Intellectual Property Stories
Authors:
Ginsburg, Jane C. / Dreyfuss, Rochelle Cooper
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2006
16 chapters
have results for copyright
4. Scope of Protection 59 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Today, though, copyright students know and its history shows that Justice Story confronted a number of important copyright issues, but most fundamentally the decision considered when copying from a copyrighted work reaches the level of infringement and held that it did so when the copying would harm the market for the copyrighted work. Justice Story’s concern for protecting the copyright owner’s market remains an important aspect of copyright law, though modern doctrine embodies the concern much differently. While Justice Story originally made the economic harm inquiry central to evaluating a copyright owner’s prima facie claim of infringement, modern courts generally expressly consider harm to the copyright owner in resolving a claim by the copier that her use of the copyrighted work is a fair use. So while today on copyright protection, in 1841 it represented a significant expansion of the protection that copyright afforded an author’s work.
- The focus on education and nation-building appears in the title of the first federal copyright law in 1790—“An act for marine maps), and books, in that order. As Professor Jane Ginsburg has noted, “The first framers of copyright laws … sought primarily to encourage the creation of and investment in the production of works furthering national social goals.” Early U.S. copyright law particularly sought to foster the development of works that would help educate the public. The founders generally viewed an informed citizenry as a necessary condition for the successful establishment of the nation, and copyright was one means of promoting an educated populace. And by granting copyright only in works by citizens or residents of the U.S., early copyright law sought to foster a distinctly American culture. The hope that copyright would stimulate the production of educational and informational works useful to the young country was not disappointed, as the extant records of early copyright...
- Having found the plaintiffs’ copyright in Washington’s letters valid, Justice Story came to the crux of the case: had Upham infringed on that copyright? Justice Story never mentions the specific rights actually conferred on the plaintiffs by the copyright statute, but the 1831 Act provided that the copyright owner of a book “shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing, and vending such book.” The question, then, was whether the defendants had reprinted, published, and sold Sparks’s book.
- as a fair use case, Justice Story’s opinion does not articulate a fair use analysis, at least not as modern copyright law understands that concept. Today, if a defendant has copied from a copyrighted work, and if the copying amounts to improper appropriation, the defendant ordinarily has infringed the copyright. But even if a defendant’s copying constitutes improper appropriation, she has not infringed if her copying qualifies as fair use. That is, once a court determines that a defendant has done something ordinarily within the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, the court proceeds to consider whether the defendant’s activity is nonetheless permitted as fair use. In , however, Justice Story’s analysis focuses entirely on the first question: whether a defendant’s copying in fact amounts to improper appropriation—that is, whether the copyright owner has made out a prima facie case for infringement.
- was very much a copyright case of its own time. It involved a conflict between early Republican authors and publishers fulfilling the goals of early copyright law by producing distinctly American informational works as part of a larger movement to develop a national culture and increase educational opportunity. The decision gave short shrift to the older copyright doctrine of the fair abridgment rule and started down the road of broader exclusive rights for copyright owners.
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3. Freedom of Ideas and of Competition 74 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is one of the few nineteenth century copyright decisions to have had continuing significance in the copyright caselaw and literature. contains potent statements of limiting principles of copyright law from which many subsequent courts and commentators have drawn guidance. Virtually every intellectual property and copyright casebook contains an edited version of the case. Its principal holding—that copyright does not protect systems described in copyrighted works—is now codified in section 102(b) of the Copyright Act. the rule that copyright protection for drawings of useful articles does not extend to the useful articles depicted in the drawings;
- The Supreme Court upheld the validity of Stein’s copyrights. Neither the mass-production of the statuettes nor their use as lamp bases disqualified them from copyright protection. The Court’s response to Mazer’s patent/copyright exclusivity argument was that “[n]either the Copyright Statute nor any other says that because a thing is patentable it may not be copyrighted.” While this statement is literally correct, the useful article limitation on copyright protection for pictorial, graphic and sculptural works has averted conflicts between patents and copyrights in such works.
