The copyright system has long been understood to play a critical role when it comes to the development and distribution of creative work. Copyright serves a second fundamental purpose, however: it encourages the development and distribution of related technologies like hardware that might be...

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...

The dominant explanatory/justificatory framework informing scholarly commentary on copyright law, policy and theory today - certainly in the US - is law and economics. From this perspective, copyright law exists to underpin markets in certain categories of 'information good' (copyright works)....

A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows more books for sale from the 1880’s than the 1980’s. Why? This paper presents new data on how copyright stifles the reappearance of works. First, a random sample of more than 2000 new books for sale on Amazon.com is analyzed along...

Dozens of people worked together to produce Casablanca. But a single person working alone wrote The Sound and the Fury. While almost all films are produced by large collaborations, no great novel ever resulted from the work of a team. Why does the frequency and success of collaborative creative...

In IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd, the High Court transformed Australian copyright law, by placing a new emphasis on the role of an author or authors in producing original works. The centrality now required to be given to authorship has focused attention on important subsidiary...

This pair of papers involves a reprinting of "Of Harms and Benefits: Torts, Restitution, and Intellectual Property," 21 J. LEGAL STUDIES 449 (1992), along with an introduction to that article for students, entitled "Copyright as Tort's Mirror Image". Both involve comparisons between statutory...

The rights of users of copyrighted materials are growing in significance. This is the result of fundamental changes in the creative ecosystem that pull in opposite directions: on the one hand, the flourishing of user-generated content places individual users at the forefront of creative...

The challenge that illegal file-­sharing poses to legal criminalisation is addressed in this study. Nonetheless, the pretexts and reasons for the specific character of file-­sharing behaviour and norms in a community likely, to various degrees, correlate with the specifics in the legal...

In this Article, we provide a blueprint for personalizing copyright law in order to reduce the deadweight loss that stems from its universal application to all users, including those who would not have paid for it. We demonstrate how big data can help identify inframarginal users, who would not...