Courts have struggled for decades to develop a test for judging infringement claims in software copyright cases that distinguishes between program expression that copyright law protects and program functionality for which copyright protection is unavailable. The case law thus far has adopted...

U.S. copyright law gives successful plaintiffs who promptly registered their works the ability to elect to receive an award of statutory damages, which can be granted in any amount between $750 and $150,000 per infringed work. This provision gives scant guidance about where in that range awards...

John Perry Barlow (1947–2018) was a seer as well as a great songwriter. His provocative prose in The Economy of Ideas, published in WIRED magazine in 1994, imaginatively surveyed the burgeoning activity in the relatively early days of cyberspace, focusing on what he described as the...

This foreword for a symposium issue of the Texas Law Review discusses the evolution of intellectual property law scholarship, with particular attention to developments in empirically oriented IP scholarship. Over the past few decades, IP scholarship, outlets for its publication, and the IP...

The scenes a faire doctrine, which recognizes elements of a work that are stock, rudimentary, or that arise naturally from a particular theme or setting, is a flexible and capacious limitation on copyright protection that can shield defendants from copyright liability. There are at least five...

The Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in eBay v. MercExchange seemingly heralded a major change in not only patent law but also copyright law. The Court ruled that injunctions for patent infringement should no longer be granted automatically; instead, plaintiffs must establish the need for...

We address an important issue the Supreme Court left unaddressed this spring in its blockbuster Google v. Oracle decision: are computer interfaces copyrightable at all? We argue that they aren’t, and that the Federal Circuit's decision to the contrary is an aberration that should not undermine...