Modern Copyright Law Research Articles

Differences in the Definition of an Author under Copyright Laws of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany in the Context of Artificial Intelligence

In modern copyright law, which began with Queen Anne s Law, the author plays a very important role as the subject of the work. As such, identifying the author s identity is a matter of priority. ??As science and technology advances, granting author status to anyone has been discussed under copyright law since Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony in 1884, and the development of artificial intelligence technology is again an issue of legal issues concerning the confirmation of author status of artificial intelligence products. Though it was thought that artificial intelligence products should be protected by law, the problem is that only creations expressing human thoughts or emotions can be protected under the current copyright law. In addition, only human beings can be recognized as authors in precedents and theories. ??This paper introduces the author problem of the distant, recent issue of artificial intelligence products and review the author s concept through content on the author s concept of Anglo-American and continental law countries.

Can the AI-Generated Content be Protected as Work Under Copyright Law? ---Jurisprudential Developments in China

Recent Chinese cases of the copyright disputes on AI-generated content (AGC) reveal challenges to copyright jurisprudence by Natural Language Processing (NPL)-based AI systems. Some scholars argued from the perspectives of intellectual characteristics of the AGC. This paper, however, combines historical and doctrinal methods to show that the production process of AGC should be the defining factor of work. This paper argues that modern copyright law does not protect the AI-generated content from the aspect of copyright law in intellectual writings/ paintings/ music/ art as work. Work in the history of copyright law requires direct human intellectual labor, which the AI lacks. AI does not have physical and / or mental labor to the levels of humans, and the human physical and intellectual labors put into building the AI system is different from the AIs production of contents. These are two separate and consecutive processes: humans make AI, and AI automatically generates contents. The second process cannot produce work because it does not involve comparable labor to humans.

A System Out of Balance: A Critical Analysis of Philosophical Justifications for Copyright Law Through the Lenz of Users' Rights

Ultimately, this Article has three goals. The first is to offer an analysis of users’ rights under copyright law from four commonly used theoretical perspectives. These are labor, personality, economic and utilitarian theories. In doing so, this Article will demonstrate that the philosophies that underpin modern copyright law support a broad and liberal set of rights for derivative creativity. It will argue that current treatment of derivative works is unnecessarily conservative from a theoretical perspective. Second, this Article will demonstrate how, in spite of theory that supports a healthy community of derivative creativity, those who practice it have been further disenfranchised by the law. It will argue term limit extensions, increased protectionist treatment of secondary works online, and the functional lack of access to proper licensing mechanisms have rendered users’ rights impotent. Finally, in conclusion, this Article will offer a solution to the apparent imbalance of power in the form of replacing property-based derivative rights with liability rules. The conclusion, in many ways, merits its own paper and is meant as merely a suggestion of direction rather than a formulated solution.

Imagining interdisciplinary dialogue in the European Court of Justice’s Deckmyn decision: conceptual challenges when law and technology regulate parody

Abstract In Deckmyn v Vandersteen, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) defined parody as an “autonomous concept of EU law” with certain “essential characteristics.” The case revolved around a parodic drawing modeled after a cover of the well-known Suske & Wiske comic book series. Building on literary theory on parody, including the work of Genette, this paper will analyze both the ECJ’s reasoning in Deckmyn and the preceding Advocate General’s opinion in this case. In search for a shared vocabulary, we will focus on the specific legal interpretation in comparison to the characteristics identified from a humanities perspective. We identify opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue, which now remains too implicit in the legal documents. In addition, we will address the conceptual challenges posed by parody in the digital age. For instance, to what extent can parody’s nuanced characteristics be recognized by filter technologies as required by modern copyright law in the online environment that has become a catalyst for sharing creative content?

A theory of ‘authorship transfer’ and its application to the context of Artificial Intelligence creations

This article aims to contribute to the copyright debate concerning Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) creations. AI-created works could and should be protected by copyright law. However, existing answers to the issue of allocation of authorship remain somewhat unsatisfactory. A reasonable and practical solution to this issue, fortunately, could be established upon the doctrine of ‘authorship transfer’ (the initial transfer of authorship from the actual creator to a constructive author) in modern copyright law. The ‘control of the creative process’ theory can provide a reasonable and justifiable explanation of ‘authorship transfer’. The person, either a natural or a juridical one, who has exercised sufficient control over the creative process, should be constructed as an author of the outcome. This theory is quite flexible before the ever-changing AI technology that challenges copyright law. For AI-created works, the authorship is better transferred to a person behind the AI who had control over the creative process in order to safeguard the current copyright system and its founding principles.

The Five W’s of Merger

I’m a big student of the nineteenth century. I love the 1800s, I write about them, and I think about them a lot. There are a lot of questions in modern copyright law where we look back, and we spend time thinking about what was going on in the 1800s and opinions from the 1800s. And so when we came up with this idea to talk about the scope of copyright, I went back to the cases from the 1800s, and the Supreme Court has told us a lot about what is copyrightable and what is not from a perspective of merger—from a perspective of protecting laws or not.

