This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, (...) and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This Article discusses the first steps of Israeli copyright law, dating it back to Ottoman times, which is earlier than thus far discussed in the literature. The account provides an early case of legal globalization through colonialism. The imposition of copyright law in Palestine enables us to observe the difficulties of applying an uninvited legal transplant and to trace its dynamics. The discussion queries the fate of copyright law in Mandate Palestine from two perspectives. First, the Colonial-Imperial (...) point of view: I ask why the British government imposed copyright law in the newly administered territory only a month after the establishment of the civil administration in 1920 and then replaced it in 1924. The answers are to be found in the general imperial agenda, its Palestine agenda, as well as the nature of copyright and the personal background of those involved. Second, from the local point of view, I trace the first steps of copyright law within the Hebrew community and especially within the literary circle in the 1920s. The local needs of the literary field concerned the author-publisher relationship, attribution, the integrity of the work and international transactions. However, the answers to these problems were not found in the law but rather in private ordering, namely contracts and social norms. (shrink)

Private copying exception is an exception to copyright which is present both in Lithuanian national law and law of the European Union. Recent jurisprudence of Court of Justice of the European Union interpreted legal regulation of private copying exception in the laws of the European Union. The mentioned jurisprudence raised concern whether Lithuanian copyright laws on private copying exception and their interpretation in case law of Supreme Court of Lithuania are compatible with the European Union law. (...) This paper analyses the nature and intention of private copying exception, its reflection in Lithuanian and European copyright law and evaluates Lithuanian laws and case law in the light of recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The authors conclude that recent jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union on private copying exception shall not lead to any dramatic or substantial changes of Lithuanian national copyright laws. (shrink)

Traditional folk music refers to customary songs and tunes played since time immemorial in a specific area. As an expression of culture and identity, this kind of music can be deemed as the heritage of the local community in its entirety, and derives from musical practices transmitted orally and repeated over a long period of time by a group of people, who, in so doing, keep their traditions alive. From this point of view, the owner of traditional folk music is (...) not a specific composer, but all the members of a local community. But this clashes with the efforts to copyright traditional folk music expressions, since often copyright acts do not recognize forms of collective ownership on folklore and traditional knowledge. This paper aims to discuss possible solutions to tackle the issues related to the protection of traditional folk music, by considering not only the literature in the field of intellectual property, but also the outcomes of the legal formants and the comparative methodology, taking into consideration the studies of the social sciences involved in this topic, in particular anthropology and ethnomusicology. The final task is to find a place for traditional folk music within the framework of copyright law and verify its level of protection. (shrink)

Copyright law is often premised on the identification of an author of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work, and then giving this author exclusive rights for a limited period to control the commercial exploitation of his or her intellectual creation. However, the hegemonic modernist position of the romantic authorial text has been challenged by numerous scholars who have argued that the meaning of a text lies not in its origin but in its destination. Roland Barthes’ work, controversial at (...) the time of publication with its assault on modernity and the primacy of authorial control, has nonetheless laid the groundwork for an important body of scholarship on interpretive communities. Whether one adopts the position of neoconservative postmodernism or poststructural postmodernism, this article argues that a semiotic analysis of works of copyright as “signs”, “myths” and “polysemous texts” will nonetheless offer an important framework to understand the full reach of the transformative use doctrine in the United States today. (shrink)

