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...

Twenty one years ago, copyright died. More accurately, it was killed. In 1996, in ProCD v. Zeidenberg, Judge Easterbrook, writing for the Seventh Circuit, held that a contract that restricted the use of factual information was not preempted by the Copyright Act and therefore enforceable. The...

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...