Copyright law aims to incentivize the creation of original works by extending protection against copying to rights holders. Not all works merit copyright protection, however. Some are specifically excluded from it. Increasingly, some of these works nonetheless parade around as if cloaked in...

Payola—sometimes referred to as “pay-for-play”—is the undisclosed payment, or acceptance of payment, in cash or in kind, for promotion of a song, album, or artist. Some form of pay-for-play has existed in the music industry since the 19th century. Most prominently, the term has been used...

The conventional wisdom is that property rules induce more (and more efficient) contracting, and that when faced with rigid property rules, intellectual property owners will contract into more flexible liability rules. A series of recent, private copyright deals show some intellectual property...

Copyright provides a long term of legal excludability, ostensibly to encourage the production of new creative works. How long this term should last, and the extent to which current law aligns with the economic incentives of copyright owners, has been the subject of vigorous theoretical debate....

The deterrence of copyright infringement and the evils of piracy have long been an axiomatic focus of both legislators and scholars. The conventional view is that infringement must be curbed and/or punished in order for copyright to fulfill its purported goals of incentivizing creation and...

For well over a century, legislators, courts, lawyers, and scholars have spent significant time and energy debating the optimal duration of copyright protection. While there is general consensus that copyright's term is of legal and economic significance, arguments both for and against a lengthy...

Regulatory arbitrage — defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings — is often seen in heavily-regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological...

Research on the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content has revealed an unlikely symbiosis between uncertainty and efficiency. Contrary to received wisdom, which tells us that in order to increase efficiency, we must increase stability, this Article will show that...

The government is not the only player in copyright reform, and perhaps not even the most important. Left to free market negotiation, risk averse licensors and licensees are contracting around the statutory license for certain types of copyright-protected content, and achieving greater efficiency...