This article examines a worldwide shift in laws, policies, and practices pertaining to intermediaries’ role in online copyright enforcement. We use a comparative methodology to expose an emerging trend in jurisdictions, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, the European Union, France,...

Digital communications technologies have led to fundamental changes in the ways that cultural institutions fulfil their public missions of access, preservation, research, and education. Institutions are developing publicly-accessible websites in which users can visit online exhibitions, search...

Even as a mere conceptual cloud, the term “user-generated content” is useful to discuss the societal shifts in content creation brought about by the participative Web and perhaps best epitomized by the remix phenomenon. This Essay considers the copyright aspects of UGC. On the one hand, the...

Intellectual property rights are often justified by utilitarian theory. However, recent scholarship suggests that creativity thrives in some industries in the absence of intellectual property protection. These industries might be called IP's negative spaces. One such industry that has received...

In the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) and others v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills case, the High Court of Justice in matter of private copy exception provides the twofold prime opportunity to shed light on the state of the art of copyright...

The agenda of the EU includes the harmonisation or unification of laws of its Member States for promoting the common market, improving free movement of goods, free movement of capital, free movement of services, and free movement of people. This also applies to copyright law. However,...

For well over a century, legislators, courts, lawyers, and scholars have spent significant time and energy debating the optimal duration of copyright protection. While there is general consensus that copyright's term is of legal and economic significance, arguments both for and against a lengthy...

Modern copyright law is based on the inescapable assumption that users, given the choice, will free-ride rather than pay for access. In fact, many consumers of cultural works – music, books, films, games, and other works – fundamentally want to support their production. It turns out that...

U.S. copyright law is facing an interesting moment, where technology is far ahead of the law, and where the evolution of law seems to lead nowhere. This article focuses on recent technological evolution and subsequent legal developments, especially the safe harbor provisions for Internet service...

A growing conventional wisdom argues that copyright restricts artists' ability to fulfill their creative potential and to express themselves freely in their art. But this conventional wisdom misunderstands the role that copyright plays in fostering and enabling artistic freedom. To understand...