Death of a Copyright

A well-established feature of modern copyright law is that the term of a copyright extends beyond—far beyond—the author’s death. In his article, Death in Copyright: Remarks on Duration, Abraham Drassinower boldly challenges that settled rule, arguing that, because of the deeply personal link between an author’s creativity and the grant of a copyright, the term of that right should end when the author dies. Extending the argument of his recent book, What’s Wrong with Copying?, Drassinower draws on the thinking of Immanuel Kant to conceive of authorship not as a “thing” but as a “communicative act” connecting the author and the audience. This essay, prepared for a symposium celebrating the work of Wendy Gordon, responds to Drassinower’s engaging article by making two main points. First, it goes beyond Kantian theory and sketches how other justifications for copyright, including personhood theory and economic utilitarianism, could be used to critique (or to justify) the long, post-death duration of modern copyright. Second, it explores the implications of Drassinower’s theory of authorship for works-made-for-hire, where the personal link between author and copyright is more tenuous, and for works published only posthumously, which would not receive any copyright protection at all under Drassinower’s model.

EU Contractual Protection of Creators: Blind Spots and Shortcomings

EU Contractual Protection of Creators: Blind Spots and Shortcomings

Reconceptualizing Nigerian Copyright Law to Protect Nollywood

Reconceptualizing Nigerian Copyright Law to Protect Nollywood

When the Law Advances Access to Learning: Locke and the Origins of Modern Copyright

In light of the challenge and promise currently facing scholarly publishing’s move to digital models of greater openness, this paper offers a point of historical reflection on an earlier era of concern over sustainable access to learned works. It reports on a period of great turmoil in publishing that ran from the end of British book licensing in 1695, which unleashed a great wave of print piracy and sedition, to the legal remedy afforded by the Statute of Anne 1710, which introduced what we now think of as modern copyright law. The paper begins with John Locke’s lobbying of Parliament to end the effrontery of press censorship and monopoly maintained by the three-decade old Licensing Act of 1662. The scholar-friendly legal reforms of this act that Locke proposed in the 1690s were not taken up by Parliament when it allowed the act to expire in 1695. However, six years after Locke’s death in 1704, his and others’ proposed reforms were to find a place in the Statute of Anne 1710. This legislation was the first to vest authors with an exclusive, limited-term right to print copies of their work, while also protecting the access rights of scholars and the public to these and other works. I argue that the history of the statute reveals how the age of copyright began with striking a fine legislative balance between the interests of learning and those of commercial publishing, while also offering further insight into Locke’s influential work on property rights and limits. My hope is that this portrayal of Locke’s relatively effective political intervention as scholar-activist and public defender of learning in relation to the subsequent Statute of Anne might inspire and lend weight to the academic community’s current grappling with the growing commercial dominance of scholarly publishing.

Should We Bury the Concept of Reproduction – Towards Principle-Based Assessment in Copyright Law?

Since of the very beginning of the modern copyright law era, the exclusive right of reproduction has been an integral part of copyright law. However, among the fundamental concepts of copyright, it is perhaps the least suitable for the digital environment due to its technical-functional nature. Flexible, principle-oriented regulation enabling context-sensitive outcomes and balancing of interests is needed in European copyright law. In this respect, often suggested solutions such as a fair use exception or the implied licence doctrine might not create enough adaptability; whereas, a better solution would be to reform the fundamental structures of copyright law. Even though achieving any radical changes to international conventions might not be realistic, this article attempts to find an alternative approach to the concept of reproduction. Structural rather than substantive elements as substitutes for reproduction could be derived from the context of modern trademark law. Such an approach would be consistent with the existing weak signals on convergence between the branches of industrial property law and copyright. As a structural adoption, a formulation stressing the legitimate interests behind the protection and consequences of utilisation of the protected object for these interests could be used in copyright law. One possibility would be a flexible instrument by which it would be evaluated whether the utilisation of copyrighted work affects, or is liable to affect, the legitimate interests of the right holder or alternatively if the utilisation follows honest practice in the particular sector of the creative industry.

Literary and Dramatic Disputes in Shakespeare’s Time

Disputes over literary works and plays — between one authors and another, one publisher and another, and between authors and publishers — have arisen since the ancient world. This is to be expected, since publishing poems and plays and producing theatrical performances can have significant economic, political, and emotional implications all at the same time. The nature and legal frameworks governing these disputes have changed dramatically over the centuries, however, particularly with regard to the proprietary rights involved. Though modern copyright law did not exist at the time, the Elizabethan age saw a high degree of professionalism of theatrical performance, book publishing, and dramatic authorship. When audiences are clamoring for novel entertainments, authorship is becoming a professional activity, and profits are to be made, customs and traditions inevitably arise — as do violations of those customs and traditions. This article discusses the framework of authorship and publishing in Shakespeare’s time and examines some of the disputes that arose and how they were resolved in a context where the legal remedies were limited. Methods from patronage to private guild “courts” to theft to public denunciation to outright violence were employed in attempts to maintain profitable businesses in publishing and theatre.

