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"international IP"
Before yesterday’s ruling in the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons Supreme Court case, I had written a post about the oddity that copyright law is the only form of property right that does not include a specific mechanism by which the rights holder can lose their rights if they do not use the property [...]
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One of the most basic justifications for all forms of property rights, something every first-year law student is taught, is that these rights encourage the efficient use of property. Because property (usually) is a scarce resource, exclusive ownership rights help encourage people who value and will use the property. For the same reason, restraints on [...]
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I wrote this post several weeks ago, intending to explain the oddities of international copyright treatises that led to Antigua being poised to become a “copyright haven” that does not recognize US copyrights. Many other events intervened, but I think it is still worth posting for the sake of the explanation, which some readers might [...]
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Last week I was attending a meeting on campus that had nothing to do with e-science (which today refers to virtually all science, I suppose) when a very fortuitous event occurred. Professor Jerome Reichman of the Duke Law School handed me a copy of the April 2012 issue of the Minnesota Law Review (vol. 96, [...]
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The conference on Orphan Works & Mass Digitization, hosted by the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley last week, was exciting — at least to the 230 copyright geeks like me who attended — and filled with well-researched papers. The three White Papers that were prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology [...]
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With the Orphan Works conference taking place last week, there is an awful lot to blog about. I will address the conference in the next couple of postings (unless there is a GSU decision), but for now I want to look at another round in the John Wiley v. Kirtsaeng case.
Lest we [...]
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Today the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Golan v. Holder which is a significant defeat, I think, for the public domain in the United States. Reading the opinion has made me wonder if we have really strayed from our fundamental commitments about intellectual property.
The case involved the complex and technical [...]
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At its roots, copyright in the Anglo-American legal system is a statutory grant of rights intended to be an engine for innovation. Copyright and patent legislation is the only type of law whose authorization in the Constitution is specifically tied to a purpose — “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” If copyright [...]
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Last week the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision with potentially disastrous consequences for higher education. I admit that I have been reluctant to write about it because I cannot think of a good remedy for the situation and I dislike the role of Chicken Little, always crying that the sky [...]
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From Dave Hansen, J.D., the 2010-11 intern for Duke’s Scholarly Communications office:
A while back Kevin wrote a blog post highlighting the Ghanaian copyright law’s treatment of traditional knowledge and folklore. He pointed out two very basic ambiguities in Ghana’s domestic protections: (1) How exactly is “traditional knowledge” defined, and (2) who owns it?
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As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. 
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