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...

Im März dieses Jahres hat das Europäische Parlament trotz zahlreicher Proteste ein neues Urheberrecht beschlossen. Ziel der Reform ist es zum einen, einen vereinheitlichten digitalen Binnenmarkt zu schaffen. Einheitliche Regeln sollen den EU-Unternehmen, insbesondere Start-ups, bessere Chancen...

Die Inhaber der Rechte an Musikstücken drängen auf einen wirksamen Schutz vor der unberechtigten Nutzung der von ihnen verlegten Titel. Anbieter von Musik-Download-Diensten haben daher Programme entwickelt (Digital Rights Management Systems, DRMS), die unter anderem das Kopieren verhindern...

Moderne Technologien machen es den Nutzern möglich, sehr viel mehr urheberrechtlich geschützte Güter zu kopieren und weiterzugeben, als dies noch vor 50 Jahren der Fall war. Das Urheberrecht kann die Rechteinhaber derzeit nicht effektiv schützen. Es müsste gründlich reformiert werden, um...

We study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy. We consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation. We associate the strength of IPR protection with the...

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...