Search results

Purpose – In this chapter, I explore the graduated response approach to combatting online piracy, and examine the different ways in which this approach has been implemented in the United States and around the world.

Design/methodology/approach – I discuss the legal, political, and industrial origins and current state of the graduated response programs in each country.

Findings – Overall, the most successfully launched graduated response programs have been the ones where a single entity is overseeing the program implementation, and the code of conduct has been well articulated.

Originality/value of chapter – Few scholars have examined the processes leading up to the implementation of graduated response programs and the mechanics of how they work in practice. This chapter does this by looking, chronologically, at the developments in each country as well as the choreography of its notice process.

Trade in counterfeit products has been expanding continuously. The emergence of the internet, the process of globalisation as well as the increase of digitalisation have enabled counterfeit products to infiltrate legitimate supply chains, causing harm not only to national economies but also to holders of intellectual property rights (IPR). In this chapter, we analyse the possible solutions that holders of IP rights and their legal representatives have in their fight against the online sale of counterfeit products. To elaborate on this issue, first, we explain the legislation on an international level for IPR protection and its specific characteristics. We explain the conventions on the protection of IPR that are governed by the World Intellectual Protection Organisation (WIPO) and the provisions of the TRIPS (Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement governed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). We also analyse the national legislative procedure of protecting and enforcing IPR in North Macedonia to explain a possible solution to fight online counterfeit trade. As a case study of this chapter, we explain the work of the Online Enforcement Programme of REACT as a not-for-profit organisation with over 30 years of experience in the fight against counterfeit trade and the challenges that they have in fighting against the online sale of counterfeit products. Since IP law is territorial in its nature as a conclusion, we suggest that a more centralised approach is needed in the fight against the online sale of counterfeit products.

This paper focuses on two related questions at the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property law. First, under what circumstances must the holder of a patent or a copyright or the owner of a trade secret allow others to use that intellectual property? Second, under what circumstances can the holder of an intellectual property right use that right to make it difficult for another party to succeed in a related market? These questions have vexed antitrust and intellectual property scholars alike ever since the Federal Circuit ruled in 2000 that patent holders “may enforce the statutory right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention free from liability under the antitrust laws,” a ruling that directly contradicted the Ninth Circuit ruling that antitrust liability could be imposed for almost identical conduct, depending on the motivations of the patent holder. The various proceedings in United States v. Microsoft only added fuel to the firestorm of controversy.After briefly retracing the jurisprudential path to see how this situation arose, we propose a solution that primarily involves a variation on the real property concept of adverse possession for the intellectual property space along with a slight extension of the Essential Facilities Doctrine for industries that exhibit network effects. We examine, both for firms with and without market power, how our proposal would resolve the situations presented by large fixed asset purchases, the introduction of entirely new products, and operating systems with network effects. We also demonstrate how our proposal could be applied in the European antitrust enforcement context.

Copyright can be confusing and intimidating for schools. Copyright is difficult enough to understand when dealing with paper, but as new technologies enter the mix, copyright is often ignored as obsolete or is so confusing that even beneficial and legal uses are avoided. While copyright places restrictions on some use of material, educators have many rights to use work created by others. This chapter helps guide educators through the issues relating to copyright and technology so copyright is not used as an automatic “no” to legitimate uses or an automatic “yes” for questionable uses.

The expansion of copyright and the shrinking of the public domain did not begin with the Internet, but the Internet has exacerbated the problem. The threat posed by digital technology has led industries to obtain increasingly absolute protection over their “property.” In this paper I will argue that developing a vibrant public domain is essential for resisting the overextension of copyrights and patents. Developing the public domain as a counterpoint to copyright and patent law is vital to an energized public sphere and by extension a democratic system.

This paper is designed to seek out the everyday narratives of copyright. To find these narratives, I analyze the comments section of websites where users can post their reactions to copyright-related stories. I argue that understanding how people who are not legal scholars frame the use of copyright as they discuss sharing, owning, and controlling the copy is a good place to begin to develop a sense for the everyday life of copyright law.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the criminalization of sharing music on peer-to-peer (p2p) networks. Taking the Italian situation into consideration, it aims to introduce a socio-legal reflection about the processes of construction of this deviance.

Design methodology/approach – Adopting a constructionist approach, this chapter first explores the ways in which the social problem of music piracy was built in Italy. The choice of the legislator to place this practice within the category of criminal behaviour was analysed and examined. In the second section, the points of view of other participants involved in the practice of file sharing are taken into account.

Findings – Placing file sharing within the jurisdiction of criminal law does not seem to respond to the needs to counter the infringement of a shared social value, but it rather seems to reflect the protagonists’ involvement into the process of legislative decision about piracy conception and idea of the damage caused by this phenomenon, promoted and conveyed by the music business. The way in which piracy is conceived by Italian legislation emerges here in its partial understanding of the effects of this practice. Sharing music on digital networks appears as a highly conflicted crime, whose harmfulness is scarcely perceived by the society. Furthermore, file sharing repression policy seems to give shape to a new victimless crime, whose harmful effects do not seem to actually fall back on artists or consumers.

Originality/value – Sharing music on the net and violating copyright is little studied from the perspective of the sociology of crime. Using this approach, this chapter contributes to a better understanding of the phenomenon.

The question of how we know when censorship occurred has several sides. Problems of evidence of censorship do not only arise from practical obstacles, but also from its very nature as a knowledge-related phenomenon. Scarcity and abundance of information about censorship may be determined by the extent of the censors’ success or by uneven research efforts. These factors often make it complicated to demarcate censorship from similar restrictions and to identify patterns and trends in the relationship between power and freedom. The present chapter looks into this epistemological problem by mapping the set of concepts governing and surrounding censorship in the particular field of history. It draws up a mini-dictionary with definitions of 26 key concepts related to, larger than, and different from the censorship of history. As these definitions are interrelated, the set in its entirety forms a taxonomy.