Twenty one years ago, copyright died. More accurately, it was killed. In 1996, in ProCD v. Zeidenberg, Judge Easterbrook, writing for the Seventh Circuit, held that a contract that restricted the use of factual information was not preempted by the Copyright Act and therefore enforceable. The...

What can and can't be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and...

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...

This paper provides a brief review of the law and economics of Copyright Law and Copyright Exceptions, Limitations, and Immunities. Copyright law requires the creator's consent to copy, publish, convey, transfer or profit from their original work. Copyright exceptions are legal limitations on...

The well-known “access-incentives” tradeoff that lies at the heart of the standard economic analysis of copyright follows largely from the assumption that copyright turns authors into monopolists. If one instead analyzes copyright through a framework that allows for product differentiation...

Regulatory arbitrage — defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings — is often seen in heavily-regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological...

The great expansion of EU copyright law has paved the way for several rightholders' abusive or dysfunctional conducts, without providing adequate solutions to prevent or remedy them. The answer from EU sources is characterized by extreme fragmentation, with tools mostly borrowed from external...

One manifestation of the trend towards the strengthening of copyright protection that has been noticeable during the past two decades is the secular extension of the potential duration during which access to copyrightable materials remains legally restricted. Those restrictions carry clear...

Does the lack of international copyrights benefit or harm developing countries? This article examines the effects of U.S. copyright piracy during a period when the U.S. was a developing country. U.S. statutes protected the copyrights of American citizens from 1790, but until 1891 deemed the...