There is a built-in tension between the perception of copyright law as promoting a delicate balance between the interests of creators, distributions, and users of information goods and contract law’s laissez-faire philosophy. Legal systems need to decide how to approach this tension and...

In Statutory Domain and the Commercial Law of Intellectual Property, John Duffy and Richard Hynes argue that IP exhaustion — the doctrine that limits a patentee's or copyright holder's control over goods in the stream of commerce — was created and functions exclusively to confine IP law...

The Copyright Act grants authors and users a set of entitlements in copyrightable works. It is questionable whether and to what extent authors and users can reallocate these rights by entering into legally enforceable contracts. The Seventh Circuit’s historic decision in ProCD, Inc v...

The American Royalties Too Act (known as the ART Act) is now pending in Congress. If passed, it will grant visual artists a right, known as droite de suite, to collect royalties when their works are resold. The proponents of the bill partly rely on a comprehensive report, published by the U.S....

In 2013, in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, the Supreme Court wrote another chapter in the ongoing story of copyright exhaustion. This decision is part of a series of recent decisions in high-profile cases and a vibrant discourse, domestically and internationally, regarding the scope of...

Can a buyer of copyrighted works abroad import them into the United States or resale them? This question is currently pending before the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons.The parties' positions in this case as well as the Justices' questions during oral argument included extensive...

Can a buyer of copyrighted works abroad import them into the United States or resale them? This question is currently pending before the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons.The parties' positions in this case as well as the Justices' questions during oral argument included extensive...

Starting in 2013, authors of copyrighted work and their successors will be able to terminate every assignment and license 35 years after execution. These termination rights are inalienable and are expected to have a substantial impact on some industries, and in particular, the music...

Copyright law gives copyright owners tremendous power over their users, but some of them want even more. Copyright law’s restrictions on the copying, distribution, adaptation, public performance, and public display of a work are broad, applicable to all stages within the stream of commerce and...

U.S. colleges and universities have for some time joined the privatization movement where university functions and assets are turned over to private contractors. Here we present a case of a 50-year comprehensive energy concession agreement by The Ohio State University that generated an up-front...