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Copyright law has been oft-criticized for its unintended consequences. This paper retells three “tales of the unintended” concerning the 1976 Copyright Act, the present U.S. copyright statute. The first tale focuses on fair use, the second on statutory damages, and the third on formalities. From these three tales, the paper draws five different morals that provide insights into the ongoing process of copyright reform. These insights will enable policymakers and commentators to rethink the ongoing and future development of copyright law.

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.

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.

Moving images represent a category of material which has historically received short shrift in most libraries and archives. Film, video, and now digital images form a significant part of many library and archival collections, however, and can be found in many formats and genres. Despite the ubiquity of such media in cultural institutions, the majority of libraries and archives owning collections of moving images have neglected these holdings—with the specific exception of those few archives devoted primarily to the care and preservation of moving images.

The simplest part of sound preservation involves technology and its application. The real complexities lie in a mix of social legal, and financial issues. The social issues include how archivists, curators, librarians, historians, or anyone with limited engineering, computing, and other technical training can evaluate competing claims and risks. The legal issues include copyright and the risks that an institution may choose to take about what constitutes fair use and preservation copying. The financial issues include how much of what quality of preservation an institution can afford, and for how many of the items in its collection.

Since the arrival of mass production, commodification has been plaguing markets – none more so than that for music. By separating production and consumption in space and time, commodification challenges the very conditions underlying economic exchange. This chapter explores authenticity as the institutional response to the commodification of music, rekindling the relationship between isolated market participants in the increasingly digitized world of music. Building upon the “Production of Culture” perspective, we unpack the commodification of music across five different institutional realms – (1) production, (2) consumption, (3) selection, (4) appropriation, and (5) classification – and provide a thoroughly relational account of authenticity as an institutional practice.

The nonconsensual taking or sharing of nude or sexual images, also known as “image-based sexual abuse,” is a major social and legal problem in the digital age. In this chapter, we examine the problem of image-based sexual abuse in the context of digital platform governance. Specifically, we focus on two key governance issues: first, the governance of platforms, including the regulatory frameworks that apply to technology companies; and second, the governance by platforms, focusing on their policies, tools, and practices for responding to image-based sexual abuse. After analyzing the policies and practices of a range of digital platforms, we identify four overarching shortcomings: (1) inconsistent, reductionist, and ambiguous language; (2) a stark gap between the policy and practice of content regulation, including transparency deficits; (3) imperfect technology for detecting abuse; and (4) the responsibilization of users to report and prevent abuse. Drawing on a model of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we argue that until platforms better address these problems, they risk failing victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse and are implicated in the perpetration of such abuse. We conclude by calling for reasonable and proportionate state-based regulation that can help to better align governance by platforms with CSR-initiatives.