- decision and to discern how important the patent/copyright distinction was to the it is helpful to review core parts of the opinion. The Court perceived the key question to be “whether the exclusive property in a system of bookkeeping can be claimed, under the law of copyright, by means of a book in which that system is explained.” Selden claimed that “the ruled lines and headings, given to illustrate the system, are part of the book and, as such, are secured by the copyright; and that no one can make or use similar ruled lines and headings…without violating the copyright.” The Court did not doubt that a work on the subject of bookkeeping could be copyrighted, nor that such a work might be “a very valuable acquisition to the practical knowledge of the community.” ...copyright a treatise “on the composition and use of medicines, be they old or new; on the construction and use of ploughs or watches or churns; or on the mode of drawing lines to produce the effect of perspective … but...
- More common have been cases in which plaintiffs have sought to assert copyright protection in useful articles indirectly by claiming that defendants copied designs from copyrighted drawings. National Cloak, for example, was unsuccessful in its copyright infringement suit against a competitor insofar as it was based on copying of dress designs from National Cloak’s drawings. Also unsuccessful were claims of infringement based on copying of a parachute design, a bridge approach design, and a natural gas pipeline route from copyrighted drawings. is the primary precedent courts have relied upon in denying such claims. Extending copyright protection to useful designs depicted in drawings would be inconsistent with ’s legacy is codified in the Copyright Act of 1976.
- decision states that “blank account-books are not the subject of copyright.” The U.S. Copyright Office has accordingly refused to register claims of copyrights in “blank forms, such as time cards, graph paper, account books, diaries, bank checks, scorecards, address books, report forms, order forms, and the like, which are designed for recording information and do not in themselves convey information.”
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The Story of Graham v. John Deere Company: Patent Law’s Evolving Standard of Creativity (Patents) 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Two fundamental differences in the scope of rights protected by copyrights and patents explain the difference between the standards of creativity needed to support the rights. First, unlike a patent, a copyright prevents only copying of the protected work. It grants no rights over independent creations of similar or even identical works, nor does it preclude use of any previously available work. Granting copyrights for the trivial efforts of a ten-year-old does not necessarily stifle the creative work of others because, if other ten-year-olds can also produce the triviality, the copyright system allows them to do so. A copyright on a triviality will thus have a limited economic impact. Even if people are willing to pay for the triviality, each creator will be in competition with others, and none may be able to charge much for the trivial work.
- Because of this focus on creativity, an important question in both copyright and patent law is the extent of creativity necessary for obtaining a right. In copyright law, the necessary level of creativity has been set “extremely low.” Copyrights are generally available for “original works of authorship.” A ten-year-old who completes her creative writing homework is entitled to a copyright even if she spent only an hour writing a trite story and even if her teacher thought the effort worth no more than a “C.” The student’s story does not even have to be new: provided that she did not copy the story from another, she has a valid copyright even if every word and punctuation mark happens to be identical to something previously written by someone else.
- The central goal of the U.S. patent and copyright systems is to harness human creativity for socially desirable ends. The Constitution authorizes Congress to create exclusive rights not for all work or effort that may happen to promote “the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” but only for the creative efforts undertaken by “Authors” in “Writing[]” and “Inventors” in “Discover[ing].” Thus, for example, an archeologist who, through great effort and expense, uncovers tablets containing an ancient story or a long forgotten invention is entitled to no copyright or patent to protect the find. This result is meant not to denigrate the hard work of the archeologist but merely to recognize that the intellectual property system of patents and copyrights is directed to a particular kind of human activity: intellectual creativity.
- As explained in the preceding chapter by Professor Zimmerman, the threshold of creativity needed for a copyright, though low, is not non-existent. In the recent case of the Supreme Court held that a phonebook is not entitled to a copyright because the names, addresses and phone numbers are themselves not attributable to the creative efforts of the phonebook maker, and the alphabetical arrangement of names is so mechanical as to exhibit not even the modicum of creativity needed to support a copyright. The work of the phonebook maker might involve much “sweat of the brow,” but that work is still more akin to the labors of the archeologist than the creative expressions of an author. Yet even with its recent revival at the Supreme Court, the creativity requirement in copyright law remains important only in a limited category of cases, outside of which the copyrightability of a creative work—a book, a song, a story, etc.—can usually be presumed provided that the work has not been...
