LECTURE TRANSCRIPTS

Based on the Lectures of Prof. William W. Fisher III, Harvard Law School
Compiled by Marc Pelteret, student of CopyrightX: UCT 2017

Version 1.2 (7 February 2018)

PREFACE

There are many ways to learn, and which way is best is up to the individual to decide. Personally, I
find it quicker and easier to read rather than listen to lectures. Because of this, I decided to extract
the transcriptions of Prof. Fisher’s excellent lectures from the YouTube videos. Only later I did I
discover that the FLAX project (http://flax.nzdl.org) had already done this. What the project lacks,
however, is the visual references, and so I decided to continue with my effort to create a
comprehensive set of transcripts, complete with as much referenced material as possible.
This text includes most images, diagrams, graphs and textual material referenced in the video
lectures. Some material was left out because while it is interesting to see, it is not critical to
understanding the subject and would only have extended the length of the text. Many of the
diagrams and graphs were re-drawn, initially just to make a few of them clearer, but later to ensure
they have a consistent look. In a few cases I added extra detail.
Most of the text is a direct transcription of Prof. Fisher’s videos. Some editing was necessary
to refer to figures and tables, rather than the screen. Additional editing was done to correct
mistakes in the transcriptions, remove repetition (particularly in the introduction of each lecture),
and to improve the readability of the text.
Following Prof. Fisher’s example, this work is released under the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 License. I may revise it as the lecture videos are updated, but if I do not, others are
welcome to do so. A list of which versions of the videos the text is based on can be found in
Appendix B.
I hope you find this document useful, and the course as enjoyable and interesting as I did.
Many thanks to Prof. Fisher and Dr. Tobias Schonwetter of the Dept. of Commercial Law at the
University of Cape Town for all the work they put into presenting a very worthwhile course.

Marc Pelteret
Student of the CopyrightX: UCT 2017 at the University of Cape Town in South Africa

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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CONTENTS

1. The Foundations of Copyright Law .......................................................................................... 1

1.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1
1.2. Originality ................................................................................................................................ 5
1.3. The Idea/Expression Distinction ........................................................................................... 11
1.4. The System of Multilateral Treaties ...................................................................................... 15
2. Fairness and Personality Theories ......................................................................................... 26
2.1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 26
2.2. Fairness ................................................................................................................................. 28
2.3. Personality ............................................................................................................................ 36
3. The Subject Matter of Copyright ........................................................................................... 46
3.1. Literature (and Software)...................................................................................................... 46
3.2. Drama and Choreography ..................................................................................................... 52
3.3. Music ..................................................................................................................................... 56
3.4. Audiovisual Works ................................................................................................................ 65
3.5. Fictional Characters .............................................................................................................. 67
3.6. Architectural Works .............................................................................................................. 69
4. Welfare Theory .................................................................................................................... 81
4.1. The Utilitarian Framework .................................................................................................... 81
4.2. The Incentive Theory of Copyright........................................................................................ 90
4.3. Applications and Assessment.............................................................................................. 103
5. Authorship......................................................................................................................... 108
5.1. Sole Authorship ................................................................................................................... 108
5.2. Joint Authorship .................................................................................................................. 113
5.3. Works for Hire ..................................................................................................................... 121
6. The Mechanics of Copyright ............................................................................................... 130
6.1. The Decline of Formalities .................................................................................................. 130
6.2. Duration .............................................................................................................................. 140
6.3. Protective Provisions .......................................................................................................... 145
7. The Rights to Reproduce and Modify .................................................................................. 156
7.1. Reproduction ...................................................................................................................... 156

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 7.2. Improper Appropriation...................................................................................................... 164
7.3. Derivative Works ................................................................................................................. 178
8. Distribution & Performance Rights ..................................................................................... 183
8.1. Distribution ......................................................................................................................... 183
8.2. Performances ...................................................................................................................... 198
8.3. Exceptions & Limitations..................................................................................................... 208
9. Fair Use ............................................................................................................................. 218
9.1. The History of Fair Use ........................................................................................................ 218
9.2. Fair Use Today ..................................................................................................................... 229
9.3. Other Approaches ............................................................................................................... 242
10. Cultural Theory .................................................................................................................. 257
10.1. Premises .......................................................................................................................... 257
10.2. Implications ..................................................................................................................... 264
10.3. Supplements and Concerns ............................................................................................ 274
11. Supplements to Copyright .................................................................................................. 280
11.1. Secondary Liability .......................................................................................................... 280
11.2. Dual-Use Technologies .................................................................................................... 286
11.3. Tech Protection Measures .............................................................................................. 299
12. Remedies........................................................................................................................... 308
12.1. Equitable Relief ............................................................................................................... 308
12.2. Damages.......................................................................................................................... 312
12.3. Criminal Penalties ........................................................................................................... 321
13. Appendices ........................................................................................................................ 326
A. Sources .................................................................................................................................... 326
B. Document History ................................................................................................................... 329

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin .............................................................................................. 5

Figure 2: “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci ........................................................................................... 5
Figure 3: A poster advertising the Great Wallace circus ......................................................................... 7
Figure 4: Studio photograph of Oscar Wilde taken by Napoleon Sarony, the subject of Burrow-Giles
Lithographic Co. v. Sarony 111 U.S. 53 (1884) ...................................................................... 10
Figure 5: Bill Diodato Photography v Kate Spade – original photograph (top) and accused photograph
(bottom) ................................................................................................................................ 12
Figure 6: Gentieu v. Tony Stone Images/Chicago Inc. et al (2003) – Gentieu’s photograph (left) and
accused photograph (right) ................................................................................................... 13
Figure 7: Screenshot of Google Maps showing the sector of Cambridge, Mass., that includes Harvard
University............................................................................................................................... 14
Figure 8: A maps showing the Berne Convention signatory countries (as of January 2016) ............... 19
Figure 9: Berlin Hauptbahnhof, designed by Meinhard von Gerkan .................................................... 36
Figure 10: Two cartoons by Gary Larson............................................................................................... 39
Figure 11: White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (1992) – magazine adverts run by Samsung;
the one in the top right was the subject of the lawsuit ........................................................ 43
Figure 12: The real Vanna White and the image of the robot in the Samsung advert ......................... 43
Figure 13: The Dickson-Edison Kinetoscope ......................................................................................... 47
Figure 14: The growth of US copyright law........................................................................................... 48
Figure 15: A timeline of the creation of forms of intellectual property for software .......................... 52
Figure 16: Buddhist monks from the Namgyal Monastery creating a sand mandala .......................... 55
Figure 17: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of music works (compositions), and their
interactions ............................................................................................................................ 57
Figure 18: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of sound recordings, and their
interactions ............................................................................................................................ 58
Figure 19: Press release by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) welcoming the
introduction of the Performance Rights Act ......................................................................... 60