This article considers current advances in tattooing that are challenging community-held views of authorship and ownership, and the need to address this tension. The key challenge is from AI-generated artworks being used as tattoo designs, but the authorial role of the tattooist is also challenged by body art projects such as tattoo collection. Legal clarity for tattooing is lacking, and in addressing this, this article advocates for an open, community-based form of shared copyright ownership and authorship for projects as (...) tattoo collecting, drawing on Dusollier’s and Mendis’ work. This article contributes to both copyright and cultural heritage legal scholarship, and to tattooing scholarship and the tattooing community. AI-generated art being tattooed on people has not been explored in the literature to date, and this article fills this gap. Furthermore, this article contributes a pilot study of the tattoo community’s views on AI-generated tattoos, which is currently lacking from the scholarly debate on AI-generated art. This article argues that the debate within the tattoo community about AI-generated art being used in tattoos needs to be addressed within the community through agreed extra-legal norms, which may well depart from how copyright law decides to approach AI-generated art globally. This article also asserts that AI should _not_ be regarded as the “author” of tattoo works in the traditional copyright sense, as only a human tattooist can draw from a number of cultural, textual, audiovisual and visual, cultural folklore, history and mythical references in creating their tattoo designs, as well as drawing on the client’s personal stories. This article explores the following: (i) an understanding of tattooing as an artform; (ii) tattoos in UK copyright law; (iii) an exploration of the authorial role of the tattooist within tattooing; (iv) the authorial role of the tattooist within tattoo collecting; (v) AI-generated tattoos—perspectives from the tattoo community, through a pilot study of YouTube videos and viewer comments about this; and (vi) a consideration of whether copyright legal reform is the solution for the tattooing community. (shrink)

Graphic justice and the law of aesthetics have in very recent years successfully brought law, aesthetics and comics scholarship into the same space. The culture of copyright infringement within comics (including in the Marvel, DC, and Disney universes) has been extensively in the literature by scholars including Saval. How copyright law is portrayed within the graphic novels and comics themselves is the focus (and contribution of) this article. This article will explore several comics and graphic novels, as well (...) as included this author’s reflections of portraying copyright visually within zines for public dissemination. Throughout this article, the discourses of ghosts and spectres that are interwoven with copyright law and haunt the texts will be seen, as will the discourses of oppression and warfare that are involved for anyone seeking to make use of copyright works. As Gómez Romero and Dahlman note, comics offer “an alternative legal discourse” and we can see these alternative legal discourses through their aesthetic graphic form. This article will consider: the aesthetic portrayal of copyright law in A Gift for a Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats No. 6; as well as Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures. These comics and graphic novels have been chosen as they aesthetically portray copyright law and copyright infringement (referred to in some of the comics as “plagiarism”), and others aesthetically portray the public domain and fair use. In viewing these aesthetic manifestation of copyright law, the reader understands the limiting nature of copyright on creative freedoms, and that copyright law’s power is absolute. This article will explore the following: (i) copyright’s aesthetic portrayals and the impact of this; (ii) comics haunted by copyright law, considering A Gift for A Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats; (iii) comics about the necessity of the public domain and fair use, considering Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures; and (iv) self-reflections on portraying copyright aesthetically in publicly disseminated research zines. This article has not set out to determine that certain visual aesthetic portrayals are “correct” or “better”, but rather to explore how legal discourses and narratives about copyright law are circulated through the comics medium. These visual depictions hold considerable weight, and it is striking to see similar narratives used across a range of comics works, with different intended audiences. What is clear is that the visual depiction of copyright law enables a greater ability to convey the multiple copyright law discourses that can be felt at once, and also to highlight that some of these discourses are contradictory to one another. (shrink)

in Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World, eds. H. Tavani and R. Spinello, 2004.

Can one reject copyright law and be a qualified observer of its dispositives? This question was taken up by Bertolt Brecht in an intriguing essay concerning the litigation surrounding the film adaptation ofThe Threepenny Opera(1928). Brecht here develops an experimental observation around the nature of film adaptation and cultural production in copyright. While an experimental approach to law was in itself a subversive gesture, the specific legal process enabled him to expose the paradoxical ways in which the (...) class='Hi'>copyright system worked. (shrink)

Is copyright a property right? Common law and civil law jurists have debated that issue for over three centuries. It remains at the heart of battles over copyright’s scope and duration today, even if its import lies principally in the rhetorical force of labeling a right as "property," not in any doctrinal consequence flowing directly from that label. In parallel to their common law and civil law counterparts, presentday rabbinic jurists engage in lively debate about whether Jewish law (...) recognizes copyright as a property right. And, as in secular law but for different reasons, that issue has significant repercussions in Jewish law. As discussed in rabbinic court decisions and writings, whether Jewish law accords authors a right of ownership in their works impacts such issues as whether it is permissible, without license from the author or publisher, to copy and distribute software and sound recordings, perform music in wedding halls, make copies for private and classroom use, and download songs from the Internet. There are numerous, and at times profound, differences in the terminology, form of argument, doctrinal specifics, and overarching legal framework of Jewish and secular law. Nonetheless, the arguments within the Jewish law debate have some intriguing parallels with those of secular copyright law. In fact, one finds the direct, if largely unstated, influence of secular copyright just below the surface in the debate in Jewish law about whether copyright is property. (shrink)

