This commentary examines the controversy over Grooveshark, an on-demand music streaming service that has provided access to much of the catalogs of the major record labels without licenses from three of the four majors. It raises questions about how such reliable access could have been sustained...

Following the most tumultuous decade in copyright history, Professor John Tehranian’s recent book – Infringement Nation: Copyright 2.0 and You – promises a broad-ranging account of the complexities of copyright infringement in the Internet Age. There can be little doubt that copyright...

The article describes how the first courts to address the scope of copyright protection for application programs have tended to view application programming as predominantly an exercise in creative expression and accordingly have interpreted the scope of copyright protection in this area quite...

This article examines three critical, interrelated challenges for reforming legal protection for computer software: (1) analyzing the market failures that might justify government intervention to define (or alter) the legal entitlements granted for software innovations; (2) predicting the likely...

Recent advances in digital technology have created the potential to make the vast stock of recorded knowledge searchable using sophisticated tools by anyone with an internet connection. As Google is in the process of demonstrating, it is now feasible to scan the collections of the major...

The principal recent studies of patent reform (NAS (2004), FTC (2003), Jaffe and Lerner (2004)) contend that a uniform system of patent protection must (or should) be available for anything under the sun made by man based upon one or more of the following premises: (1) the Patent Act requires...

In crafting the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress brokered a grand compromise between authors and publishers so as to bring about a unitary term of protection. Authors obtained an inalienable right to terminate transfers 35 years after an assignment, subject to designated carve outs for nine...

The Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v. MercExchange brought into focus whether intellectual property policy should follow reflexively in the wake of tangible property doctrines or instead look to the distinctive market failures and institutional features of intellectual resources. Professor...