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Figure 20: Press release by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) opposing the introduction
of the Performance Rights Act .............................................................................................. 61
Figure 21: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of sound recordings and the payments
between them (in green)....................................................................................................... 62
Figure 22: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of movies, and their interactions ......... 66
Figure 23: Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp. – the Omega globe design ..................................... 70
Figure 24: Carol Barnhart Inc. v. Economy Cover Corporation (1985) – mannequins .......................... 72
Figure 25: Barry Kieselstein-Cord v. Accessories by Pearl, Inc. (1980) – belt buckles .......................... 72
Figure 26: Brandir International, Inc. v. Cascade Pacific Lumber Co. – the Bandir ribbon rack ........... 73
Figure 27: Two of cheerleading uniforms offered by Varsity Brand ..................................................... 74
Figure 28: Five of the cheerleading uniform registrations belonging to Varisty Brand........................ 75
Figure 29: The Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind .............................................. 77
Figure 30: The National Museum of Australia, designed by Howard Raggatt ...................................... 79
Figure 31: Compare the National Museum of Australia (left) to the Jewish Museum in Berlin (right) 79
Figure 32: The basic axes ...................................................................................................................... 91
Figure 33: The marginal cost of producing a DVD ................................................................................ 92
Figure 34: Plotting price vs demand ..................................................................................................... 92
Figure 35: The demand curve ............................................................................................................... 93
Figure 36: A possible initial price for the DVD and the resultant revenue ........................................... 93
Figure 37: A rival copies the DVD and sells it at a lower price .............................................................. 94
Figure 38: Competition drives the price down to (almost) the marginal cost ...................................... 94
Figure 39: At marginal cost, there is a consumer surplus, but there is no incentive to make the film 95
Figure 40: Perfect price discimination leads to maximum “monopoly profits” ................................... 95
Figure 41: Price experimentation in month 1 and the resultant revenues .......................................... 96
Figure 42: The month 1 revenue broken down into costs and profits ................................................. 96
Figure 43: Price experimentation in month 2 and the resultant revenue gain and loss ...................... 97
Figure 44: The total profit for month 2 ................................................................................................. 97
Figure 45: Price experimentation in month 3 and the resultant revenue gain and loss ...................... 97
Figure 46: Price experimentation in month 4 and the resultant revenue gain and loss ...................... 97
Figure 47: The total profit in month 4 .................................................................................................. 97
Figure 48: The marginal revnue curve .................................................................................................. 98
Figure 49: Using the marginal curve to find the profit-maximizing price and output, which yield
monopoly profits ................................................................................................................... 98
Figure 50: Price experimentation in month 4 and the resultant revenue gain and loss ...................... 99

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Figure 51: Pricing on Amazon for the DVD of Schindler’s List ............................................................ 100
Figure 52: Purchase pricing for the short film Defending Our Lives. .................................................. 100
Figure 53: At a high price, CDF will earn some monopoly profit, but it will forfeit a large potential
market ................................................................................................................................. 101
Figure 54: The first steps in showing the demand curves for regular consumers and instutions ...... 101
Figure 55: The instituional and consumer demand curves ................................................................. 101
Figure 56: The Toyota Solera .............................................................................................................. 110
Figure 57: Meshwerks' wireframes for the Toyota Solera.................................................................. 110
Figure 58: G&W's additions to Meshwerks' wireframes .................................................................... 110
Figure 59: The RMS Titanic ................................................................................................................. 111
Figure 60: A photo of the bow of the Titatnic wreck .......................................................................... 112
Figure 61: Poster for the musical play “Rent” – Oregon version ........................................................ 113
Figure 62: Poster for the musical play “Rent” – Jarkarta version ....................................................... 114
Figure 63: The facts of the Thomson case ......................................................................................... 114
Figure 64: James Earl Reid's sculpture commemorating homelesness .............................................. 123
Figure 65: The second page of Gone with the Wind, showing the book’s copyright information ..... 132
Figure 66: The timeline of copyright protection under the 1909 regime ........................................... 133
Figure 67: Copyright registrations (excluding renewals), 1910 – 2000 .............................................. 136
Figure 68: Rate of copyright renewals, 1910 – 2000 .......................................................................... 136
Figure 69: The timeline of copyright protection under the current regime ....................................... 137
Figure 70: The effect of Creative Commons ....................................................................................... 139
Figure 71: Durations under the 1909 copyright regime ..................................................................... 141
Figure 72: Copyright duration of works published before 1923......................................................... 142
Figure 73: Copyright duration of works published 1923 – 1963 ........................................................ 142
Figure 74: Copyright duration of works published 1964 – 1977 ........................................................ 143
Figure 75: Copyright duration of works created but not published before 1978 .............................. 144
Figure 76: Duration of works created in 1978 or later ....................................................................... 144
Figure 77: Duration of works created in 1978 or later, for anonymous works, pseudonymous works,
and works for hire ............................................................................................................... 144
Figure 78: Copyright under the 1909 regime, showing the ability to assign renewal rights .............. 145
Figure 79: The parties involved in and the timeline of Fred Fisher Music v. M. Witmark & Sons...... 148
Figure 80: Termination rights for works created in 1978 or later ...................................................... 151
Figure 81: Termination rules that apply if rights were assigned after 1978 ....................................... 152
Figure 82: Termination rules that apply if rights were assigned before 1978 .................................... 153

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Figure 83: The operations of Cablevision............................................................................................ 162
Figure 84: The Nichols "pattern" test ................................................................................................. 172
Figure 85: Pattern test for software, step 1 – remove elements dictated by efficiency .................... 173
Figure 86: Pattern test for software, step 2 – remove elements dictated by external factors .......... 173
Figure 87: Pattern test for software, step 3 – remove elements taken from public domain............. 173
Figure 88: Pattern test for software, step 4 – compare elements of defendant’s program vs protected
parts of plaintiff’s program.................................................................................................. 173
Figure 89: Comparing a magazine photo of Kevin Garnett and a photo prepared for a billboard
advertising Coors beer......................................................................................................... 174
Figure 90: A cover of The New Yorker magazine compared to a poster advertising the movie Moscow
on the Hudson ..................................................................................................................... 175
Figure 91: The mayor character in the TV show “Fun Stuff” contrasted with the mayor of
McDonaldland ..................................................................................................................... 176
Figure 92: Comparing the photos in the Kisch case ............................................................................ 176
Figure 93: Prince’s “Love Symbol #2” ................................................................................................. 182
Figure 94: Pickett's guitar design ........................................................................................................ 182
Figure 95: Pricing on the American Airlines website for a flight 143 on 1 June 2014 ........................ 184
Figure 96: Seating configuration of the Boeing 757-200 aircraft ....................................................... 184
Figure 97: Market windows for major films from release date, circa 1990 ....................................... 186
Figure 98: The relationship between provisions of sections 602, 106 and 109 ................................. 191
Figure 99: An example of the import restriction text on a textbook .................................................. 192
Figure 100: Vernor v Autodesk, Inc. – Vernor’s narrative .................................................................. 196
Figure 101: Vernor v Autodesk, Inc. – Autodesk’s narrative .............................................................. 196
Figure 102: Case law affecting the provisions of sections 602, 106 and 109 ..................................... 198
Figure 103: Violations of § 106 ........................................................................................................... 200
Figure 104: The economic effects of a copyright vs that of a compulsory licensing system .............. 217
Figure 105: An advert for Sony Betamax tape storage cabinets ........................................................ 222
Figure 106: Interoperability ................................................................................................................ 230
Figure 107: Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. (9th Cir. 1992)..................................................... 231
Figure 108: The Vanity Fair cover featuring Demi Moore, a portion of Botecelli's "The Birth of Venus",
and the Naked gun 33⅓: The Final Insult poster that parodies the Vanity Fair cover ........ 234
Figure 109: Mattel’s Barbie and photos from Forsythe’s series “Food Chain Barbie” ....................... 235
Figure 110: Art Rogers, photograph: Puppies, 1980 ........................................................................... 237
Figure 111: Jeff Koons, wood painted sculpture: String of Puppies, 1998 ......................................... 237