- The law is vastly different for patents. As with copyrights, no one is entitled to a patent on work copied from another ( 35 U.S.C. § 102(f)), but inventors must also be able to show both that their work is new (§ 102 generally) and that it is inventive—that it is not “obvious” to a person having ordinary skill in the relevant art (§ 103). In contrast to copyright, the patent standard would rarely if ever by met by a ten-year-old’s homework assignment. Even people with advanced degrees in science and engineering typically fail to meet this standard in their day-to-day labors. Because the standard of creativity is so much higher for patents than for copyrights, the question whether it has been met is litigated in almost every patent case, and the precise level creativity needed to support a patent—the precise scope of what is now known as the nonobviousness requirement—is one of the most important policy issues in all of patent law.
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2. Creativity and Inventiveness 62 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Court chose to tamper when it did with a standard that was both time-honored and had the virtue of ease of application may never be known. But the dramatic changes that occurred in the context of copyright by the time as he did, copyright was still limited to defined categories of works, and nothing like the modern broad protection for so-called derivative works had yet emerged. Also, a potential copyright claimant had to cross numerous hurdles successfully to obtain and then retain protection for the maximum time the law allowed. Several examples of such requirements were raised and discussed at length in the course of the litigation itself. Furthermore, the copyright term was bifurcated, and half-way through the maximum time allotted for copyright, a claimant who wanted to keep the interest alive would need to file a proper notice of renewal. ...never received copyright in the first place, and of the ones that did, many more fell into the public domain half-way through...
- The court relied on a considerable body of precedent for the proposition that copyright was available only for works that met some basic standard of worthiness. The preamble of the Constitution specified that copyright was intended solely “to promote the progress of science and useful arts,” and the power Congress obtained under that clause could not therefore be used to protect “writings” that did not further that end. Prominent among the sorts of materials deemed by prior courts to be ineligible for copyright had been various sorts of promotional or product-related writings and pictorial representations. had concluded that the labels on bottles of “disappearing ink” were not the proper subject matter of copyright. Some question existed whether labels such as these fell even nominally within copyright or were instead something assigned to trademark law, but assuming that copyright was pertinent, said the Justices in
- Two questions were raised. The first was whether or not the trial court acted properly in taking from the jury the question of whether the posters had sufficient value to be fit subjects for copyright. The second was whether, even if copyright were available to such works, the ones for these posters had been perfected in compliance with applicable law.
- For one thing, reliance on the preamble of the intellectual property clause to limit Congressional copyright power quickly and essentially dried up. Although courts routinely treated the preamble as bearing substantively on the extent of Congress’s copyright powers prior to , after it originality became a key issue, and other doctrines substituted for resort to the preamble when courts wanted to deny protection. For example, obscene or sexually explicit works were once denied copyright because they were held not to promote science and the useful arts. In the early 1970s, Justice Douglas in a well-known dissent to a denial of certiorari, warned that, by “judicial gloss,” the preamble was at risk of becoming irrelevant in the analysis of copyright … cases. decade later, at least one court of appeals made clear that Douglas’s concern was well-founded by concluding definitively that the preamble has no substantive bearing on Congress’s copyright powers. ...term of copyright for both new...
- Not surprisingly, cases that failed this standard were indeed rare. A copyright was found to be proper for a miniaturized, but otherwise exact, copy of Rodin’s sculpture, The Hand of God. An answer sheet used to take a standardized test was similarly found original enough to obtain a copyright, even though many of its elements were dictated by the optical scanning equipment used to read it (and, arguably, by the test with Although courts occasionally made gestures toward a more demanding standard, particularly in cases involving copyrights for derivative works, the vast number of works that were either “original to the author” in the sense of not copied or original in the sense of exhibiting some nontrivial variation from an original continued to enjoy copyright.