This study aims to optimize the enterprise criminal law-based copyright protection. This exploration discusses the role of the entrepreneurial spirit in criminal law-based copyright protection. To study the relationship between ES and criminal law-based copyright protection, the concepts of ES, criminal law-based copyright protection, and enterprise innovation are given. Next, by collecting literature, hypotheses are put forward. They include the relationship between ES and enterprise innovation, ES and the criminal law-based copyright protection, and the intermediary (...) role of ES in the criminal law-based copyright protection and economic growth. Then, relevant models are established. Finally, the hypotheses are tested through experiments and empirical analysis, and the model is regressed to test the experimental data’s robustness and the scale’s reliability and validity. The empirical analysis shows that: the significance of ES under the 1% index is greater than 0. It indicates that the higher the managers’ ES is, the greater the enterprise innovation is. The significance of criminal law-based copyright protection on ES under the 1% index is greater than 0 and the regression coefficient is 0.59. This shows that criminal law-based copyright protection has a significant positive impact on ES. Under the l% index, the significance of ES on economic growth is greater than 0 and the regression coefficient is 0.63. It shows that ES mediates the relationship between criminal law-based copyright protection and economic growth. Therefore, strengthening criminal law-based copyright protection improves the ES and leads to faster enterprise and regional economic development. Therefore, the state should pay attention to criminal law-based copyright protection to encourage innovation to promote enterprise development. This exploration studies the relationship among ES, economic growth, enterprise innovation, and criminal law-based copyright protection. The finding provides a theoretical reference for criminal law-based copyright protection. (shrink)

This paper attempts a theoretical discussion of effects on the legal regime of copyright induced by the change from material to digital media. Specifically, a fundamental question remains unanswered: what is the relationship between an object and a copy? A conceptually clear answer to this question has been unnecessary because it has always been possible to provide an ad hoc answer through visual inspection of an object. Authorized mechanical reproductions – authorized copies – look similar to one another, and (...) unauthorized reproductions bear tangible evidence of degradation. Digital reproduction, however, makes such visual inspection impossible, as both authorized and unauthorized digital reproductions look the same. At that moment, one “would expect” that copyright protects the essence of the object, independently of how it looks. Indeed, this is precisely what copyright jurisprudence, which emphasizes originality, tries to do. However, absent the baseline of visual intelligibility, there is no criterion for knowing which object legitimately embodies its eidos and which does not. The effects of this absence stand behind many of the battles surrounding digital reproduction. In section 2, I discuss more precisely how digital reproduction undermines the original/copy distinction. In section 3, I show how the effects of this are manifest in contemporary debates. Section 4 attempts a more theoretical discussion, organized around Deleuze's discussion of Platonism (and the degree to which, for Deleuze, the Platonic original/copy distinction functions to enable the police work of good copy/bad copy). The essay concludes with some thoughts about future developments in copyright and the suggestion that the move to digital rights management technologies are appropriately seen as a response to these conceptual limitations in copyright. (shrink)

Jon Bing was not only a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and law and the legal regulation of technology. He was also an accomplished author of fiction, with an oeuvre spanning from short stories and novels to theatre plays and even an opera. As reality catches up with the imagination of science fiction writers who have anticipated a world shared by humans and non-human intelligences of their creation, some of the copyright issues he has discussed in his (...) academic capacity take on new resonance. How will we regulate copyright when robots are producers and consumers of art? This paper tries to give a sketch of the problem and hints at possible answers that are to a degree inspired by Bing’s academic and creative writing. (shrink)

