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)

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)

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)

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)

Pendant plus de dix ans, chacun dans son coin, Marie-Pierre, Gérôme et Samuel ont consacré leur temps libre à des fanzines sur la musique. Jusqu’à ce qu’en 1998 Samuel se lance dans la publication de travaux de jeunes chercheurs en Lettres et en Sciences humaines et fonde les éditions Mélanie Séteun – anagramme et nom de plume de Samuel Étienne. Nombre de manuscrits qu’il reçoit ne sont pas publiables _in extenso. _Il songe alors à un livre collectif. L’IRMA, diffuseur des (...) éditions, rectifie le tir. Aucun périodique n’est consacré aux recherches pluridisciplinaires sur les musiques actuelles et amplifiées? Le livre collectif sera donc une revue. Samuel s’adjoint Marie-Pierre et Gérôme pour diriger les opérations. Et les voilà à l’heure de la parution du premier numéro de _Copyright Volume! _Il présente, toutes disciplines confondues, des articles de réflexion écrits par des universitaires, des témoignages de professionnels et d’institutionnels ainsi que des propositions plastiques d’a... (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)

In recent years, copyright governance for short videos has become a hot issue of common concern in the academic community and the industry. Therefore, this study intends to explore the economic aspect of copyright governance in relation to the proliferation of infringing short videos. The short video industry of China has been taken as a case to demonstrate the copyright governance issue. Transaction cost theory has been applied to analyze the economic aspect of copyright governance in terms of four dimensions: (...) bounded rationality, opportunism, environmental uncertainty, and asset specificity. From the perspective of transaction cost economics, the problem of short video infringement is observed to be essentially a market failure due to high transaction costs. In the short video market, substantial transaction costs are incurred in the legal transaction of copyright with these costs considered to be too high. This is especially the case when transaction costs exceed the net proceeds initially expected by short video users from the authorization, making it impossible to carry out the transaction and leading to infringement. To effectively control the copyright infringement of short videos, it is necessary to build a cross-platform information-sharing mechanism to reduce search costs, establish a unified copyright management platform to reduce coordination costs, and give full attention to the role of technical support to reduce regulatory costs. (shrink)

This revised version of the author’s 1985 article “Contra Copyright” includes a new, introductory section explaining the background of the author’s path to copyright abolitionism. The main article surveys various libertarian debates on this issue, including the anti-intellectual property views of Benjamin Tucker and the pro-IP views of Lysander Spooner. McElroy argues that the issue of copyright hinges on the question: can ideas be property? Because only scarce goods can be property, and ideas are not scarce, copyright must be rejected (...) as unjustified. (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)

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)

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)

Two property regimes for software development may be distinguished. Within corporations, on the one hand, a Private Regime obtains which excludes all outsiders from access to a firm's software assets. It is shown how the protective instruments of secrecy and both copyright and patent have been strengthened considerably during the last two decades. On the other, a Public Regime among hackers may be distinguished, initiated by individuals, organizations or firms, in which source code is freely exchanged. It is argued that (...) copyright is put to novel use here: claiming their rights, authors write `open source licenses' that allow public usage of the code, while at the same time regulating the inclusion of users. A `regulated commons' is created. The analysis focuses successively on the most important open source licenses to emerge, the problem of possible incompatibility between them (especially as far as the dominant General Public License is concerned), and the fragmentation into several user communities that may result. (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)

Academic file-sharing services encourage students to upload materials, sometimes their own study notes for example, but can also include copyrighted university documents, in exchange for access to downloading resources from a common repository. In this process, the lines between legitimate study help and academic misconduct are unclear. Integrity-based strategies to combat these transactions have been limited. Removal by copyright mechanisms has been identified as a potential approach but has been hampered by the enormity of the task and the resource intensity (...) required to make an impact at scale. This explorative study at a large Australian university sought to remove a percentage of copyrighted material from two commonly used academic file-sharing websites and to understand the experience of users in uploading files. Findings from the study were encouraging and informative, resulting in a suite of initiatives being introduced across the institution to prevent uploading in the first instance as well as, where possible, addressing misconduct when it occurred. Limitations included that the study was only undertaken as one university and therefore does not represent the contexts of different institutions. Further, it only investigated two websites out of many available. Future research could explore the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by academic file-sharing services to retain existing users and attract new ones. This work provides a clearer picture of how an institution’s copyrighted material is hosted on two academic file-sharing websites and offers an effective and potentially scalable copyright approach that could be adapted by other higher education institutions. (shrink)

Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical ApproachYoungJames O. Routledge. 2020. pp. 184. £120.

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)

This article is a limited defense of copyrights for the contents of factual compilations. The form of protection that I propose, under which the collective factual content of such compilations is protected, differs from an approach that protects individual facts and from the currently accepted approach (as articulated in Feist v. Rural Telephone), under which only selections and arrangements of individual facts are protected. Although I accept that there are sound economic justifications for refusing to copyright individual facts, my justifications (...) differ from those that have traditionally been offered. The traditional justifications are: 1) that the monopolization costs of protecting individual facts are too great, because facts are too valuable as components for future works to have access to them limited by property rights, and 2) that facts fail the independent creation requirement for copyright protection, because they are not authored by anyone. Both of these justifications fail. Monopolization costs can at most justify limited terms for copyrights in facts. And, far from failing the independent creation requirement, facts (properly understood as representations of reality rather than reality itself) are as much works of authorship as novels are. I argue that transaction and enforcement costs are the real reasons that individual facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, some components of factual works - specifically, ground breaking and explanatorily powerful theories like Einstein's theory of relativity - should be copyrightable if our sole concerns were transaction, enforcement and monopolization costs. Instead such theories are not protectable because any work that borrows them is their complement (in the sense that its production makes them more desirable), provided that the work acknowledges the theories' true provenance. This is because it is only through dissemination in other works that such theories can undergo the test of truth. But nothing about the uncopyrightability of the components of factual works stands in the way of copyrights for the collective factual content conveyed by such works. It might appear that protecting collective content is no different from the Feist approach, in which selections and arrangements of facts alone are protected. After all, collective factual content is created by selecting and arranging individual facts. If individual facts are not protected, then the selections and arrangements, it seems, must be. But this is a fallacy. Protecting a fictional story is not the same as protecting the methods of selection and arrangement used to generate the story from unprotected elements of character, plot, and setting. Likewise, protecting the collective factual content of a database is not the same as the Feist method. The collective content of databases, I argue, should be protected in the same manner that fictional stories are. Such an approach, far diverging from traditional copyright principles, follows from them. (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)

