy sharing of all sorts ...
It’s science. Deal with it. We hear an awful lot about how copyrights on creative works “stifle innovation,” preventing new business opportunities from launching or thriving. And the self-serving advocates of these “new” ideas love to describe those of us who question their proposals as anti-technology, anti-progress, stuck in old models, and so on. But the idea that a digital ...