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The Story of Sony v. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets the Boston Strangler (Copyright) 76 results (showing 5 best matches)
- may be the most famous of all copyright cases. People who know nothing about copyright know that the case held that home videotaping of television programs is fair use. Paradoxically, although the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case to decide whether the copyright law permitted consumers to engage in private home copying of television programs, the majority ended up crafting its analysis to avoid answering that question definitively. Instead, it ruled that even if consumers sometimes violated the copyright law when they taped television programs off the air, that violation did not make the manufacturer and seller of the copying equipment they used liable for copyright infringement. That was so, the Court ruled, because some of the time, home videotaping was authorized by the programs’ copyright owners, and some of the time, home videotaping qualified as fair use. Since videotape recorders could be used for legitimate as well as infringing copying, making and selling the...
- with the copyright bar. To copyright lawyers, the Court’s opinion seemed like a sharp break with longstanding precedent; from the copyright lawyer’s standpoint, Justice Blackmun’s dissenting opinion was grounded in long copyright tradition, while Justice Stevens’s opinion for the Court had no real historical foundation. The majority’s adoption of the staple article of commerce doctrine seemed unnecessary and ill-reasoned, and its presumption-mediated treatment of the burden of proof in fair use cases seemed ill-advised. To people outside of the copyright bar, the case came immediately to stand for the proposition that private noncommercial copying was fair use. To many members of the copyright bar, that represented an unwarranted expansion of what they had believed to be a fairly confined privilege. ...picture industry vowed to overturn the decision in Congress, but found little enthusiasm in the Senate and House for imposing a copyright tax on videocassette recorders or blank...
- Thus, although every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright, noncommercial uses are a different matter. A challenge to a noncommercial use of a copyrighted work requires proof either that the particular use is harmful, or that if it should become widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work. Actual present harm need not be shown; such a requirement would leave the copyright holder with no defense against predictable damage. Nor is it necessary to show with certainty that future harm will result. What is necessary is a showing by a preponderance of the evidence that
- Respondents argue that an abstract theoretician’s view of the copyright monopoly allows them to control the way William Griffiths watches television. In the name of that abstract vision, they ask the federal courts to establish a bureaucracy more complex than anything Congress has established in the field of copyright to date, in order that they may levy an excise tax on a burgeoning new industry.
- Judge Ferguson’s opinion, handed down on October 2, absolved Sony of liability. The copyright law, Judge Ferguson held, did not give copyright holders “a monopoly over an individual’s off-the-air copying in his home for private non-commercial use.” First, the court concluded, Congress could not have meant the courts to interpret absolutely literally the statutory language giving copyright owners the exclusive right to reproduce their works. Although legislative history accompanying the addition of sound recordings to the list of works entitled to copyright demonstrated that Congress had not intended to prohibit non-commercial home audio-taping, the statute contained no language expressly exempting it. By the same token, the judge concluded, Congress had not intended to give copyright owners the right to prohibit home video recording. “Congress did not find that protection of copyright holders’ rights over reproduction of their works was worth the privacy and enforcement problems...
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The Story of Wheaton v. Peters: A Curious Chapter in the History of Judicature (Copyright) 68 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Statute of Anne, the model for all early American copyright legislation, had prescribed certain statutory formalities, including registration of the title of the book and deposit of a copy thereof with the Stationers’ Company, in order to perfect copyright protection. Similarly, the Copyright Act of 1790 prescribed registration of a copyright claim with the local federal district court clerk and deposit of a copy of the work, within six months of publication, in the office of the Secretary of State. The 1802 Act added a new formality: the placement of a notice of copyright on every publicly distributed copy of the work. Finally, the 1831 Act revised the details of all of three of the by-then established formalities, namely, registration, deposit, and notice.
- Cf. the Copyright Act of 1976, which specifically approves the copyrightability of compilations, but provides that “[t]he copyright in a compilation … extends only to the material contributed by the author of such a work [i.e., by the compiler], as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the [compilation] … ” 17 U.S.C. § 103 (2000).
- , 10 F. Cas. 1035, 1039 (No. 5,728) (C.C. Mass. 1839), Justice Story observed: “In the case of Wheaton v. Peters, … [i]t was not doubted by the court that Mr. Peters’ Condensed Reports would have been an infringement of Mr. Wheaton’s copyright, supposing that copyright properly secured under the act, if the opinions of the court had been or could be the proper subject of the private copyright by Mr. Wheaton.”