The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information, often on the ground that an expansive public domain is a condition of a ‘free culture’. Yet questions remain about why the public domain is worth defending, what exactly a free culture is, and what role (if any) authors’ rights might play in relation to it. From the standard liberal perspective shared by many critics of copyright expansionism, the protection (...) of individual expression by means of marketable property rights in authors’ works serves as an engine of progress towards a fully competitive ‘marketplace of ideas’ – though only if balanced by an extensive public domain from which users may draw in the exercise of their own expressivity. This article shows that a significantly different, and arguably richer, conception of what a free culture is and how authors’ rights underpin it emerges from a direct engagement with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, progress towards a fully emancipated (i.e. a ‘mature’ or ‘enlightened’) culture can only be achieved through the critical intellectual activity that public communication demands: individual expressive freedom is only a condition, not constitutive, of this ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’. The main thesis defended in this article is that when Kant’s writings on publicity (critical public debate) are read in relation to his writings on the legal organization of publishing, a necessary connection emerges between authors’ rights – as distinct from copyrights – and what Jürgen Habermas and others have named the public sphere. I conclude that it is the public sphere, and not the public domain as such, that should serve as the key reference point in any evaluation of copyright law’s role in relation to the possibility of a free culture. (shrink)

This Article calls into question the primary meaning of copyright law. It argues that copyright is not primarily a legal instrument, but rather a fundamental mode of human existence. The starting point of the analysis is Kant’s definition of a book as a "public address" and of author’s rights as ultimately being grounded in the furtherance and maintenance of truth. Building on Kant’s argument, the Article defines the copyright primary subject matter as the act of speaking publicly (...) in one’s own name, and the copyright sphere as the author-public coalescence that such act of speaking generates. This enables reaching a proper understanding of the scope of copyright and to characterizing its specificity as compared to its "fellow rights," patents and trademarks. (shrink)

The article deals with the comparison of key terminology in the field of copyright in the Polish, English, Japanese and German languages. The research material consists of copyright acts binding in Poland, Great Britain, the United States of America, Japan and Germany. The terminology has been compared in order to reveal similarities and differences in the meaning. Firstly, statutory terms from the Polish, English, German and Japanese acts will be presented and discussed. Also, a list of functional equivalents (...) will be presented. The task was to search for functional equivalents, and if there is partial equivalence or no equivalence, an equivalent was provided according to techniques of providing equivalents for non-equivalent terms. They were made in such a way that equivalents will correspond with the reality of the laws in the above mentioned languages. The terms have been extracted with the usage of AntConc. The method of analysis of comparable texts has been applied as well as the one based on three categories of equivalence by Šarčević : “near equivalence”, “partial equivalence” and “non-equivalence”. Special attention has been paid to system-bound terminology existing in those five legal systems. To sum up, it should be borne in mind that the copyright law has been unified almost world-wide. As a result many countries have adopted similar or almost identical principles in this respect. Therefore, there is a significant convergence of meanings of analysed copyright terms with only slight differences resulting from deeply ingrained local and national legal traditions. (shrink)

Creative influence, be it in the form of subtle inspiration or unequivocal imitation, has impacted the development of artistic styles and schools of thought for millennia. Since the late twentieth century, appropriation artists have drawn attention to these customs by intentionally borrowing or copying from preexisting sources with little or no transformation, despite these practices running into direct conflict with United States copyright law. Indeed, recent decades have witnessed several noteworthy lawsuits involving prominent artists who have challenged the boundaries (...) between copyright infringement and fair use, raising questions regarding the ethical creation and consumption of art. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the ethical responsibility to teach students of the visual arts about the purpose, theory, and parameters of copyright law, including its inherent ambiguities and risks, in order to foster moral creative practices. Because of the complex nature of copyright law, the author advocates both traditional instruction on copyright principles and applications as well as the encouragement of personal self-regulation on the part of students with regard to their own professional work. (shrink)

Creative influence, be it in the form of subtle inspiration or unequivocal imitation, has impacted the development of artistic styles and schools of thought for millennia. Since the late twentieth century, appropriation artists have drawn attention to these customs by intentionally borrowing or copying from preexisting sources with little or no transformation, despite these practices running into direct conflict with United States copyright law. Indeed, recent decades have witnessed several noteworthy lawsuits involving prominent artists who have challenged the boundaries (...) between copyright infringement and fair use, raising questions regarding the ethical creation and consumption of art. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the ethical responsibility to teach students of the visual arts about the purpose, theory, and parameters of copyright law, including its inherent ambiguities and risks, in order to foster moral creative practices. Because of the complex nature of copyright law, the author advocates both traditional instruction on copyright principles and applications as well as the encouragement of personal self-regulation on the part of students with regard to their own professional work. (shrink)

