The doctrine of fair use allows limited copying of creative works based on the rationale that copyright holders would consent to such uses if bargaining were possible. This paper develops a formal model of fair use in an effort to derive the efficient legal standard for applying the doctrine....

Copyright owners routinely obtain prompt removal of allegedly infringing materials from the Internet using takedown notices. The Copyright Act’s takedown procedures are an attractive and powerful tool to combat infringement because they do not require filing a federal copyright infringement...

Copyright protection of the restoration and reconstruction of works, especially of public domain works, is a controversial matter. One of the pillars of copyright protection, the requirement that the work is original, that is, it originates from the author and does not derive entirely from a...

The Supreme Court tells us that originality is the sine qua non of copyright. I argue that uniqueness is the sine qua non. Copyright only protects unique work, a one-of-a-kind – a work that no one created before (novel) and that no one could independently create after (unrepeatable). The Court...

This paper, updated from one delivered to the Canadian IT Law Association’s 13th Annual Conference in Toronto in 2009, discusses the implications on Canadian copyright law of some recent case law, mainly dealing with joint authorship, legal and equitable ownership,time bars, infringement and...

As scientists are motivated by readership rather than by royalties, one might doubt that academic copyright is required for protecting the authors' property rights and for stimulating research. Consequently, the possibility of moving to an open access regime by abolishing academic copyright is...

There is a common perception that digitisation has prompted changes in creative labour markets. In particular, it is widely assumed that exploiters insist on "grabbing rights" (i.e. broadly conceived assignments of rights), that visual artists are not able to negotiate, that they are paid less...

Key Point – This article provides an overview of the developments in the field of Intellectual Property (IP) in Nigeria and highlights key issues in 10 recent judgments on IP Law in Nigeria. The cases are organized thematically according to the type of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)...

The incentives-for-authors formulation of copyright’s purpose is so deeply ingrained in our discourse and our thought processes that it is astonishingly hard to avoid invoking, even when one is consciously trying not to do so. Yet avoiding that formulation is exactly what we ought to be doing....

Music sampling continues to be the linchpin of a variety of musical styles including rap, hip-hop, house, and dance music, and has even become prevalent in rock music. The practice of sampling involves taking pre-existing sound recordings and using portions of those recordings as elements in a...