Category: Featured

I have posted a new paper on SSRN.  The paper is based on a presentation that I gave at the Exhaustion and First Sale in IP Conference held at Santa Clara Law School last November.  Here’s the abstract: The first sale doctrine (or exhaustion) limits the exclusive rights that survive the initial authorized sale of an item protected by such rights.  The first sale doctrine has always been under pressure by owners of intellectual property rights, and courts have never been able to precisely outline its contours, or fully articulate its rationale. Recently, and somewhat counter-intuitively, insights borrowed from modern …

The First Sale Doctrine: What Antitrust Law Can (and Cannot) Teach Read more »

Last month Judge Chin denied the proposed Google Books Settlement (the Amended Settlement Agreement, or ASA). While I’m pleased with the outcome, I’m troubled with some aspects of the opinion. Setting aside the issues of adequacy of representation, notice, privacy, and whether a class action settlement should be used to establish future and ongoing arrangements, etc, I’m pleased with the outcome because in my view, the main problem with the ASA was its potentially anti-competitive outcomes. The forward-looking element of the ASA consisted of two separate parts: first, it created what is, effectively, a new Collective Rights Organization for works whose copyright …

Copyright Dogma and the Denied Google Books Settlement Read more »

The Guardian reports that British Prime Minister, David Cameron, believes that the UK should adopt a US-style “fair use” regime (and as expected, criticized by the music industry, publishers, etc.). Apparently, Cameron was convinced that a company such as Google could not have started up in the UK after Google’s founders explained to him that their service “depends on taking a snapshot of all the content on the internet at any one time”, and felt that the UK copyright system “is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States”. Google’s founders and Cameron …

Where will the next Google come from? Read more »