The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests to strengthen claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests’ everexpanding proprietary control of knowledge and establishing a more public regarding copyright system. This Article examines one of the most notable intellectual property political movements, the emergence of late nineteenth-century agitation to provide copyright protection for foreign authors as a (...) social movement. It places this political and legal activism within the larger framework of Progressive Era reform. During this period, activists promoted the idea of the public — and not simply the author — as primary to the workings of American copyright. The framing of the purposes of copyright, the appeal to a broader public, and the complex negotiations surrounding the passage of an international copyright act after a long period of gestation was formative to the creation of modern United States copyright law. Ironically, the movement for international copyright also sharpened the identification of interest groups. The first modern American comprehensive copyright legislation, the 1909 Copyright Act, was drafted by gathering together these groups for negotiations remarkably similar in style to those which led to the protection of the rights of foreign authors — but which would strongly embrace a proprietary model. (shrink)

Copyright is accepted as being the necessary and efficient response to the need of authors and publishers to appropriate the economic value of copyright works from users. Nevertheless, difficulties arise when such works are both produced and consumed within universities. The law recognizes that copyright cannot be an absolute right and in certain circumstances, the scope of copyright protection is limited by the statute. Where educational usage of works is concerned, the British copyright law has (...) attempted to balance the rights of the individual academic user, the duties of universities and their libraries, and the rights of the copyright owners. However, recent case-law suggests that the correct balance between the interests of copyright owners on the one hand, and the interests of education and scholarship on the other has not been achieved especially where the educator and the copyright author reside in a single individual. The article employs stakeholder analysis to discern whether there should be a re-evaluation of the law so that copyright law and policy better reflect the interests of key participants within the educational sector. (shrink)

In these pages we seek to integrate two claims. First, we argue that, taken to their logical conclusions, the considerations that support a strict form of protection for tangible property rights do not call for a similar form of protection when applied to the case of copyright. More dramatically, these considerations demand, on pain of glaring inconsistency, a substantially weaker protection for copyright. In pursuing this claim, we show that the form of protecting property rights is, to an (...) important extent, a feature of certain normal, though contingent, facts about the human world. Second, the normative question concerning the selection of a desirable protection for creative works is most naturally pursued from a tort law perspective, in part because the normative structure of copyright law simply is that of tort law. (shrink)

The prevalence of social production and the increase in User Generated Content destabilize some of the fundamental premises of our current copyright law. Copyright law is primarily designed to regulate the relationships of a single owner with other non-owners and is focused on the sovereignty of the author/owner. Social production, by contrast, requires us to articulate a matrix of relationships between the individual, the facilitating platform and the communities and crowds involved in social production. The transition from industrial (...) production to social production transforms the social relations associated with the production of content and therefore requires adjustment of the institutions that design such relations. This Article closely examines the social dimension of content production and analyzes the consequences for the governance of content in the social web. The Article proceeds as follows: Part I describes social production and analyzes the implications for the stakeholders involved. I focus on three key features of social production which affect why we create, how we create, and what assets are generated by the process of creation. Part II explains why social production might be incompatible with the current copyright regime. In particular, I argue that copyright law mainly defines rights against strangers and fails to provide a framework for managing the rights and interests within a gigantic group of collaborators. Furthermore, the exclusivity offered by copyright law may undermine social motivation and collaborative production. Finally, in Part III, I outline some of the challenges for legal policy. (shrink)

Copyright law is a crucial part of the normative framework of the artistic and art-related practices in the modern world. It facilitates the production and public accessibility of certain works of art and literature, music, moving images, etc. At the same time, it prevents the production and public accessibility of others whichmight have been just as interesting as those we got to know. Intellectual property norms imprint our ideas of authorship as well as the ontological constitution of artworks. Yet (...) the interdependencies and interferences between copyright law, aesthetic theories and artistic practices deserve a more thorough analysis. This paper presents a new approach to an institutional theory of art, analyzing the relevance of intellectual property regimes for the opening and exclusion of certain possibilities in the production, distribution and use of works of art as well as for our understanding of some fundamental aesthetic concepts. (shrink)