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Figure 112: The nature of “transformative” and leading cases involving fair use.............................. 238
Figure 113: Strength of copyright protection ..................................................................................... 241
Figure 114: Implementation status of the 22 exceptions and limitations to copyright for all 28 EU
member states..................................................................................................................... 249
Figure 115: Implementation status of the 22 exceptions and limitations to copyright for all 28 EU
member states, with China added for comparison ............................................................. 251
Figure 116: Leading cases where “transformative” was defined as “creative” highlighted by the green
ellipse................................................................................................................................... 269
Figure 117: Actions that a copyright owner can take against parties for publicly performing their
work in a dance hall without permission ............................................................................ 285
Figure 118: How Napster’s MusicShare software functioned ............................................................ 289
Figure 119: Grokster’s software functioned using FastTrack technology, which uses supernodes ... 292
Figure 120: The state of the law governing OSPs after the Viacom decision ..................................... 299
Figure 121: US consumer home entertainment rental and sell-through spending (2010) ................ 305
Figure 122: Ranges of statutory damages .......................................................................................... 316
Figure 123: Verdicts in the Thomas-Rassett case ............................................................................... 320
Figure 124: David LaMacchia (right) with his lawyer .......................................................................... 321

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: The lecture topics for the course .............................................................................................. 2

Table 2: Selected “Covers” of Hendrix, Little Wing .............................................................................. 64
Table 3: Test for determining when a person should be considered an employee, applied to the
CCNV case ............................................................................................................................ 124
Table 4: Copright formalities for US works over time ........................................................................ 131
Table 5: The application of the fair use factors in the Sony, Harper & Row, and Campbell cases ..... 228

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THE FOUNDATIONS OF COPYRIGHT LAW

1.1. Introduction
This is the introduction to a series of twelve lectures on copyright. My hope, in these lectures, is
to provide you the following things:
▪ First, an understanding of the basic principles of copyright law.
▪ Second, an appreciation of the ways in which that law affects, for better and
worse, creativity and innovation in a wide variety of artistic and technical fields.
(To that end, I will be providing you, along the way, illustrations of the ways that
copyright works in literature; music; film; photography; graphic art; software;
comedy; fashion; architecture; and so forth.)
▪ Third, I will try to provide you a critical understanding of the main theories of
copyright by which I mean, the arguments, developed over several centuries by
economists, philosophers, and political theorists, concerning the purposes or
functions of the copyright system.
These theories are not mere matters of academic curiosity and dispute.
Copyright law is changing very fast, in part in an attempt to address new technologies, and
the lawmakers who are making the changes are influenced by and in turn help to shape the
competing theories of copyright. So, to understand where the law is going and certainly if you
wish to affect its trajectory you need to know a fair amount about theory.
This bring me to the fourth and last of the ambitions: By the end of these lectures, I hope
to have increased your ability and confidence to make informed judgments concerning how, if at
all, the copyright system should be reformed.
So, to summarize: copyright law; its impact on creativity; theories of copyright; and ways
in which the system could be improved those are the general themes I will be addressing. The
themes are intertwined, of course, and I will try to identify, in the lectures, the relationships
among them.

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 Table 1: The lecture topics for the course

1. The Foundations of Copyright Law 7. The Rights to Reproduce and Modify

2. Fairness and Personality Theory * 8. Distribution & Performance Rights
3. The Subject Matter of Copyright 9. Fair Use
4. Welfare Theory * 10. Cultural Theory *
5. Authorship 11. Supplements to Copyright
6. The Mechanics of Copyright 12. Remedies

The topics of the twelve lectures, in which I will be addressing these themes are set forth
in Table 1. This first lecture is called “the foundations of copyright law.” Once I am finished with
the introductory material, I will discuss three aspects of copyright that can be thought of as
fundamental:
▪ the concept of originality;
▪ the crucial distinctions in copyright law between ideas, facts, and expression;
▪ and the system of multilateral treaties that constrain the freedom of almost all
countries when shaping and administering their national copyright systems.
Along the way, I will discuss some current controversies that those basic principles affect.
The second lecture will examine and contrast two theories of copyright law specifically the
fairness theory, which is especially prominent in countries (like Great Britain, the United States,
and Australia) that have been influenced by the common-law legal tradition; and the personality
or personhood theory, which tends to be somewhat more prominent in countries (including
Continental Europe and Latin America) that have been influenced by the civil-law tradition.
In the third lecture, we will return to legal doctrine. Specifically, I will survey the kinds of
original works that are subject to copyright protection. Some of these (such as novels, musical
compositions, and films) will be unsurprising. Others (such as software, fictional characters, and
three-dimensional useful objects) may be somewhat more eye-opening.
The fourth lecture will concentrate on the most complex of the copyright theories: the
welfare theory, an outgrowth of the philosophic tradition of utilitarianism. As we will see, this
theory has growing influence, certainly among scholars and increasingly among lawmakers, in all
jurisdictions in the world.
The fifth lecture will consider the complex set of rules that define the term, “author” –
and identify the persons and organizations that qualify as authors.
The sixth lecture, entitled “the mechanics of copyright,” considers how the copyright
system works in practice. I will discuss, for example,
▪ what, if anything, an author must do to secure copyright protection;
▪ the preconditions for bringing a copyright infringement suit;
▪ how long copyrights last;
▪ how the rights associated with copyright are transferred from one person to
another;

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 ▪ and how the copyright system attempts to shield authors (or their families) against
exploitation.
The seventh and eighth lectures will examine in some detail the legal rights that a
copyright owner enjoys. The primary entitlements, we will see, are the exclusive rights to
reproduce, modify, distribute, or perform their works. We will examine the scope of each of
those rights – and the equally important list of specific exceptions and limitations upon those
rights, which are designed to protect the public’s interest in enjoying and transforming
copyrighted materials.
The ninth lecture will examine the general defense to copyright infringement known
variously as fair use and fair dealing. This is among the most controversial and unstable aspects
of the copyright system. How this doctrine evolves in the near future will have a big impact on
journalism, music, film, graphic art, and so forth.
In the tenth lecture, we will return for the last time to copyright theory, examining an
approach that seems gradually to be growing in influence in many countries. It goes by various
names, but I will use the term cultural theory.
In the eleventh lecture, we will examine 2 important supplements to the set of legal rights
enjoyed by copyright owners. The first of these is the doctrine of secondary liability, which
enables copyright owners sometimes to control the behavior of organizations that do not
themselves engage in copyright infringement, but rather facilitate the infringing behavior of
others. (Included in this group are some quaint organizations, like flea markets, and some
modern ones, like peer-to-peer file sharing systems.) The second supplement is the recent
addition to the copyright system of prohibitions on the circumvention of technological
protection measures. That cumbersome term refers to legal efforts to increase the ability of
copyright owners to control uses of their works through encryption.
Finally, in the twelfth lecture, I will survey the legal remedies that are available to a
copyright owner whose rights have been abridged.
The lectures marked using an asterisk (*) focus on theoretical or policy considerations,
while the others focus on copyright law and its applications. When discussing details concerning
copyright law, I will most often make reference to the rules currently in force in the United
States partly because I know that system best, and partly because, for better or worse, US law is
influential in many other jurisdictions. But I will also devote significant attention to the
differences between US law and the legal systems in other countries.
Now, a few words about the logistics of these lectures: Each will last roughly 90 minutes. A
fair amount of graphic and audiovisual materials will company the presentations. Consequently,
it will be best if you view recordings of the lectures on a computer or on a screen of some sort.
You could, of course, just listen to them, but you would be missing much illustrative material.
The most important of the supplementary visual materials will be two maps I have
prepared. One covers the main features of copyright law. The other covers the main features of
copyright theory. Because the maps themselves and my use of them are unusual, I will say a few
more words about this feature. The heart of the first map looks like this. As you might imagine,

