For the last few years, we have been witnessing a long and unsuccessful fight of copyright holders against online copyright infringement. During this time, by establishing the so-called graduated response mechanisms, for the first time some state legislators have legalised a widespread use of...

Contracts lie at the heart of the regulatory system governing the creation and dissemination of cultural products in two respects: (1) The exclusive rights provided by copyright law only turn into financial reward, and thus incentives to creators, through a contract with a third party to exploit...

In 1998, Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). One of its provisions, 17 U.S.C. § 512, gave online service providers a safe harbor from liability for user-caused copyright infringements. The web hosting safe harbor's structure was relatively simple: copyright owners...

This article covers the copyright theft lawsuit brought by the family of the great soul singer, Marvin Gaye, against singer/songwriters Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their hit, “Blurred Lines”. The case goes to the very heart of how we define what is creative and innovative, the...

Digitization has impacted publishing, news, and entertainment industries in recent years by lowering the cost of access. With the option to download creative works legally, however, come the possibility of doing so illegally and the issue of how to protect copyrighted works effectively. Public...

There is an ongoing conflict between software copyright owners and a vast majority of users who are continually finding ways to use the software without paying. The paper investigates the attitudes of the users towards application of licensed or unlicensed software. Through in-debt analysis of...

Calls for the creation of a "small claims" intellectual property court have arisen periodically in the U.S. since at least the late 1980s. While prior efforts to establish such a court have fizzled, a recent push to establish a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office is gaining...

We examine the interrelationships between firms' efforts to leverage different types of intellectual property (IP) rights. While prior research has tended to view different forms of intellectual property as substitutes, we argue that they can also be viewed as complements. We motivate this...

In the platform age, copyright-protected contents are primarily disseminated over the internet. This model poses various challenges to the copyright regime that was mainly designed in and for the analog age. One of these challenges is related to the fair balance between the interests of...

Several different cases in the US have lately shed some light on the application of copyright to tattoos. However, in Europe, this area is quite untested and just a few regional decisions can be identified. With the current popularity and social acceptance of tattoos in combination with the rise...