Search results

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.

This chapter provides an overview of five modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

This chapter provides an overview of the five main modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and designs – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

The concept of user rights in copyright law has clear affinities with the concept of copyright scope. The scope of an author’s entitlement over her work is lessened in proportion to the extent to which we assert that users, too, have rights. Yet user rights have profound implications not only with regard to copyright scope but also with regard to copyright subject matter. User rights implicate not only the scope of an author’s entitlement, but also the very nature of her work. Integrating user rights into copyright jurisprudence requires that a work of authorship be conceived not as an intangible commodity or metaphysical chattel, but as an act of speech performed by its author. The proposition that user rights are integral to copyright law makes sense only if we regard authors as speakers, and works of authorship as acts of communication.

Licensing from US universities is done within the overall legal framework of the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 and the employment agreements of universities. This chapter explains common contracts used by universities to license technologies developed by their faculty and students within the context of these laws. In addition to the legal framework, the nature of license agreements is affected by the embryonic nature of most university inventions, which necessitates faculty and student involvement in development, and the entrepreneurial goals of the university. Universities have diverse goals in terms of revenue, licenses executed, inventions commercialized, patents filed, and number of startups formed. The somewhat obvious problem is that the goals of faculty, students, the university, and the licensee may not be aligned. Common contracts used are meant to align these goals. While some contracts include multiple terms such as upfront fees, running royalties, annual payments, and equity, Express Licenses are increasingly being used to accommodate the entrepreneurial environment. This chapter discusses these issues and also the importance of the rights to sublicense inventions.

Purpose – This chapter explores the use of music and celebrity endorsements in political campaigns of the United States. It focuses on two aspects: (1) the legality of a political campaign’s use of music at rallies and in advertisements without authorization from the owner of the musical work and (2) a review of the literature on the potential effect of the use of music in political campaigns on voter behavior.

Design/methodology/approach – A brief history of the use of music in political campaigns precedes an examination of the expansion of copyright law protection for music and the legal claims musicians may raise against the unauthorized use of music by political campaigns. The chapter then reviews the potential effect of political campaigns’ use of music and celebrity endorsements on voter behavior.

Findings – A musician’s primary legal protection falls under copyright law, but the courts disagree on whether the unauthorized use of music at political rallies and in political campaign advertisements results in copyright infringement. Social research suggests music and celebrity endorsements affect voter behavior with a likely greater effect on first-time voters.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter introduces the complicated application of copyright law to the unauthorized use of musical works by political campaigns. Additionally, it notes the limited research on the effect of music and celebrity endorsements on voter behavior even as political campaigns increasingly target niche demographics with specific music selections to motivate voters to vote.

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.

I begin with a dispute over a fox hunt, by which to understand the law of tangible property, then develop that metaphor for the major types of intellectual property. I start with domestic U.S. patent law for the sake of concreteness, and generalize to other jurisdictions and types of intellectual property. In the latter parts of the paper I discuss the international implications of intellectual property, including especially the effects of information spillovers. The last part of the paper describes the hazards in analogizing “trade” in intellectual property rights to trade in goods, and particularly in interpreting international patent data. These hazards motivate the search for a structural model specially adapted to the purpose of valuing international intellectual property rights and rules. The goal is to give economists a simple and integrated framework for analyzing intellectual property across time, jurisdiction and regime type, with an eye towards eventually developing other incentive systems that have the advantages of property (such as decentralized decision-making), but fewer of the disadvantages.