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the “plus” signs identify opportunities for expansion. If you click on a “plus” sign, it will open
additional branches of the map – like so. These icons identify links. Some of the links will open
slide presentations that I have prepared. Others lead to copies of statutes or judicial decisions –
or to supplementary materials prepared by other scholars or lawyers that are accessible through
the Internet.
The second map, which examines Intellectual Property Theory, works the same way. Both
of the maps were created using the Mindmanager software program, and I will be displaying the
Mindmanager versions on your screens during these lectures. If you want to explore the maps at
your leisure, you can gain access to them through the CopyrightX website or through my
personal homepage, the address of which is: tfisher.org.
If you want to edit the maps, for example, to add your own notes or to supplement the
links you will need a software program of some sort. You can, of course, use Mindmanager –
which you can obtain from the website for Mindjet – but it is expensive. Other programs that
can be used to import and edit the maps include thoughts, which is available for a modest price,
and Xmind, an open-source program that is available for free.
Last but not least, if you want to explore the maps but not edit them, the easiest way to
do so is to use the “flash” based versions, which are available on the CopyrightX website. To use
those, you do not need any software at all; they will open in most modern browsers. Together,
the two maps contain all of my lecture notes for all 12 of these lectures, plus links to a wide
variety of additional materials. The result is that they contain – or provide access to – a large
amount of information and commentary.
However, it is important that you understand their limitations. In particular, you should
not think of the first map as the equivalent of a treatise on copyright law; it is certainly not a
comprehensive survey of the law, and it contains some opinionated material that would be
inappropriate in a treatise. Rather it is a pedagogic aid – a device intended to facilitate your
understanding of – and capacity to remember – the main features of the copyright system. I
modify both of the maps with some frequency. Most often, I do this to take into account
changes in copyright statutes or treaties or new judicial decisions. But I also sometimes revise
the maps when I change my mind on a particular issue or when another commentator deploys a
novel argument. Accordingly, if you find the maps useful in the future, you should probably
check the CopyrightX website to make sure that you have the most current versions. I will try to
keep the maps reasonably up to date as long as I am able.
Finally, if you have suggestions concerning the content of either map (bearing in mind, of
course, their limited purposes), feel free to e-mail me using the address listed on the CopyrightX
website. The same principle applies to these lectures. If you have suggestions concerning how
they might be improved – please let me know, by sending a message to the same email address.
This concludes the introduction to lecture one. In the next segment, I will take up the first
of the substantive topics in the course: the concept of originality.

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1.2. Originality
To be entitled to copyright protection, something must be original. That term encompasses two
distinct requirements. The first is independent creation. If you copy your work from someone
else, you cannot assert a copyright in it. Suppose, for example, that you read a poem and like it.
You memorize it, then you write it down verbatim. Someone photocopies the piece of paper on
which you have written down the poem. Do you have a copyright claim against the person who
makes the photocopy? No. The author who first created the poem might, but you don’t. That’s
certainly true if the poem is recent and still covered by copyright. But what if the poem is old
and no longer covered by copyright? You still have no claim against the person who makes the
photocopy, because your work is not original.

Figure 1: “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin Figure 2: “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci

Here’s a more plausible example: Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker,” was created in
1902 – and thus (as we will see) is no longer subject to copyright protection. Suppose that you
make a perfect replica of The Thinker. Do you have a copyright in your replica? In other words, if
someone copies your replica, do you have a legal claim against the copyist? No. The same
principle applies – certainly in the US and probably in other countries – if you take a photograph
of an old painting, like the Mona Lisa, trying to recreate the painting exactly. This is not a
hypothetical example. A few years ago, there was a sharped-edged controversy between the
National Portrait Gallery in England and one Derrick Coetzee, who uploaded to Wikipedia some
3000 high-resolution photos, taken by the Portrait Gallery, of old paintings in its collection.
Coetzee invoked this principle when resisting, successfully, the Gallery’s copyright claims:
because the photos lacked originality, they were not shielded by copyright.

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 As we will see later, the question becomes more complicated if your replica or painting of
a public-domain work is not perfect – in other words, if you have made changes to The Thinker
or altered the colors of the Mona Lisa. But if your replica is verbatim, you have no rights. So, to
repeat, the first of the two requirements encompassed by the term originality is independent
creation. The second requirement is creativity. To be entitled to copyright protection, a work
must embody a modest amount of creativity. Not much, but some. This is the more interesting
and subtle of the meanings of originality, and we’ll spend a fair amount of time exploring it.
Before doing so, however, we need to identify some related characteristics that are not required
for copyright protection – and consider why not. Once we have cleared away this underbrush,
we’ll return to the question of creativity.
The first thing not encompassed by the originality requirement is novelty. To be protected
in the United States, a work does not have to be new. In this respect, copyright law is very
different from patent law. To be patentable, an invention must be new. To be protected by
copyright, a literary or artistic work need not. The classic statement of this principle in US law
appears in the Sheldon case, decided by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Here is what Judge
Hand said:

Borrowed the work must indeed not be, for a plagiarist is not himself pro tanto an
“author”; but if by some magic, a man who had never known it were to compose anew
Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, he would be an “author,” and, if he copyrighted it, others
might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats’s.

In other words, if your creation is identical to an already existing work, but you are
genuinely unaware of that existing work, your creation is original, and you get the benefit of
copyright protection. Novelty is not necessary.
To be sure, as Professor Paul Goldstein observes, lack of novelty, though not itself fatal,
may sometimes be introduced in litigation to undermine other aspects of a plaintiff’s case. For
example, it can be used to rebut a presumption that the plaintiff’s work was independently
created – which, as we’ve seen, is required for copyright protection. Or a defendant can
sometimes use the fact that the plaintiff’s work is not novel to argue that the defendant did not
copy the plaintiff’s work, but instead copied the preexisting work. That’s the import of the last
clause in Judge Hand’s statement – “though they might of course copy Keats’s.” If true, that
would get the defendant off the hook. The upshot is that, in practice, novelty helps a plaintiff,
and lack of novelty can hurt. But strictly speaking, novelty is not required for copyright
protection.
Another thing that is not required for copyright protection – at least in the United States –
is intent to be original. To get the benefit of copyright protection, it’s not necessary that you, the
author, try to create something of your own. It’s only necessary that you do so. The classic
statement of this principle in US law comes in an opinion by Judge Jerome Frank in the 1951

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 Figure 3: A poster advertising the Great Wallace circus

Alfred Bell case, which held that, even if mezzotint engravings of old (public-domain) paintings
differed from the originals only inadvertently, they were still copyrightable. “A copyist’s bad
eyesight or defective musculature, or a shock caused by a clap of thunder, may yield sufficiently
distinguishable variations. Having hit upon such a variation unintentionally, the ‘author’ may
adopt it as his and copyright it.” As you might imagine, this issue doesn’t arise often, and one
can find some judicial opinions that seem to cast doubt upon it. But the principle expressed by
Judge Hand is the canonical view in the United States.
A third thing not required for copyright protection is that the work in question be artistic.
If your creation is bad art – or not art at all – you still get a copyright in it. The classic statement
of this principle comes in the 1903 Bleistein case, which involved a copyright claim to three
circus posters, one of which is shown in Figure 3. In some famous passages in the majority
opinion in that case, Justice Holmes rejected the defendant’s argument that these posters did
not enjoy copyright protection because they did not constitute “fine art.” In US law, Bleistein has
come to stand for the principle sometimes referred to as “aesthetic neutrality.” When applying
copyright law, the quality or artistic character of both the plaintiff’s work and the defendant’s
work are said to be irrelevant. A child’s finger paintings are as deserving of copyright protection
as the Mona Lisa. Why? What might justify this stance of strict aesthetic neutrality? Defenders of
this principle commonly make four arguments. The first is that judges (or juries) who would be
called upon to assess the merit of either the plaintiff’s or the defendant’s works lack the
expertise to do so. Justice Holmes emphasizes this point in Bleistein:

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 It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute
themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest
and most obvious limits. At the one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to
miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had
learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted,
for instance, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been
sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be
denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge.