- In England, the nature of copyright in books had been settled in 1774 by the House of Lords’ great decision in The principal question there was whether, after the Statute of Anne, copyright law, at least as to manuscripts subjected to publication, had become solely a creature of statute, all rights existing subject to constraints enacted by the legislature, or whether a common law entitlement, arising by virtue of an author’s natural right in the product of her creations, had preexisted adoption of the Statute and then survived its enactment unfettered by the Statute’s limitations (including as to duration). In , the House of Lords had adopted the statutory right (or positive law) theory of copyright, and thus assured that published books which did not qualify for copyright or exceeded the statutory term of protection would escape the claims of would-be proprietors and fall forever into the public domain, there to be enjoyed freely by all.
- always had been regarded as subject to copyright by the Reporter—rested on well-recognized practical and theoretical foundations. English court reporters of the day were assumed to own the copyrights in their reports. Moreover, historically, copyright law in America has served (in the words of the Copyright Clause itself) “[t]o promote the Progress of Science” by incentivizing authors financially.
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The Story of Diamond v. Diehr: Toward Patenting Software (Patents) 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed a National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), charged, in part, with considering the applicability of copyright law to computer programs. In its report, CONTU concluded that copyright protection of programs was appropriate, and recommended legislation that Congress adopted in 1980. The Commission and legislation left open a number of questions regarding the scope of copyright protection, including, for example, the extent to which copyright would protect a program’s design as distinct from the literal code.
- As software production and distribution grew, firms sought protection beyond that offered by contract and trade secrecy law. They began registering object code with the Copyright Office under the 1909 Copyright Act, refusing to register source code for fear of losing whatever trade secrets remained therein. The Copyright Office accepted the registrations under its “Rule of Doubt:” It would issue a registration certificate indicating the Office’s inability to determine the existence of copyrightable authorship.
- In 1994, the PTO held hearings on patent protection for software related inventions. By this time, copyright law was beginning to change. In 1992, the Second Circuit had developed a new test for protection of program design that was significantly less protective than earlier ones. Additionally, other courts began construing copyright law as permitting users to reverse engineer object code despite the inevitable copying involved. These courts held that copyright law’s fair use doctrine permitted users to reverse engineer programming code to obtain design and other elements unprotected by copyright law even when the reverse engineer marketed a new product as a result.
- both the copyright and patent laws, generally the subject matter provisions of the statutes channel protection of expressive works to copyright law and utilitarian works to patent law.
- Developments in the Industry, and in Trade Secret and Copyright Law
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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY STORIES 5 results
- The Story of Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Company: Originality as a Vehicle for Copyright Inclusivity (Copyright)
- The Story of Wheaton v. Peters: A Curious Chapter in the History of Judicature (Copyright)
- The Story of Baker v. Selden: Sharpening the Distinction Between Authorship and Invention (Copyright)
- The Story of Folsom v. Marsh: Distinguishing Between Infringing and Legitimate Uses (Copyright)
- The Story of Sony v. Universal Studios: Mary Poppins Meets the Boston Strangler (Copyright)
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Author’s Bios 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Law, and Co–Director, Institute for Intellectual Property & Information Law, at the University of Houston Law Center, where he teaches copyright, advanced copyright seminar, American legal history, and torts. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property, a member of the boards of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., the Journal of Supreme Court History, and H-Law (the Humanities Social Sciences Online Discussion Network of the American Society for Legal History), and the lead co-author of a well-known casebook on the law of copyright.
- R. Anthony Reese is Thomas W. Gregory Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. He teaches courses on intellectual property, copyright, trademark, intellectual property theory and intellectual property in cyberspace, and regularly teaches in the Masters of Business Law program of the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and the Joint International IP Law Summer Program. He has written extensively on copyright and the Internet. Before entering academics, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Betty B. Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, practiced law, and was a Research Fellow for the Program in Law, Science and Technology at Stanford Law School. Prof. Reese is also Special Counsel to the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP. He received his B.A. degree in Russian Language and Literature from Yale University and earned his J.D. degree from Stanford University.