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 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 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)

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)

This essay investigates the tensions between traditional music and its modern codification as intellectual property. It will begin by considering the myths concerning the divine source of music. In traditional music and in folk music, music is closely connected to religious ritual. In these rituals the source of the music is recognized and attributed to certain deities. For instance, in Thai traditional music, the Wai Khru ceremony venerates the Duriyathep or devatas drawn from Indian mythology: Phra Visawakarm, Phra Panjasinghkorn, and (...) Phra Parakhonthap (Narot). Much of modern and contemporary music has long been disengaged from ritual and its traditional forms of transmission. Especially since the nineteenth century with the growth of popularity of music printing, it has been subject to copyright law. With these restrictions in transmission, the more fluid routes of transmission have become broken and the ritualistic and religious identifications have been transferred to the cult of performers, to legal codification, to the control of corporations, and the construction of new mythologies through marketing. This essay will use Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the loss of “aura” in the reproduced work of art to try to understand the consequences of this transition in the function of music. And it will consider the situation in Thailand where traditional music and mythology stands side by side with marketed music, and traditional performance stands side by side with commercial performance. It will demonstrate that these conflicts cannot be resolved. But it is precisely in the appreciation and preservation of these conflicts, that traditional culture can itself be recognized and preserved. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Perspectives on the Unity and Integration of Knowledge Garth Benson, Ronald Glasberg & Bryant Griffith Intercultural Communication: pragmatics, genealogy, deconstruction Robert Young.

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for analyzing fictional copyright protection of fictional characters in literature. Using this framework, I argue that the two most prominent approaches that U.S. courts have adopted with respect to fictional character copyright (the Nichols test and the Sam Spade “Story Being Told” test) are unsustainable. The idea of distinct delineation that came out of Nichols may be understood in two ways: on one view, fictional characters are distinctly delineated if they deviate (...) from a literary type. On the other view, they are distinctly delineated if they are attributed a sufficient number of properties in the fictions where they appear. Both views succumb to serious objections, while the test in Sam Spade is no better. The failure of the two judicial tests suggests that, instead of asking questions about fictional character copyrightability, courts should instead focus on the substantial similarity question. In the last part of the paper, I draw a distinction between two types of fictional character copyright infringement cases (transformations and transfers), and suggest that a Nichols-type substantial similarity analysis is all that is required in transformation situations. Although the focus of this article is U.S. law, the issues discussed and the analyses proposed may prove helpful in addressing fictional copyright in other jurisdictions as well. (shrink)

Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a ‘tangible medium of expression’. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expansion of copyright protection shrinks the public domain. (...) While copyright has become more important for dancers and choreographers who wish to control the appropriation of their work that is now made available to millions of end-users online, it also potentially restricts them from engaging in a dialog with other dancers or building on inspiring dance moves across communities. This paper investigates notions of property that rely on both the commons and individual personhood in the context of dance. (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)

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)

This study is based on analysis of copyright policies and 26 interviews with science and engineering faculty at three research universities on the topic of copyright beliefs, values, and practices, with emphasis on copyright of instructional materials, courseware, tools, and texts. Given that research universities now emphasize increasing external revenue flows through marketing of intellectual property, we expected copyright to follow the path of patents and lead to institutional emphasis of policies and practices that enhanced universities’ intellectual property portfolios, accompanied (...) by an increase in copyrighting by professors. Although this pattern occurred with regard to institutions, professors offered a more varied pattern, with some fully participating in commercialization of copyright and embracing entrepreneurial values, while others resisted or subverted commercial activity in favor of traditional science and engineering values. (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)

The problems and the keys to their solutions -- Ontology of artworks -- Copyright and its limits -- Token appropriation -- Pattern appropriation -- Appropriation of artistic elements.

Philosophers have given relatively little attention to the ethical issues surrounding the nature of intellectual property in spite of the fact that for the past ten years the public policy debate over "fair use" of copyrighted materials in higher education has been heating up. This neglect is especially striking since copyright ethics are at stake in so many aspects of academic life: the photocopying of materials for classroom use and scholarly work, access to electronic texts, and the cost and availability (...) of single-source information technology such as Dialogue, library card catalogues, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a variety of other print and electronic resources. Of course, the ethics of copyright are not only an issue for those of us in the business of education: recent allegations of copyright infringement by Texaco, which regularly photocopied articles from scientific and technical journals for its employees, suggests that questions about copyright ethics may arise regularly for every corporation and business. While the current lawsuit against Kinko's Copies(1) and Texaco may settle some public policy questions in the short run, the legal discourse on fair use depends upon competing ethical intuitions which are not likely to be resolved soon. (shrink)