The second argument, latent in the last sentence of Holmes’ passage, is fear of elitism –
worry that an upper class would use the opportunity to assess artistic quality to impose their
tastes on the rest of the population. The third, related argument is fear of paternalism – or what
has come more recently to be called parentalism. This argument is tied to the political theory of
liberalism, which continues to have considerable sway at least in western democratic societies.
The basic idea is that governments should not impose on their citizens any particular conception
of the good – or the good life in particular – but rather should create conditions in which people
are free to formulate and pursue their own conceptions of the good. One implication of that
idea, it is sometimes argued, is that the law – specifically copyright law – should not promulgate
a particular conception of what counts as worthy art. In the United States, this attitude finds
expression in periodic campaigns to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, which
distributes government funds to artists. Most other countries are less hostile to government
support for the arts.
The final argument in favor of the principle of aesthetic neutrality is that to decide what
constitutes good art, one needs to know what art is, and there’s deep disagreement on that
crucial question. As Professor Fred Yen has pointed out, at least three different meanings of art
are in widespread circulation. Formalism, exemplified by the work of Clive Bell, defines art as
things capable of provoking in sensitive people the aesthetic emotion. Some objects have formal
qualities that enable them to cause this reaction while others don’t. Only the former count as
art. By contrast intentionalism, exemplified by the work of Monroe Beardsley, defines art as
“something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic
interest.” So, for example, whether people moving in a circle are engaged in a form of art
depends on the nature of their motivation. Their purpose might be religious (as in a ceremony),
it might be political or economic (as in a picket line), or it might be artistic (as in the dance). Only
if their intention falls into the last category does their behavior constitute art. Finally,
institutionalism, exemplified by the work of George Dickie, emphasizes the role of the “art
world” – ““[t]he broad social institution in which works of art have their place.” The members of
this world include artists and viewers who participate in the traditional social practice of
creating, presenting, and appreciating art. Against this backdrop, “objects become art when
someone who believes that he is a member of the art world invites others to view the object

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aesthetically.” In the simplest case, an object constitutes art if a museum chooses to display it.
These three approaches – formalism, intentionalism, and institutionalism – are in obvious
tension. Some objects or activities qualify as art under one approach, but not under others. If
aesthetic theorists cannot resolve this crucial question, surely it would be foolish for the law to
attempt to do so. So, those are the four arguments commonly deployed in support of the
principal of aesthetic neutrality. Lack of expertise, unease about elitism, hostility to
governmental involvement in art, and uncertainty concerning what constitutes art in the first
place. However, as we will see, the principle of aesthetic neutrality is frequently violated – tacitly
and occasionally expressly – even in the United States, which purports to adhere to the principle
most faithfully. Judges and juries find ways to favor plaintiffs who have created what they
consider meritorious works, and to disfavor plaintiffs who have created what they consider bad
or unimpressive material. On the other side of the ledger, judges and juries find ways to penalize
defendants whose work seems poor, and to give extra latitude to defendants whose work seems
worthy of respect.
Professor Yen and others argue that, if judges and juries are going to be making such
judgments, they should do so expressly-and should be obliged to justify their judgments. This is a
fairly fundamental issue, on which, as we will see, countries differ sharply. By the end of the
series of lectures, I hope you are in a position to form your own opinion concerning the scope
and merits of the principle of aesthetic neutrality.
Yet another characteristic not required for copyright protection is that a work be
noncommercial. This is not quite as obvious as it might seem. For example, Justice Harlan, in a
dissenting opinion in the Bleistein case, suggested that advertisements will be produced in at
least optimal quantities, regardless of whether they are protected by copyright. In other words,
copyright protection for ads is unnecessary. Whatever the merits of Harlan’s position, it has
been rejected. Today, advertisements definitely enjoy the protection of the copyright law.
A final characteristic not required for copyright protection in the United States is that the
content of a work be lawful. So, for example, it’s now reasonably clear that, in the US, obscene,
libelous, or fraudulent material enjoys copyright protection. In this respect, US copyright law
differs sharply from US trademark law, which denies protection to immoral or scandalous marks.
Copyright law purports to have no such exclusions.
Having listed the things that copyright does not require, let’s now return to what it does
require. As I mentioned earlier, to satisfy the requirement of originality, a work must pass two
tests: it must be independently created, and it must embody some degree of creativity. The
more important and slippery of these tests relates to creativity. How much do you need? In the
United States, very little. In its 1991 decision in the Feist case, the Supreme Court put it this way:
A work must possess “at least some minimal degree of creativity. To be sure, the requisite level
of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice. The vast majority of works make
the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, ‘no matter how crude, humble or
obvious’ it might be.” As the Court notes, it’s pretty easy to pass the test formulated in this way.
Take photographs, for example. In 1884, the Supreme Court ruled that this staged studio photo

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of Oscar Wilde (Figure 4) enjoyed copyright protection,
emphasizing the many forms of creativity that went into
setting up and producing the photo. Today, it’s clear that
nothing so elaborate is necessary. In the US, a snapshot
taken with a modern automated point-and-shoot camera
contains enough creativity to satisfy the Feist standard.
The modest creativity involved in deciding what to point
the camera at, and when to activate the shutter, is
enough.
But some degree of creativity is necessary. The
most important effect of this requirement is to withdraw
copyright protection from works whose form is entirely
conventional, even if they required lots of effort and/or
skill to create. At one point, courts in the US (and in
other common-law countries) extended copyright
protection to such works under the auspices of the so-
called “sweat of the brow” theory. Since the 1991 Feist
decision, that doctrine has been formally rejected by US
courts. I hasten to add that, in practice, it’s not so clear
Figure 4: Studio photograph of Oscar Wilde
that a plaintiff’s labor does him no good when seeking
taken by Napoleon Sarony, the subject of
copyright protection. Despite the formal repudiation of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony 111
the sweat of the brow theory, in borderline cases, some U.S. 53 (1884)
courts still pay attention to the effort that authors have
invested in their works. Again, this is a general theme we’ll return to in lecture #2, when we take
up the Fairness and Personality Theories of Intellectual Property.
Thus far, I have confined my attention to the interpretation of the originality requirement
in the United States. Now let’s examine some other jurisdictions. Today, every country in the
world treats originality as an essential requirement for copyright protection. But not all define
“originality” the same way. A few decades ago, countries’ disagreement on this issue was sharp.
Generally speaking, countries influenced by the common-law tradition set the bar very low,
while countries influenced by the civil-law tradition were more demanding. The two fields where
this disagreement mattered most were photography and software. As mentioned above, in the
US and its cousins, virtually all photos taken by people have long enjoyed copyright protection.
By contrast, as Roman Heidinger has observed, in Austria photographs were given copyright
protection only if they differed substantially from pre-existing photographs. Applying that
standard, a conventional photo showing some bikers in a landscape failed to qualify. Likewise, as
we will see in Lecture #3, software programs received generous protection in the US and its
cousins. In Germany, by contrast, software programs were accorded copyright protection only if
they embodied degrees of creativity greater than that exercised by average programmers.
Recently, the divergence among countries on these and related issues has decreased. As you can