This Article aims to draw the connection between how we conceptualize legal rights over information resources and our capacity to develop technologically neutral legal norms in the information age. More specifically, it identifies and critically examines three competing approaches to the idea of technological neutrality apparent in copyright jurisprudence. Ultimately, it is argued that true technological neutrality requires not simply the seamless expansion of legal rights into new technological contexts, but the careful, contextual recalibration of rights and interests in (...) light of shifting values and changing circumstances. As a normative principle, technological neutrality in copyright law thus demands a nuanced and relational understanding of the rights at play, and the social values that they seek to foster as technologies evolve. (shrink)

This book provides international perspectives on the law of copyright in relation to three core themes - copyright and developing countries; the government and copyright; and technology and the future of copyright. The third theme includes an examination of the extent to which technology will dictate the development of the law, and a re-examination of the role of copyright in fostering innovation and creativity. As a critique, one chapter discusses how certain rights can create or (...) reinforce social inequality under copyright royalty systems. Underlying these themes is the role the law of copyright has in encouraging or impeding human flourishing. (shrink)

Determining the copyright status of a literary work is not always straightforward, because copyrights are territorial and the relevant laws differ significantly country by country. In some legislations, for example, a work’s copyright status may depend on the publication date, on whether the publication was posthumous, on the quantity and quality of editorial interventions the manuscript underwent before publication, etc. 2021 marked the 70th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death. In many countries, the duration of the copyright term (...) is the author’s life plus 70 years. Thus, as of the moment of this writing, it is important to attempt a comprehensive analysis and to try to determine whether, where and why his manuscripts and his published works are in the public domain. This paper clarifies the general principles of copyright and describes the rules and best practices that must be followed in the context of internet publications. Additionally, it examines the factors that make it particularly challenging to ascertain the copyright status both of Wittgenstein’s published works and of the transcriptions of his manuscripts. Lastly, it provides a detailed account of the copyright status of some of Wittgenstein’s works that were published in the second half of the 20th century, proving that they are in the public domain in most countries. (shrink)

As we become more and more enhanced with cyborg technology, significant issues of law and policy are raised. For example, as cyborg devices implanted within the body create a class of people with enhanced motor and computational abilities, how should the law and policy respond when the abilities of such people surpass those of the general population? And what basic human and legal rights should be afforded to people equipped with cyborg technology as they become more machine and less biology? (...) As other issues of importance, if a neuroprosthetic device is accessed by a third party and done to edit one’s memory or to plant a new memory in one’s mind, or even to place an ad for a commercial product in one’s consciousness, should there be a law of cognitive liberty or of “neuro-advertising” that applies? This paper discusses laws and statutes enacted across several jurisdictions which apply to cyborg technologies with a particular emphasis on legal doctrine which relates to neuroprosthetic devices. (shrink)

The most widely accepted explanation of why we need copyright is that it provides authors with the necessary economic incentive to create. This incentive story has largely gone unchallenged, and has been used to justify lengthening and strengthening the legal protections for expressive works. This Article points out, however, that the empirical foundation for the copyright-as-incentive story is seriously suspect. It fails to account for the economic conditions under which most art, literature and other expressive works are produced, (...) and it contravenes the insights provided over the last forty years or so by psychologists interested in creativity and by behavioral economists. Empirical research has shown that intrinsic factors are much more important determinants of participation in creative work than such extrinsic ones as monetary reward. In fact, evidence exists that the promise of extrinsic rewards such as money can actually be detrimental to the creative impulse. This is not to say that concern with economic rewards should play no role in a legal regime designed to encourage the creative process. But, at a minimum, this Article suggests both that copyright scholars need to develop a far more nuanced understanding of why people produce what they do, and that a satisfactory legal regime to promote intellectual property creation and dissemination can afford to be far less concerned than it presently is with ensuring that authors and copyright owners can extract every bit of available profit from their works. (shrink)

