Articles
Andrés Guadamuz-González
The paper looks at the legal nature of so-called open licenses – agreements designed to provide permissions to users and publishers through “some rights reserved” clauses. The article starts with the assertion that copyright licenses are contracts in Civil Law jurisdictions, and looks at the opposing views and practice in Common Law jurisdictions. The article particularly looks at recent case law in the United States which deals specifically with the issue, and concludes that there is now a clear jurisdictional split between both traditions on whether these licenses are contracts. Read More »
Edward L. Carter
Free expression principles traditionally have not been applied against the U.S. Copyright Act, but technology-driven changes in the global copyright law landscape are forcing reconsideration of how to protect the public interest, including in free expression. Traditionally, U.S. courts maintained that the idea-expression dichotomy, along with the doctrine of fair use, provided sufficient protection for free expression such that First Amendment scrutiny need not be applied. Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court held that, notwithstanding the First Amendment‘s free speech guarantee, Congress did not violate the Constitution in extending copyright duration to life of the author plus 70 years in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.3 However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit broke new ground in 2007 when it held that First Amendment scrutiny had to be applied to Congress‘ adoption of § 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994. Read More »
Lynn M. Forsythe & Deborah J. Kemp
Creative Commons is both a political movement and a practical tool that responds to the increasingly common perception that copy-right, at least in the U.S., is so broadly applied that it threatens the progress of science and the useful arts, rather than promoting it. Crea-tive Commons enables creators to license their works for public use in a uniform manner. The increasingly famous legal scholar Lawrence Les-sig played a significant role in the creation of Creative Commons as a technique for addressing shortcomings he encountered in the copyright system when he argued a case before the Supreme Court, Eldred v. Ash-croft. Just as an author can register a copyright in her original work of authorship, she is now free to —register? her Creative Commons in the same work to which she has affixed a copyright. Creative Commons reaches beyond U.S. copyright and is an active international movement. Read More »
Anthony Ciolli
This Essay identifies three significant obstacles to the ideal of the organic, open Internet, and proposes solutions to them that both progressive and conservative activists should embrace. Part I considers the problems stemming from the inadequate protections U.S. law offers to non-corporate social networking websites that, rather than grant intermediaries a true safe harbor, provide intermediaries with incentives to censor their users and other third party content providers. Part II examines the related issue of non-uniform standards for the disclosure of anonymous Internet speakers, which promote and subsidize SLAPP suits and other frivolous litigation. Part III outlines the threats posed by the lack of effective remedies available to Internet users and intermediaries to defend themselves against corporations or public figures that seek to use the legal system to repress their constitutionally protected rights. Read More »
Grace M. Mills
You want to get a job at Target or in the U.S. federal government. Where?s the job application? It is online. You are told to fill out the application by typing and often „cutting and pasting? your answers. It will be sent, via the Internet to the appropriate agency. Do you understand what has been asked? Do you have the skills? Read More »
Jianlan Zhu
There is consensus that a free press is a fundamental prerequisite for societies to resolve their conflicts, promote their well-being and protect their liberty. “Laws protecting the press rest on a rationale that suggests the press performs a valuable societal function distinct from the functions performed by other institutions and individuals.” The role of the press has experienced an evolution from “journalists as nation builders” to “journalists as government partners,” and finally from “journalists as agents of empowerment” to “journalists as watchdogs.” The “watchdog” role (also called the “fourth estate”) emphasizes that the function of the press is to discover and disseminate information about conditions that are unlikely to be discovered except by the press. Under this view, it is journalists, not the citizenry, that are seen as the essential “check” on government excess. However, nowadays the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) “break down many of the existing barriers between journalists and the public” and provide a communication channel for “egalitarian informal conversation.” Read More »
Notes & Comments
Sagi Schwartzberg
What happens when a computer hacker1 illegally intrudes into an unsuspecting victim‘s computer, and then finds illegal material? What if the hacker turns the material over to the police? Can it be used in a criminal prosecution of the hacker‘s victim, or in a civil suit against him? The hacker himself has violated the law and may be prosecuted, but does his discovery of another crime and its disclosure to the government give him immunity for his own actions? If the prosecutor exercises discretion and chooses not to prosecute a hacker, does this constitute implied permission or even give the hacker an incentive for this conduct? Is a civil remedy available for the invasion of privacy which resulted in a term of imprisonment? These questions, and others like them, are becoming increasingly urgent, as evidence obtained by illegal hackers becomes more common. Read More »
Curtis R. Wright
This Note discusses the legal effects and repercussions of the United States Supreme Court‘s unanimous decision in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., which properly extended the doctrine of patent exhaustion to include method patents. Patent exhaustion is the termination of an inventor‘s patent rights over a product after an unconditional and authorized sale of either the finalized product or a qualified component. Prior to the Quanta decision, the patent exhaustion doctrine was applied to apparatus patents only, which cover physical products. After Quanta, patent exhaustion was extended to method patents, which cover non-physical processes as well. Read More »
Thomas Connors
Intellectual property law in the United States, comprising of trademarks, trade secrets, copyrights, and patents, affords protection to artistic and commercial creations of the mind, such as video games. Once a niche market that began in the 1970?s, video game related sales reached $21.33 billion in 2008. Vying for the high score of the available market share, all players must now realize it is game over for broad patent protection on video gameplay methods in the wake of the recent decision In re Bilski. Read More »
Kelsey Mezzanatto
The harm to children victimized by child pornography is indisputable, and the government‘s interest in protecting these children is clear. In recent years, problems associated with regulating child pornography have grown substantially due to the Internet. The Internet not only makes it easy for creators of child pornography to distribute such material, it also makes it more difficult for the government to prevent its creation and distribution. One of the many difficulties in regulation arises from the use of computer generated images (CGIs) that are indistinguishable from images portraying actual children. This CGI material is called —virtual child pornography, and its existence greatly complicates efforts to combat online child pornography. Congress‘ most recent attempt, the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today (PROTECT) Act, was at issue in United States v. Williams. Read More »