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see from the map, most common-law countries have now repudiated the permissive “sweat of
the brow” approach and adopted stances similar (though not always identical) to the approach
taken by the US Supreme Court in Feist.
Meanwhile, harmonization within the European Union has resulted in a modest softening
of the requirements that some of the member countries previously enforced. In a series of
decisions, the European Court of Justice has announced and then refined a new, general
definition of originality. Under this new approach, two related things (in addition to independent
creation) seem both necessary and sufficient: the creation reflects the author’s personality; and
the author, when creating the work, was able to express her creative ability by making
unconstrained choices and thus impressing her personal touch on the work. The articulation of
this standard by the European Court of Justice has caused courts in several of the member
countries of the EU to adjust their originality thresholds – in most cases downward. In Austria,
for example, it’s now easier to secure copyright protection for modestly creative photos than it
used to be. And in Germany, a larger set of software programs are now eligible for copyright
protection; the only things now excluded are simple, routine programs that ordinary
programmers would write the same way. In combination, the harmonization process in Europe
and the trend among common-law countries to abandon the sweat of the brow theory has
reduced the divergence among the countries of the world concerning the meaning of originality.
But some divergence remains. For example, the European standard alludes to a theme that US
lawmakers generally ignore – namely, the degree to which a work reflects the personality of the
creator – a topic we’ll return to in the next lecture. And there remain outlier countries. For
example, South Africa and New Zealand still seem to adhere to the sweat of the brow approach.
At the other extreme, courts in Switzerland pay attention, when considering originality, to the
degree of “statistical uniqueness” of the work in question – an approach that suggests concern
with the novelty of the work, a consideration ignored in the overwhelming majority of countries.
The upshot is that some works are more likely to secure copyright protection in some countries
than in others.

1.3. The Idea/Expression Distinction

We turn now to the second of the foundational doctrines in copyright law: the idea/expression
distinction. Every system of copyright law contains some version of this distinction. In US law, its
statutory locus is section 102(b) of the Copyright Act, which provides “in no case does copyright
protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system,
method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery.” (Some scholars, such as Professor Pam
Samuelson, argue that this provision reaches more broadly than the idea/expression distinction,
but I’ll put that controversy aside for the time being.) In the Eldred case, which we will consider
in a subsequent lecture, the United States Supreme Court suggested that the idea/expression
distinction is necessary in order to reconcile copyright law with the principle of freedom of
speech embodied in the First Amendment of the federal Constitution.

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 Lots of other examples of this distinction can be found in the law of other countries. So,
what exactly is this famous, fundamental distinction? It’s easy to state, but surprisingly hard to
apply. The key concepts are clear enough: neither ideas nor facts are protected by copyright law;
only the way in which an author expresses ideas or facts is protected. Simple enough.
Unfortunately, the key terms – idea, fact, expression – are all ambiguous and contested. To
figure out what they mean, you need to examine some applications of the principles.
Here’s a general guideline: when interpreting and applying the idea/expression
distinction, try to avoid attributing to those terms their ordinary meanings. Think of them rather
as “terms of art”: shorthand references to loose clusters of things that, for policy reasons, the
law includes in – or excludes from – copyright. Against this backdrop, let’s consider some of the
contexts in which the idea/expression distinction arises. The first such context is known as the
merger doctrine. Suppose there is only one set of words that accurately conveys a particular
idea. In such a situation, the principle that
ideas are unprotected and the principle that
expression is protected clash. Which
prevails? The principle that ideas are
unprotected. So, anyone else is free to use
that uniquely appropriate set of words with
impunity. Such situations arise more often
than you might think-particularly the context
of computer software. But we will wait to
take up those illustrations until lecture three,
when we will consider the various kinds of
works that copyright covers.
The second context is known as the
scenes a faire doctrine. The 1978 case of
Alexander versus Haley provides a good
illustration. The basic facts of that case were
as follows: prior to the publication of Alex
Haley’s book Roots, the plaintiff wrote a
similar book about the history of her own
family during slavery and about her own
gradual awakening to the importance of her
heritage. When Roots was published, and
became famous, the plaintiff brought a
copyright infringement suit against Haley. In
support of her claim, the plaintiff provided a Figure 5: Bill Diodato Photography v Kate Spade – original
long list of parallels between her book and photograph (top) and accused photograph (bottom)

Roots, arguing that Haley had copied heavily

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Figure 6: Gentieu v. Tony Stone Images/Chicago Inc. et al (2003) – Gentieu’s photograph (left) and
accused photograph (right)

from her. The court eventually ruled that, despite the large number of similar scenes, Haley had
not engaged in copyright infringement. One of the grounds on which the court rejected many of
the plaintiffs’ assertions is that they involved so-called scenes a faire. Here’s the language in
which the court expresses this judgment: “These are incidents, characters or settings which are
as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given topic.
Attempted escapes, flights through the woods pursued by baying dogs, the sorrowful or happy
singing of slaves, the atrocity of the buying and selling of human beings, and other miseries are
all found in stories at least as old as Mrs. Stowe’s. Other examples include scenes portraying sex
between male slave owners and female slaves and the resentment of the female slave owners;
the sale of a slave child away from her family and the attendant agonies; the horror of punitive
mutilation; and slave owners complaining about the high price of slaves.” All of these images,
the court ruled, constituted unprotected ideas, because they were standard vignettes in the
genre of US slave narratives.
Some more recent, and perhaps surprising, applications of this doctrine of scenes a faire
involve photography. Here too, courts refuse to grant copyright protection to images that they
conclude are standard or typical of a particular genre. For example, in the 2005 case of Bill
Diodata Photography versus Kate Spade, the plaintiff contended that the photograph on the left
of Figure 5, which appeared in an advertisement for women shoes, was infringed by the one on
the right. The court rejected the argument, arguing that the positioning of a model sitting on the
toilet with her feet angled inward, though “seemingly unnatural,” was a common trope;
photographing stylish women in this pose to showcase fashion accessories was an idea “used
often in popular culture.” Similarly, in the 2003 Gentieu case (Figure 6), the photograph on the
right side was held not to infringe the copyright in the photograph on the left side, because,
even if one photographer had been imitating the other, the compositional elements they had in
common were “standard photographic conventions or devices” and thus not copyrightable.

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 Here’s a more straightforward application of the same general principles. Suppose I write
and publish a cookbook – a collection of recipes of a particular sort. Suppose further that I
created some of those recipes myself. You copy some of my recipes and include them in your
own cookbook. Have you engaged in copyright infringement? If the recipes that you copied
contain nothing more than descriptions
of ingredients, quantities, ways of
combining things, cooking times, and
so forth – in other words, instructions
for creating the dishes in question –
then the answer is no. The reason is
that unadorned recipes are said to be
ideas or “methods of operation” and
thus not subject to copyright
protection. By contrast, if the recipes
you copied included expressive
embellishments – for example
descriptions of how the dishes taste or
suggestions concerning social
circumstances for which they would be Figure 7: Screenshot of Google Maps showing the sector of
appropriate – then you would be in Cambridge, Mass., that includes Harvard University

trouble, because such things are considered expression.