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky” and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky” and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination

Proportionality – A New Mega Standard in European Copyright Law

Modern copyright law is designed so as to accommodate the needs of a dynamic reality through the extensive use of open standards, aimed at reconciling conflicting interests. In the past few decades the tension between the competing interests has intensified, and contemporary global copyright discourse has focused on the relationship and tension between traditional copyright interests and fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression, data protection and privacy. Against this background, a new path is gradually emerging in European and English copyright law, in which a new standard -- "proportionality" -- is being established to moderate the growing constitutional tension. The notion of "proportionality" is an acknowledged principle in European law. This article attempts to examine the relatively brief, recent history of the proportionality test as implemented in the copyright sphere, and understand its potential trajectories. Proportionality has been adopted as a measure for scrutinizing remedies granted in cases of copyright infringement. A growing body of literature acknowledges that remedies affect the scope of rights. The implementation of the proportionality test as a remedy-based measure in the copyright context firmly supports this position. The development of the new standard in European and English copyright law thus far, sketches a picture of a sophisticated vehicle for adjusting remedies to constitutional tensions within the substantive civil-copyright arena. The strength of this mechanism lies not only in its flexibility but also in its ability to simplify acute conflicts between competing fundamental rights and transform them into a dialogue which involves a more factually oriented balancing of interests, examined through the prism of remedies. The proportionality test therefore, may indeed take European intellectual property law to its inevitable new constitutional phase.

The Creative Rights Act of 2020: Rethinking Copyright for the Future

The Creative Rights Act of 2020: Rethinking Copyright for the Future

Internet Piracy: Is Protecting Intellectual Property Worth Government Censorship?

Intellectual property law has struggled to keep up with new technologies and the issues posed by new mediums of communication. With the rise of the Internet, digital piracy has led to millions of dollars worth of losses in American intellectual property. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA ") was intended to address some of the problems related to online infringement; however, at the time the DMCA was drafted, the legislature did not foresee that peer-to-peer file sharing software would give millions of users instant illegal access to copyrighted works. In response to lobbying for an expansion of copyright protection, the Senate introduced the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act. The Act will give the Attorney General the power to bring an action against websites dedicated to online infringement. If the Attorney General is successful, the court may issue an order to internet service providers to block access to the infringing site, to financial institutions to stop providing online payment systems to infringing sites, and to online advertisers to prevent them from purchasing ad space on the infringing website. Additionally, the Act will require Internet service providers to block all access to foreign infringing web pages from within the United States. Proponents of the Act are certain that it will help decrease the prevalence of online infringement; however, critics of the Act argue that it is overly broad and will trample over free speech. This Comment discusses the history of modern copyright law, including the rise of digital piracy, and the implications of the proposed Intellectual Property Act.

What Is a Copyright Work?

The work, which came into its own with the emergence of modern copyright law at the turn of the twentieth century, occupies a pivotal (but largely unexplored) position in copyright law. Focusing on the question of how copyright decides whether part of a work should be treated as a separate and distinct object, this Article looks at some of the techniques that copyright law uses to decide both what is a work and when a new work comes into being. The Article shows that in spite of the central role that the work plays in copyright doctrine the law is not well equipped to explain when a new work has come into being.

Les Formalités Sont Mortes, Vive Les Formalités! Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for Their Decline in Nineteenth Century Europe

Modern copyright law is based on the premise that copyright originates from original authorship and exists independently from formalities. This was different in the past, when copyright law was fully occupied with formalities. While the history of copyright formalities in the US has been well documented, the history of copyright formalities in Europe has been largely underexposed.This paper examines the development of copyright formalities against the background of the upcoming national rights thinking and some conceptual innovations in copyright law in nineteenth century Europe (France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK). Among other things, this paper concludes that, from a historical perspective, formalities are not as incompatible with the natural rights view as is commonly believed. This may cast new light on the possible reintroduction of copyright formalities, which is increasingly called for in the current digital era.

Digital Rights Management, Internet Governance and the Autopoiesis of Modern Copyright Law

The introduction of legislation on the legal protection of anti-circumvention devices into copyright law has caused fierce controversies. Perhaps the most important critique concerns the issue of a copyright nexus between a tort of circumventing and a subsequent act of copyright infringement. Technological protection measures not only protect a work against illicit copying but arguably grant the entertainment industry a positive right in controlling access to a work. The effect is to potentially transform important copyright principles. Its novelty lies in the ability to allow the person applying technological protection measures to set, independently, terms and conditions for use and access, and the related debate whether copyright embraces an access right. The article aims to place the tendency towards private regulation of access into a broader framework. It discusses and compares copyright legislation with divergent trends of how fundamental guarantees are emerging in fields outside copyright law, and asks what the impact of the new normativity emerging from technological control means for the future treatment of rights and interests in information.

International Approaches to the Orphan Works Problem

Regardless of the immediacy of the threat to intellectual progress created by orphan works, several countries have had systems in place for a number of years in order to combat the problem of stagnant works, such as those that have been orphaned. For many more countries, a solution has not yet been implemented, and the orphan works problem is the subject of myriad studies. This paper will look at the systems that are in place, as well as the inquiries into the problem in the United States and in Europe. What seems at first like a minor by-product of modern copyright law in reality threatens the need to rethink our copyright regimes in order to better serve the real functions of the property right.