The work, which came into its own with the emergence of modern copyright law at the turn of the twentieth century, occupies a pivotal position in copyright law. Focusing on the question of how copyright decides whether part of a work should be treated as a separate and distinct object, this Article looks at some of the techniques that copyright law uses to decide both what is a work and when a new work comes into being. (...) The Article shows that in spite of the central role that the work plays in copyright doctrine the law is not well equipped to explain when a new work has come into being. (shrink)

Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the legal protection of databases of 11 March 1996, which was intended to protect the interests of the makers of databases, determined that databases could be protected by double rights: copyright and sui generis right. The article first of all analyses what persons are entitled to be acknowledged as holders of copyright and sui generis right in respect of a newly created database. As the issue of the (...) owner of copyright is not regulated by the 1996 Directive, this is determined by the application of national provisions. Pursuant to the Law on Copyright and Related Rights of the Republic of Lithuania, the owner of copyright may mean, depending on the situation, a natural person – the author of a database or a group of authors, the holder of the right to a collective work, or an employer. The analysis presented in the articleindicates that predominantly it is the author (authors) of a database who is held to be the owner of the copyright. Courts tend to interpret the rule concerning the transfer of copyright to the employer in a restrictive way; besides, in accordance with the specifics of the Lithuanian legal regulation, economic rights are transferred to the employer only for the period of 5 years. The category of collective work is of a subsidiary character and may be applied only in exclusive cases. Therefore, when a database is created upon the commission of another person, including the employer, the customer is expected to form a written agreement where the transfer of economic rights to the customer is clearly defined. (shrink)

This article considers the extent to which insights from the philosophy of art can assist copyright law in identifying the author or authors of works to which many have contributed. In doing so, it looks to institutional theories of art, which go beyond a simple bifurcation of ‘author’ and ‘work’, and focus instead on broader determinants of an art work’s production, such as the ‘artworld’. It puts forward a framework focusing on three components of authorship supported by these theories: (...) role, authority and intention. The paper then draws attention to some important challenges that this framework raises for copyright law’s joint authorship doctrine in the UK and USA, and suggests some ways in which copyright law might be reformed, so as to allow copyright to retain its own benchmarks while also bringing conceptions of authorship in law and art closer together. (shrink)

Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari are utilized to help construct a 32 dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities and perspectives. In applying the framework (...) to the Google–copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was “born political”: in that it was, and still is, disposed by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where “politics is born”: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of clauses in Polish and English copyright agreements in respect of their translation by a computer assisted tool—Google Translate, and to assess the quality of such translation. The comparison of parallel texts as a research method has been applied. The research corpora include authentic Polish and English Copyright Agreements. The analysed clauses have been excerpted from the above mentioned Copyright Agreements. The author chose the most (...) standard clauses as well as clauses typical for copyright contracts. As a result of the analysis, translations provided by Google Translate are better in terms of typical clauses but of worse quality in terms of specialised copyright clauses. (shrink)

The United States recognized intellectual property rights from its earliest days and included, in its constitution, a clause which expresses this, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." These few words found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 have grown into a massive body of laws that govern works that were unimaginable to Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries. Our (...) question today is very simple: is the latest metamorphosis of copyright law, the Digital Millennial Copyright Act of 1998, prudent policy? Specifically, we are concerned with three issues which critics have raised regarding this act: chilling effects on fair use, suppression of innovation, and overreach. We will also touch on the criticism which stresses that the DMCA further expands a system which increasingly and unfairly favors the content industries. This will be limited to illustrating extant tensions between copyright owners and society and also the difficulties law faces in keeping pace with the current, rapid and overwhelming technological and cultural change. We rely primarily on leading cases to establish the impact on fair use and innovation or to demonstrate over reach. (shrink)

