Tuesday, December 15, 2015

3 New Copyright Articles: Buccafusco, Bell & Parchomovsky, Grimmelmann

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My own scholarship and scholarly reading focuses most heavily on patent law, but I've recently come across a few interesting copyright papers that seem worth highlighting:
  • Christopher Buccafusco, A Theory of Copyright Authorship – Argues that "authorship involves the intentional creation of mental effects in an audience," which expands copyrightability to gardens, cuisine, and tactile works, but withdraws it from aspects of photographs, taxonomies, and computer programs.
  • Abraham Bell & Gideon Parchomovsky, The Dual-Grant Theory of Fair Use – Argues that rather than addressing market failure, fair use calibrates the allocation of uses among authors and the public. A prima facie finding of fair use in certain categories (such as political speech) could only be defeated by showing the use would eliminate sufficient incentives for creation.
  • James Grimmelmann, There's No Such Thing as a Computer-Authored Work – And It's a Good Thing, Too – "Treating computers as authors for copyright purposes is a non-solution to a non-problem. It is a non-solution because unless and until computer programs can qualify as persons in life and law, it does no practical good to call them 'authors' when someone else will end up owning the copyright anyway. And it responds to a non-problem because there is nothing actually distinctive about computer-generated works."
Are there other copyright pieces posted this fall that I should take a look at?

Update: For readers not on Twitter, Chris Buccafusco added some additional suggestions:
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