Maps have been protected by copyright law for a very long time. But not all components
of maps enjoy copyright protection. For example, the location of roads, mountains, rivers, and
political boundaries; the names of cities and towns; are all excluded from copyright protection.
Thus, you can copy such things from someone else’s map onto your own without running afoul
of the law. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising. More interesting is the fact that newly coined
place names are not shielded. Suppose, for example, an explorer surveys a remote mountain
range, selects names for the hitherto nameless peaks, and draws up a map that includes those
new names. Another cartographer copies those features and those names into his own map.
Copyright infringement? No. It’s sometimes said that the newly applied names, although created
by the Explorer, become facts once applied to features in the world. But that can’t be right. By
the same logic, the text of my novel becomes a “fact” once it’s published, and I lose copyright
protection for it. A more plausible reason is that to recognize copyright protection for newly
created place names would frustrate important public policies – concerning communication of
geographic information. Latent in that rationale is the seed of a much more general principle
that will flower in subsequent lectures. So, what aspects of maps do enjoy copyright protection?
The answer is original selection, arrangement, or presentation of individually unprotected
elements. The net effect is that entirely conventional maps receive no protection whatsoever.
Consider, for example, the screenshot (Figure 7) of a map created by Google of the sector of
Cambridge, Mass., that includes Harvard University. If I copy it without permission, as I have

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done for the purpose of this slide, have I engaged in copyright infringement? Probably not,
because it’s difficult to locate in the Google map any unconventional selection or presentation
element.
We come, finally, to the tricky case of history. Perhaps the most striking effect of the
idea/expression distinction is the limited legal protection enjoyed by works of history. Suppose I
spend years investigating the life of a little-known politician, and then write and publish a
biography of him. You read my book, and then, relying on it, quickly write your own biography of
the same politician. You’re a better writer than I am, so your book sells better. I’m angry. I point
out that you could not have written your book without mine, and that most of the story I told,
and most of the arguments I made, in my book can be found in yours. Do I have a copyright
claim against you? If the things you lifted from me consists of facts about the life of the
politician, then the answer is no – no matter how much time and pain it took me to ferret them
out. This principle governed the outcome of the litigation between two historians, arising out of
the close similarity between two biographies of the Rosenbergs, who were tried for treason in
1953. Because all of those similarities were deemed to involve facts, the defendant escaped
liability.
What if I included in my biography some speculations, and the same speculations appear
in yours? If I have represented my speculations as facts, then they too are unprotected. The rule
underlying this outcome is known as copyright estoppel. Having depicted an assertion as a fact, I
am said to be estopped from subsequently re-characterizing it. So, for example, in the Nash
case, the Court of Appeals ruled that the plaintiff’s contention in his book the John Dillinger had
not been killed by the FBI at the Biograph Theater but had lived on in California was not
protected by copyright, because the plaintiff had offered that contention as a fact. What if you
lift from my biography, not a factual contention, but an historical theory? Once again, I will lose,
but for a different reason: historical theories are considered ideas – and thus unprotected. So,
for example, in the Hoehling case the Court of Appeals held unprotected the plaintiff’s assertion
that the Hindenburg dirigible had been destroyed by a member of its crew in an effort to
discredit the Nazis. The bottom line is that an historian should not expect to get much protection
from copyright law. If a second historian copies significant hunks of her prose, or closely tracks
original ways in which she has expressed arguments, she will have a claim. But if, as in the usual
case, a second historian free-rides on her research and lifts facts or ideas from her books, she
has no recourse.
These examples surely do not exhaust the various contexts in which the idea/expression
distinction has been applied to limit the scope of copyright – but they should suffice to give you
an overall sense of the law in this area.

1.4. The System of Multilateral Treaties

This is the final segment of the first lecture in a series of lectures on copyright. In this segment,
I’ll examine the system of multilateral treaties that bind most countries in the world. A word of
warning: This material is intricate. You are unlikely to retain all of it right now. Several times

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during the remainder of this lecture series we will return to these themes. By the end of the
series, you should feel comfortable with this important dimension of copyright law.
Each country in the world creates, interprets, and enforces its own copyright laws. With
minor exceptions that we’ll consider in a minute, the force of those laws reach no further than
the country’s borders. To put the same point a bit more formally, copyright law has no
extraterritorial application. It controls conduct only so far as the nation’s edge. Suppose, to
illustrate, that I’m an American musician. I write and record a song in the United States. You’re a
French musician, in the United States on vacation. You hear the song broadcast on the radio. You
like it. You return home. Without my permission, you make your own recording of the song in
France and sell copies of that recording in France, or you perform the song in a public venue in
France. US copyright law will not reach your behavior, because none of the acts that might
violate my exclusive rights under US law occur in the United States. French copyright law might,
because the acts at issue occurred in France, but only if French law shields US composers, like
me. In any event, US copyright law won’t apply to your behavior, because it has no grip outside
US territory. As I mentioned earlier, there are some minor exceptions to this principle – a few of
them noted below.
▪ The so-called “predicate act” doctrine enables US copyright law to reach acts
commenced in the US that are completed outside the US.
▪ When a defendant engages in infringing behavior in the US, that enables him to
earn profits outside the US, courts will permit the copyright owner to recover
those profits in US courts.
▪ For a while, some courts took the position that if a defendant in the United States
“authorized” behavior outside the US, he would violate US copyright law if the
behavior at issue would have been unlawful if it happened here. The Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reconsidered this issue in a case involving the
distribution outside the US of videocassettes of the classic Beatles movie, “Yellow
Submarine.” The outcome of the case is that the court rejected its earlier position,
finding authorization of extraterritorial behavior insufficient to trigger a violation
of US law. There has been some grumbling about this stance among lower courts
in other circuits, but for the most part the judgment of the Ninth Circuit seems to
have held up.
Troublesome edge cases of this sort are likely to multiply in the future, as technology blurs
national boundaries. For example, which country’s laws apply when a radio or television
broadcast containing copyrighted material originates in country #1 but is then received and
watched by viewers in country #2? A pair of judicial decisions in the United States take the
position that such acts are governed by the law of country #2 – and thus that a Canadian
broadcast received by US viewers is subject to US law. The Internet will surely generate many
more worrisome problems of this sort. But the presence of these difficult edge cases should not
cause you to lose sight of the basic, fundamental principle: each country adopts its own
copyright laws, and those laws only apply to acts in that country.

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 When a country develops its own copyright law, may it discriminate in favor of its own
citizens or residents? In other words, may it disfavor foreign authors? For a long time, the
answer was yes. Indeed, until the late 19th century, it was common for countries to deny
copyright protection altogether to foreign authors. For example, until 1891 works by foreign
authors first published outside United States received no copyright protection at all in the
United States. Foreign authors (most famously, Charles Dickens) and some US authors
denounced this practice and sought reform of US copyright law, but to no avail. What underlay
this practice? What would prompt a country, like the United States, to discriminate against
foreign authors? Several forces seem to have been at work. Simple nationalism is part of the
explanation. A more complex explanation is that copyright protection is often thought of as a tax
on consumers. By granting an author exclusive rights, copyright law enables the author to raise
the price of copies of his or her work – or to charge more for admission to performances of
those works – thereby forcing consumers to pay more for those copies or performances. The
rationale of that price increase, of course, is to provide a reward or incentive for creativity – a
rationale that we will examine in much more detail in subsequent lectures. For present
purposes, the crucial point is that copyright protection causes price increases. Historically, many
nations were reluctant to force their own residents to pay those increased prices if the monies
raised thereby were to be paid to authors in other countries, even (or especially) if the result
would be to stimulate creativity in those other countries. Attitudes of these sorts help to explain
the origins of the practice of discriminating against foreigners. Perpetuation of that practice,
however, is probably better explained by interest-group politics. For example, as Bill Patry has
shown, in the United States during the 19th century, many businesses came to depend financially
upon their privilege to print and distribute inexpensive copies of British books. Such businesses
included publishers, printers, and bookbinders. Not surprisingly, when legislative proposals to
end the discrimination against foreign authors arose, the interest groups that would have been
hurt by the change lobbied against it. They were successful until 1891. Indeed, when the law was
eventually changed, the publishers and printers were able to secure an important qualification:
copyright protection was extended to nonresident foreign authors (more specifically, to foreign
authors from countries offering similar protection to US authors), but only if copies of their
works were manufactured in the United States. This protectionist measure, known as the
“manufacturing clause,” was eliminated with respect to foreign authors in 1955 and eliminated
for US authors in 1986. Its significance in the present context is that it illustrates the ways in
which the financial interests of an industry often congeal around a particular set of copyright
laws – and then retard any modification of those laws. We’ll see several other examples of that
dynamic later in these lectures.
Let’s return to the main theme: As we have seen, one byproduct of the principle that
copyright protection is nation-specific and has no extraterritorial application is that countries
could, and for a long time did, discriminate against foreign authors. Another important
byproduct is that, historically, copyright laws in different countries differed dramatically. Here’s
an illustration to which we’ll return frequently in this course: countries in continental Europe

