It has become the practice to claim copyright protection for virtually every piece of 'writing' or its electronic equivalent, created by knowledge professionals - from business plans for a start-up company to the instruction manual for use of a motorized saw and to specifications for pipeline tenders. This paper posits that the legal doctrine of copyright was never intended, and is not equipped, to regulate the very building block of our society-information. When used to protect utilitarian information products (UIW) en masse, copyright can impede the flow of information necessary for innovation, foster waste in the form of redundant creation and adversely impact competition in the market.
"Clear, correct, and deep, this is a welcome addition to discussions of law and computing for anyone -- even lawyers!"-- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society If you work in information technology, intellectual property is central to your job -- but dealing with the complexities of the legal system can be mind-boggling. This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the legal system deals with intellectual property rights for code and other content. You'll get a clear look at intellectual property issues from a developer's point of view, including practical advice about situations you're likely to encounter. Written by an intellectual property attorney who is also a programmer, Intellectual Property and Open Source helps you understand patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and licenses, with special focus on the issues surrounding open source development and the GPL. This book answers questions such as: How do open source and intellectual property work together? What are the most important intellectual property-related issues when starting a business or open source project? How should you handle copyright, licensing and other issues when accepting a patch from another developer? How can you pursue your own ideas while working for someone else? What parts of a patent should be reviewed to see if it applies to your work? When is your idea a trade secret? How can you reverse engineer a product without getting into trouble? What should you think about when choosing an open source license for your project? Most legal sources are too scattered, too arcane, and too hard to read. Intellectual Property and Open Source is a friendly, easy-to-follow overview of the law that programmers, system administrators, graphic designers, and many others will find essential.
Professor Litman's work stands out as well-researched, doctrinally solid, and always piercingly well-written.-JANE GINSBURG, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property, Columbia UniversityLitman's work is distinctive in several respects: in her informed historical perspective on copyright law and its legislative policy; her remarkable ability to translate complicated copyright concepts and their implications into plain English; her willingness to study, understand, and take seriously what ordinary people think copyright law means; and her creativity in formulating alternatives to the copyright quagmire. -PAMELA SAMUELSON, Professor of Law and Information Management; Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California, BerkeleyIn 1998, copyright lobbyists succeeded in persuading Congress to enact laws greatly expanding copyright owners' control over individuals' private uses of their works. The efforts to enforce these new rights have resulted in highly publicized legal battles between established media and new upstarts.In this enlightening and well-argued book, law professor Jessica Litman questions whether copyright laws crafted by lawyers and their lobbyists really make sense for the vast majority of us. Should every interaction between ordinary consumers and copyright-protected works be restricted by law? Is it practical to enforce such laws, or expect consumers to obey them? What are the effects of such laws on the exchange of information in a free society?Litman's critique exposes the 1998 copyright law as an incoherent patchwork. She argues for reforms that reflect common sense and the way people actually behave in their daily digital interactions.This paperback edition includes an afterword that comments on recent developments, such as the end of the Napster story, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing, the escalation of a full-fledged copyright war, the filing of lawsuits against thousands of individuals, and the June 2005 Supreme Court decision in the Grokster case.Jessica Litman (Ann Arbor, MI) is professor of law at Wayne State University and a widely recognized expert on copyright law.
Copyright law regulates creativity. It affects the way people create works of authorship ex-ante and affects the status of works of authorship significantly ex-post. But does copyright law really understand creativity? Should legal theories alone inform our regulation of the creative process? This book views copyright law as a law of creativity. It asks whether copyright law understands authorship as other creativity studies fields do. It considers whether copyright law should incorporate non-legal theories, and if so, how it should be adjusted in their light. For this purpose, the book focuses on one of the many rights that copyright law regulates – the right to make a derivative work. A work is considered derivative when it is based on one or more preexisting works. Today, the owner of a work of authorship has the exclusive right to make derivative works based on her original work or to allow others to do so. The book suggests a new way to think about both the right, the tension, and copyright law at large. It proposes relying on non-legal fields like cognitive psychology and genre theories, and offers new legal-theoretical justifications for the right to make derivative works. As the first book to consider the intersection between copyright law, creativity and derivative works, this will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in intellectual property and copyright law.
The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However, the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular, it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement. The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure, focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation, it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to, and is aimed at, researchers in, practitioners, and students of intellectual property worldwide.
Through an assessment of the originality requirement, this work guides the reader in interpreting judicial decisions which are of fundamental importance to current and future understanding of EU copyright. The book�s holistic approach and methodology t
As an archivist or records manager it is essential to keep up to date with the complexities of copyright legislation, and Copyright for Archivists and Records Managers will prove an invaluable tool in enabling you to do so. What is copyright? Who owns it and for how long? What rights does it confer, and what are the limitations and exceptions? This comprehensive manual uniquely outlines copyright law in the UK with special reference to materials relevant to archive and records collections such as maps, legal records, records of local authorities, records of churches and faiths, most notably unpublished works. It also offers advice on rights in the electronic environment and the problems associated with rights clearance; and covers related areas such as moral rights and rights in databases. The fifth edition of this respected work has been extensively revised and updated to include: a description of the major changes to copyright exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives including the changes to permit preservation copying and copying for users of any kind of work, a simplification of the declarations required from users and a new exception permitting onsite access to digital material a description and discussion of the new schemes for orphan works a description of the other changes to exceptions for copyright and performer’s rights, notably education; quotation; caricature, parody and pastiche; text and data mining; disability; and private copying a revision of the views expressed on the exhibition of literary, dramatic and musical works an explanation of why a digital photograph, consisting of a numerical file, is still an artistic work a description of the changes in duration for sound recordings and especially for sound recordings of performances and for copyright in songs analysis of new copyright legislation in the Channel Islands and other British overseas territories an explanation of how national courts decide whether they have jurisdiction over the infringement of copyright on the internet a description of changes to Crown copyright licensing and the licensing of public sector information a new section giving links to useful websites consideration of the many copyright cases that have come before the courts the last few years that have provided help with the interpretation of many aspects of the legislation. Some notable examples are on the meaning of ‘transient and incidental’, ‘scientific research’, ‘parody’ and ‘originality’; whether hyperlinking infringes; the importance of a signature on an assignment; the terms that may be implied into a licence; and the relationship between the rights of a copyright owner and freedom of speech. Readership: Archivists and records managers; LIS professionals in libraries, museums and galleries; students, researchers and genealogists.