- law and antitrust, has long been her primary interest. In addition to teaching courses in commercial law and intellectual property law, Dean O’Rourke helps supervise the student-run Journal of Science and Technology Law. In May 2000, she became the School’s sixth recipient of the Metcalf Award, the University’s highest teaching honor. Dean O’Rourke graduated from Marist College with a B.S., summa cum laude, and received her J.D. with honors in all courses, from Yale Law School. She has published articles in the law reviews of Columbia, Duke, Iowa, and Minnesota, the technology journals of Berkeley, Harvard, and Boston University and other publications including the Journal of the Copyright Society. She also co-authored the casebook Copyright in a Global Information Economy.
- ...Graduate Faculty of Columbia University, and worked at Newsweek Magazine and the New York Daily News as a journalist before attending law school. Professor Zimmerman received her J.D. with honors from Columbia University in 1976, and went on to clerk for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, before joining the NYU faculty. Professor Zimmerman is a Trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. and a member of the editorial board of its journal. She writes and lectures extensively on intellectual property, the first amendment, and on gender issues. Professor Zimmerman served as the Reporter on Gender for the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness. She co-edited “Expanding the Bounds of Intellectual Property” (Oxford University Press) with Rochelle Dreyfuss and Harry First. Professor Zimmerman was the inaugural Hosier Distinguished Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at DePaul...
- Professor Ginsburg has taught French and U.S. copyright law and U.S. legal methods and contracts law at the University of Paris and other French universities. In 2004–05 she held the Arthur L. Goodhart Visiting Chair of Legal Science at the law faculty of the University of Cambridge, UK. A graduate of the University of Chicago (BA 1976, MA 1977), she received a JD in 1980 from Harvard, and a Diplôme d’études approfondies in 1985 and a Doctorate of Law in 1995 from the University of Paris II.
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- Stone had no avenue of legal redress. Common law copyright disappeared upon publication, and to enjoy federal copyright protection one needed to deposit a copy with the Registrar of Copyrights before publication. A daily newspaper in Chicago had no way of doing this. If Stone wanted to prevent the McMullens from copying the news, he had to take matters into his own hands. The McMullens soon discovered that self-help was a time-honored and often effective weapon. As it happened, the mayor of Sovik did not utter the ominous words, “
- Intellectual property disputes, like all legal disputes, cannot be decided merely by invoking an idea as vague as the right to reap what one sows. Thanks to judges such as Learned Hand and the preemptive sweep of federal patent and copyright law,
- Deciding the case in AP’s favor required establishing a new legal principle. Copyright protects only expression, not underlying facts. Trade secret law protects news services from theft, but such protection disappears upon publication. Conventional unfair competition focuses on “passing off.” As applied in this context, unfair competition law prevented INS from presenting its own news as that of AP, but INS was doing the opposite. It was presenting AP’s news as its own.
- Tribune Co. v. Associated Press, 116 F. 126, 127 (C.C.N.D. Ill. 1900). The court found that this controversy between “the rights of the Tribune Company to the fruits of its enterprise and expenditure under its contract arrangement with the Times, and, on the other hand, the rights of the public to the news matter thus published in the leading English newspaper” ultimately turned on copyright law. The case does not discuss misappropriation as an independent theory.
- itself, common law principles of intellectual property governed. The cost of obtaining a design patent on all the patterns to protect the few that proved successful (and then only for a season) was too onerous, even if the patterns qualified for protection. Copyright law was equally unavailable.
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Introduction and Overview 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- addresses the dangers of overlap between copyright and patent. It shows why the copyright law, to which the Constitution assigns the role of promoting the progress of “science” by encouraging the dissemination of learning, should not be interpreted to do so at the expense of science’s counterpart in promotion, the useful arts. offers a similar moral, though this time trademark, rather than copyright, law threatened the encroachment into the realm of patent law.
