Despite the blossoming of copyright law and authorship theories over the past decades, there has thus far been very little in terms of empirical research to either affirm or refute any. Fortunately, the Copyright Office is home to the largest and oldest running registry of copyright claims...

On a per capita basis, do African-American authors produce more copyright registrations than non-Hispanic whites? Do men and women show a within-group bias in choosing co-authors? And what decade in the average musician's life is the most productive? This article provides answers to these...

The registration records at the U.S. Copyright Office provide a valuable lens on the use and performance of the copyright system, but have not yet been studied systematically. Using an original data set containing all 2.3 million registrations from 2008 to 2012, we provide a snapshot of current...

All have thus far considered the Constitutional Convention’s record on intellectual property puzzling and uninformatively short. This Article revisits that conventional wisdom. Using various methods of analysis, including a statistical hypotheses test, it solves historical puzzles that have...

In this paper, we analyze how stand-up comedians protect their jokes using a system of social norms. Intellectual property law has never protected comedians effectively against theft. Initially, jokes were virtually in the public domain, and comedians invested little in creating new ones. In the...

In 2005 Congress created a new copyright formality: preregistration. Preregistration addresses a growing phenomenon in which copyrighted works are leaked to the Internet prior to official release. Preregistering a work allows copyright owners immediate access to courts and an expanded menu of...

Can Congress pass under one of its powers a statute that conflicts with the language of another Congressional power? This unsettled question has bothered intellectual property scholars in recent years. This Essay examines it by focusing on the 1994 anti-bootlegging statutes that conflict with...

In this Article, we highlight for the first time some of the significant but hitherto unrecognized behavioral effects of copyright law on individuals' incentives to create and then examine the implications of our findings for the constitutional analysis of Eldred v. Ashcroft. We show that...

Who is the author in copyright law? Knowing who our copyright system currently incentivizes to create which works is a necessary precondition for any effective copyright reform, yet copyright scholarship has thus far treated authors only through a priori conceptual analysis. This Article...

How should we allocate property rights in unowned tangible and intangible resources? This Article develops a model of original acquisition that draws together common law doctrines of first possession with original acquisition doctrines in patent, copyright, and trademark law. The common...