Whether and how copyright promotes creative expression is the central question of copyright law. The standard rationale—that copyright provides economic incentives to create—has attracted sustained critique. Supplementing existing theories, this Article advances a novel organizational theory...

Collaborative production of expressive content accounts for an ever growing number of copyrighted works. Indeed, in the age of content sharing and peer production, collaborative efforts may have become the paradigmatic form of authorship. Surprisingly, though, copyright law continues to view the...

We analyse optimal pricing and quality of a monopolistic journal and the optimality of open access in a two-sided model. The predominant aspect of the model that determines the quality levels at which open access is optimal is the nature of the (non-linear) externalities between readers and...

The increasing digitisation necessitates amendments to copyright protection. Both the European Parliament and the European Commission have now presented proposals addressing this issue. This is necessary because the way in which creative goods are produced and distributed has been changed...

Die fortschreitende Digitalisierung macht Anpassungen des Urheberschutzes erforderlich. Sowohl das Europäische Parlament als auch die Europäische Kommission haben dazu inzwischen Vorschläge vorgelegt. Hintergrund ist, dass die Art, wie kreative Güter produziert und verbreitet werden, durch...

The "UsedSoft" decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) about the right of a buyer of a downloaded copy of a software to resell this copy triggered a controversial discussion about the applicability of the "exhaustion" rule (US: first-sale doctrine) to copyright-protected...

In the current efforts towards harmonizing IPRs regimes in the African continent, this paper provides answers to four key questions relevant in the policy decision making processes. After empirically examining the questions, the following findings are established. (1) In comparison to common law...

This paper quantifies the relationship between private-network file sharing activity and music sales in the BitTorrent era. Using a panel dataset of 2,251 albums' U.S. sales and file sharing downloads on a private network during 2008, I estimate the effect of file sharing on album sales....

This paper will describe the drafting history of the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts, with particular attention to the extent of consumer and public-interest group representation in the process. The drafting process, I will argue, did not take adequate stock of problems identified in...