Translates an important 1932 work by Austrian physicist-turned- philosopher Frank (1884-1966). Among the topics he discusses are the Laplacean determinism of global causal laws of nature; the loss of causal simplicity with the establishment of field concepts; cause and chance in classical, statistical-mechanical, and quantum physics; conservation in laws and causal laws; the seeming irreversibility of natural processes; extremal principles; vitalist explanations as also causal; miracles and theological explanations; and lawfulness in the phenomena of life. First published (...) by Springer-Verlag as Das Kauselgesetz und seine Grenzen. No subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Accidental infringement of copyright is a pervasive and largely ignored problem. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly easy to infringe copyright unintentionally. When such accidental infringement occurs, copyright law holds the user strictly liable. Prior literature has questioned whether the strict liability standard is normatively defensible. In particular, prior literature has asked whether the strict liability standard ought to be reformed for economic reasons. This Article examines the accidental infringement problem from a new perspective. It (...) considers whether it is fair to hold copyright users strictly liable for accidental infringements of copyright. This Article argues that the strict liability standard is not fair because it results in copyright users being held liable for accidents for which they are not morally responsible. Using the moral philosophy literature on responsibility, this Article explores our intuitions surrounding copyright’s liability standard in order to better understand why strict liability in this context seems “harsh” and “inequitable.” In turn, this provides an argument for reforming copyright’s liability rule and adopting a negligence standard. This Article then argues that, within the United States, the proposed reform to copyright’s liability rule should be accomplished by modifications to the existing fair use doctrine. (shrink)

Accidental infringement of copyright is a pervasive and largely ignored problem. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly easy to infringe copyright unintentionally. When such accidental infringement occurs, copyright law holds the user strictly liable. Prior literature has questioned whether the strict liability standard is normatively defensible. In particular, prior literature has asked whether the strict liability standard ought to be reformed for economic reasons. This Article examines the accidental infringement problem from a new perspective. It (...) considers whether it is fair to hold copyright users strictly liable for accidental infringements of copyright. This Article argues that the strict liability standard is not fair because it results in copyright users being held liable for accidents for which they are not morally responsible. Using the moral philosophy literature on responsibility, this Article explores our intuitions surrounding copyright’s liability standard in order to better understand why strict liability in this context seems “harsh” and “inequitable.” In turn, this provides an argument for reforming copyright’s liability rule and adopting a negligence standard. This Article then argues that, within the United States, the proposed reform to copyright’s liability rule should be accomplished by modifications to the existing fair use doctrine. (shrink)

Accidental infringement of copyright is a pervasive and largely ignored problem. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly easy to infringe copyright unintentionally. When such accidental infringement occurs, copyright law holds the user strictly liable. Prior literature has questioned whether the strict liability standard is normatively defensible. In particular, prior literature has asked whether the strict liability standard ought to be reformed for economic reasons. This Article examines the accidental infringement problem from a new perspective. It (...) considers whether it is fair to hold copyright users strictly liable for accidental infringements of copyright. This Article argues that the strict liability standard is not fair because it results in copyright users being held liable for accidents for which they are not morally responsible. Using the moral philosophy literature on responsibility, this Article explores our intuitions surrounding copyright’s liability standard in order to better understand why strict liability in this context seems “harsh” and “inequitable.” In turn, this provides an argument for reforming copyright’s liability rule and adopting a negligence standard. This Article then argues that, within the United States, the proposed reform to copyright’s liability rule should be accomplished by modifications to the existing fair use doctrine. (shrink)

A model of copyright protection under which the law’s attention is directed towards a dematerialized, malleable essence (‘originality’, ‘labour and skill’ or ‘creativity’) has gradually evolved in the UK. This model has come to regulate all fundamental questions concerning the scope and attribution of rights. Nevertheless, until very recently, some aspects of copyright doctrine have remained incompatible with this dominant model. In certain situations, rather than focusing purely on an abstract property, the law has continued to limit a (...) copyright owner’s powers by reference to the boundaries of the material form within which a protected work is first recorded. It is argued here that, while apparently inconsistent, this approach has served an important function in justifying judicial resistance to expansionist pressures in the law. Since 2009, however, this pragmatic, focus-shifting system has been destabilized by the copyright jurisprudence of the Court of Justice. The Court’s judgments in Infopaq International A/S v Danske Dagblades Forening and subsequent cases have dramatically accelerated the pace of copyright harmonization. As a result, it is possible that UK courts may be obliged to adopt a more consistently dematerialized system of copyright law and our courts may have been deprived of tools previously employed to resist unduly broad claims to copyright protection. The consequences of this development are explored in this article. (shrink)