- is organized into six chapters, each drawing on cases in patents, copyrights, trademarks, or unfair competition, to illustrate the problems intellectual property law encounters. The works, inventions, and marks at issue in these cases vary widely. In Chapter 1, Justifications for Intellectual Property Protection, concerns copyright ownership of reports of decisions of the United States Supreme Court. In Chapter 2, Creativity and Inventiveness, takes us back to the birth of the Republic to examine the scope of copyright protection for George Washington’s letters. takes up the question of facilitating and encouraging copyright infringement through the sale of mass market copying equipment, the videotape recorder.
- Why this apparent disjunction between past cases and current developments? One answer may be that the perception of expansion is ill-founded. In fact, looking only at the statutes leaves three important elements out of the picture. First, for copyright and trademarks, technological changes largely subsequent to the cases recounted here have shifted the practical balance of power away from rightholders toward users and new exploiters. Provisions such as the DMCA and the ACPA may be restoring the alignment. Taking the pre-DMCA and pre-ACPA balance as somehow normatively compelled ignores the reality that intellectual property “balances” are highly contingent and contextual. Second, judicial decisions have occasionally limited the reach of statutory expansions, most notably in the area of dilution. Third, in some cases, federal protection has merely supplemented or replaced other law. Examples include the additions to federal copyright law to protect sound recordings and certain live...
- should be celebrated rather than deplored. It may be that, before, the level of legal protection was inadequate. For example, Congress may have created the Federal Circuit because regional federal appellate courts were overly skeptical of patent protection. On the international copyright scene, before it joined the Berne Convention, the United States was an outlier, virtually alone among nations in imposing formalities that divested authors of protection. Furthermore, the importance of knowledge-based products may call for more protection now, regardless of the adequacy of the old regime in its time. Because advances in computer software enhance productivity, perhaps they deserve the protection they are now receiving under the patent and copyright laws. Similarly, biotechnological products are contributing in new and important ways to medical research; therefore it may be desirable to encourage their creation through the patent system. Regarding the baseline of any one era as...
- , fairly underpopulated relative to other disciplines. But matters have changed significantly in recent years. The American economy has evolved into one based more on knowledge production than on manufacturing, technology has transformed the methods of distributing information, and globalization has led to greater appreciation for the cultural production of other countries. This includes not only works of authorship, such as music, films, and literature, but also trademarks and trade symbols. The shift toward an information economy has also put new emphasis on the scientific enterprise and the marketing of its output. Interest in copyrights, trademarks, and patents—in practice and among scholars, nationally and internationally—has grown apace.
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Copyright Page Your search matches the chapter title
- . For instance, should domestic courts be more prepared to ascertain and apply foreign trademark laws? In the copyright context, some U.S. courts of appeal have said that trial courts should do exactly this, even if it means dealing with a large number of potentially applicable copyright laws of different nations.
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5. Responses to Technological Change 1 result
- Statement of Michael A. Grow, Chairman, Federal Legislation Committee, U.S. Trademark Association, Hearings Before the Subcomm. On Patents, Copyrights & Trademarks, of the Comm. on the Judiciary, S. Hrg. 98–901, Feb. 1, 1984,
- , the Court’s majority upheld a claim of unfair competition based upon the defendants’ misappropriation of non-copyrighted news stories published by the plaintiff.
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- The reverse doctrine might have been a noteworthy addition to a patent law that is not rich in infringement defenses. An accused infringer may assert that the patent is invalid or unenforceable under current law, of course, but other common law or statutory exceptions are few and narrowly constrained. The patent law lacks the “fair use” privilege that exists in other intellectual property disciplines, for example, and the compulsory licenses so commonly found in the Copyright Act have no analog in the patent regime.
- Further, in comparison to other intellectual properties, few restraining doctrines cabin the scope of patents. The Patent Act offers no fair use privilege analogous to copyright or trademark, for example, and the courts have been disinclined to develop affirmative infringement defenses on their own.
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- Publication Date: December 5th, 2005
- ISBN: 9781587787270
- Subject: Intellectual Property
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This book brings famous cases to life by telling the true, never-heard-before stories behind landmark Intellectual Property cases. It is organized into six chapters, each drawing on cases in patents, copyrights, trademarks, or unfair competition, to illustrate the problems encountered in intellectual property law. The works, inventions, and marks at issue in these cases vary widely.
