ARLINGTON, Va. -- Last week's federal court ruling in the CleanFlicks case proved how copyright law has tilted toward content owners at the expense of the public, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEAR) President and CEO Gary Shapiro. A federal court in Denver found that CleanFlicks, a business that bought...
This paper examines the welfare effects of intellectual property protection, accounting for firms' optimal responses to legal environments and technological innovation. It examines firms' use of indirect price discrimination in response to U.S. copyright law, which effectively prevents direct price discrimination. Using data covering VHS and DVD movie distribution, it...
CCH, Inc. (Riverwoods, IL) has launched "CCH Copyright Integrated Library," an online research tool on copyright law with content from both CCH and Aspen Publishers New York. The new service combines CCH's "Copyright Law Reporter,&qu CCH, Inc. (Riverwoods, IL) has launched "CCH Copyright Integrated Library,"...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: * The Congressional Budget Office suggesting that lawmakers think twice before enacting any further revisions to copyright law, much to the chagrin of the studios, record companies and videogame publishers. * While Con ...
The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing is entwined, for better or worse, with copyright law. Copyright owners have already targeted not only the makers of file-sharing clients like Napster, Scour, Audiogalaxy, Aimster and Kazaa, and Morpheus, but also companies that provide products that rely on or add value to public P2P...
This paper discusses the evolution of copyright law in order to meet the challenges of the digital age. It provides background on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ("DMCA") anti-circumvention measures, constitutional challenges against the statute, judicial interpretations of key terms in the DMCA, and the difficulty in preserving certain "fair...
This paper reviews current copyright law in the United States and considers the unique aspects of digital technology's challenge to that law. It also examines the prospects for a market-based resolution to copyright disputes over digital content and explores the effect of potential revisions to copyright law on economic efficiency...
Digital technology and the Internet have brought about a crisis in copyright law enforcement unlike any previously seen. In the past, for copyright infringers to substantially damage the worldwide market for a copyrighted work, they had to expend considerable resources in producing the infringing products and had to have a...
This paper reviews current copyright law in the United States and considers the novel aspects of digital technology's challenge to it. It shows that major source of movie industry revenue today, however, comes from movie sales and rentals in DVD format.3 Because movie DVDs (as well as music and software...
Digital Rights Management DRM refers to the technology that copyright owners use to protect digital media. This report surveys several of the DRM bills that were introduced in the 107th Congress and those that are pending in the 108th Congress. Generally, the bills are directed at two separate goals. One...
Recent headlines have brought the use of music on the Internet to the forefront, particularly the 261 copyright infringement lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America RIAA against some of the most active fans sharing songs on services like Kazaa. RIAA's lawsuits are for downloading music illegally over...
In today's business world, a company's intellectual property can be some of its most valuable assets. In fact, in the technology field, it's sometimes the case that intellectual property may be a business's only significant asset. Nonetheless, many businesses place themselves at a significant competitive disadvantage by failing to understand...
The Recording Industry Association of America RIAA has finally launched its campaign of lawsuits against the 60 million Americans who file-share. And already, we've seen the first casualties, a 12-year-old girl and her mother in New York must pay $2,000 they don't have in a hastened settlement; a 71-year-old grandfather...
The record industry recently filed lawsuits against four individual university network users, claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in damages based on their peer-to-peer ("P2P") file-sharing activities and consequent violations of federal copyright laws. P2P technology can be used in lawful and constructive ways as, for example, when professors place...
The paper seeks to preserve real benefits from copyright laws for the authors in whose name they are granted [and] seek to ensure that copyright laws are not mere pretexts for protecting the investment and entrepreneurial initiative of their exploiting partners. The paper deals with a scenario where the employees...
Copyright law goes back to the time of the U.S. constitution and it is regarded as an important cornerstone of successful intellectual property protection. However, recently it has been criticized strongly. Moreover, modern information and communication technology makes it increasingly difficult to actually protect the copyright of a digital good....
Copyright law's first-sale doctrine allows the owner of any particular lawful copy of a copyrighted work to resell, rent, lend, or give away that copy without the copyright owner's permission. The article first considers the effects the first-sale doctrine has had as part of a copyright system in which many...
Unlike patent law, copyright law does not protect the underlying invention or idea, rather it protects only the method or manner of expressing the idea. A copyright arises when ideas or thoughts are put into the form of sentences, words, paragraphs, computer programs, sketches, pictures, graphs, or any other method...
Copyright is the exclusive protection given to original works of authorship which been fixed in a tangible form of expression that can be reproduced or communicated. The Constitution granted Congress the right to pass laws, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited time to...
This paper examines the copyright issues facing streaming media. The paper details the arcane requirements for digital performances, the controversy over how ephemeral RAM copies should be treated, and the current rulemaking on the statutory digital performance license. Streaming media face complex requirements detailing what constitutes a non-interactive transmission eligible...