U.S. copyright law gives successful plaintiffs who promptly registered their works the ability to elect to receive an award of statutory damages, which can be granted in any amount between $750 and $150,000 per infringed work. This provision gives scant guidance about where in that range awards...

The scenes a faire doctrine, which recognizes elements of a work that are stock, rudimentary, or that arise naturally from a particular theme or setting, is a flexible and capacious limitation on copyright protection that can shield defendants from copyright liability. There are at least five...

Courts have struggled for decades to develop a test for judging infringement claims in software copyright cases that distinguishes between program expression that copyright law protects and program functionality for which copyright protection is unavailable. The case law thus far has adopted...

The compatibility of the U.S. fair use doctrine with international treaty norms has been questioned many times over the years by European and even American commentators. Does the fair use limitation on copyright’s exclusive rights comport with the “three-step test” that regulates the...

This article argues that competition and innovation in the software industry in the EU will be seriously undermined if the Court of Justice of the European Union in SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. holds that copyright protection for computer programs extends to the functional...