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have long accorded generous protection to what is referred to as “droit moral” – loosely
translated in English as “moral rights.” These are said to be noneconomic rights; they shield the
personal or personhood interests of authors and artists, rather than their interests in making
money. For example, moral rights forbid the purchaser of a painting from defacing it or
obscuring the identity of the artist who painted it. Such acts might not damage the artist
financially, but they threaten the bond between the artist and her creations. By contrast,
countries whose legal systems were primarily influenced by Great Britain have long been more
skeptical of these moral rights. Such countries include the United States, Australia, New Zealand,
and so forth. The upshot is that the existence or force of moral rights traditionally varied sharply
across the world. The more general point is that, historically, the entitlements enjoyed by
authors and artists were quite different in different countries. That’s where things stood in the
late 19th century: widespread discrimination against foreign authors, and wide divergences
among the laws in different countries. There then began a long process, which continues to the
present day, of convergence of national copyright laws. Convergence has encompassed three
intertwined trends: first, the elimination of discrimination against foreigners. Second, the
mitigation of variations across countries – exemplified by the reduction in the divergence among
countries concerning the meaning of originality, discussed earlier in this lecture. And third, a
steady increase in the scope, strength, and duration of copyright protection in all countries.
These are important, so I’ll repeat: first the elimination of discrimination against foreigners.
Second the reduction of variations across countries. And third, an increase in the scope,
strength, and duration of copyright protection. There’s no logical link between those three
dimensions. For example, you could imagine harmonization having been achieved through
universal adoption of the least common denominator – the laws of the least protective country.
In other words, we could have seen a leveling down, rather than a leveling up. How and why the
three trends nevertheless have been linked historically is one of the major issues in the legal
history of copyright. I hope, by the end of these lectures, you’ll have a better sense of the
possible answers.
The primary vehicles of this process of convergence were a series of multilateral
agreements – treaties or analogous deals among many countries. Since the late 19th century,
there have been seven major multilateral agreements implicating copyright law.
▪ The Berne Convention;
▪ the Universal Copyright Convention;
▪ the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of
Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations, commonly known as the Rome
Convention;
▪ the “Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights,”
commonly known (confusingly) as TRIPS;
▪ the 1996 treaty adopted under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property
Organization, commonly known as WIPO Copyright Treaty;
▪ the contemporaneous WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty;

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 ▪ and the recently concluded Marrakesh Treaty for the Visually Impaired.
All of these agreements are complex. I’m not going to attempt here to walk you through
all of their various provisions. Instead, in this lecture, I will identify the most important general
themes of these agreements. In subsequent lectures, when addressing specific sets of legal rules
that have been shaped or constrained by these treaties, we will return to the relevant treaty
provisions.
The two most important agreements are the Berne Convention and the TRIPS agreement,
so we will spend most of our time on those. The Berne Convention is the grandparent of these
multilateral agreements: it was the first to be adopted. The negotiations that resulted in the
Berne Convention began in 1858 and finally culminated in 1886, with the adoption by 10
countries of the original version of the convention. Since then it’s been revised seven times. If
you click on the icon associated with the “History” subtopic in the map, you’ll find a series of
slides that provide details concerning the evolution of the Berne Convention – when different
provisions were added, and how many countries signed on to each version. Today (meaning, as
of January 2016), the Convention has been joined by 168 countries, extending its reach over
most of the world. Figure 8 is a map showing its coverage.

Figure 8: A maps showing the Berne Convention signatory countries (as of January 2016)

Three dimensions of the current version of the Berne Convention are crucial. The first is
the so-called national-treatment principle. Prior to the Berne Convention, some countries had
been chipping away at the widespread practice of discrimination against foreign authors through
adoption in bilateral treaties of the so-called reciprocity principle. As its name suggests, the
reciprocity principle depends upon two or more countries each extending rights to the residents
of the other(s). Country number #1 agrees to grant copyright protection to the residents of
Country number #2 if and only if Country #2 grants copyright protection to the residents of
Country #1. The Berne Convention – and, as we will see, all subsequent multilateral agreements
– repudiate the reciprocity principle in favor of the simpler and more powerful national-

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treatment principle. The key idea in national treatment is that country #1 must grant to the
residents of country #2 the same rights it grants to country #1’s own residents. To illustrate,
today French authors are given the same rights in the United States as are given to US authors,
and US authors are given the same rights in France as are given to French authors. The
application of this principle in the Berne Convention is actually somewhat more encompassing
than I have thus far suggested. As the map indicates, the Berne Convention requires each
signatory country to grant to “protected authors” the same rights it accords its own nationals. If
you follow the links in the mind map, you will see that the term “protected authors” is
capacious. The net effect is to require all member countries to extend the benefits of their
copyright laws quite broadly. In one respect, however, the application of the national-treatment
principle in the Berne Convention is less encompassing than I have thus far suggested.
Specifically, the Berne Convention does not apply to what are called “neighboring rights.” This is
the term used in many countries to describe the legal rights of performers and producers. They
are said to be “neighboring rights,” because they are adjacent to copyrights but not true
copyrights. Such neighboring rights are governed, not by the Berne Convention, but by the Rome
convention. The geographic coverage of the Rome convention is substantially smaller than that
of Berne. As of today, 91 countries have joined. Among the major countries not participating is
the United States. We will return later in this series of lectures to the ways that the Rome
convention affects the definition and scope of rights of public performance. For present
purposes, the crucial point is that members of the Rome convention are permitted to
discriminate against the residents of nonmember countries – including US nationals. And they
do. Here’s an example: France imposes a levy on sales of blank tapes. The money raised to that
levy is distributed as follows: 25% is devoted to French cultural purposes; 25% is paid to the
composers of the musical compositions recorded on those tapes; 25% goes to the performers of
the recordings of the songs recorded on the tapes; and 25% goes to the producers of those
recordings. US composers get a share of the 2nd slice, because musical compositions are
governed by the Berne Convention, and thus France may not discriminate against US authors. By
contrast, US performers and producers are excluded from the 3rd and 4th slices, because their
interests are not governed by the Berne Convention. So, to review, the first key dimension of the
Berne Convention is national treatment – the principle that each member country must extend
to the residents of other member countries the same rights it extends to its own residents.
The second of the three major dimensions of the current version of the Berne Convention
is the prohibition on formalities. As the map indicates, the key idea here is that member
countries may not impose upon protected authors any administrative obligations that they have
to satisfy in order to acquire, enforce, or maintain their copyrights.
Curiously, member countries may impose such obligations on their own nationals – and
occasionally they do so – but as one might imagine, discrimination against one’s own citizens is
rare. This prohibition on formalities creates a sharp contrast between copyright law and patent
law. Roughly speaking, while copyright law protects works of authorship, patent law protects
inventions. To obtain a patent, an inventor must comply with myriad administrative

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requirements. Typically, he or she must apply for a patent within a limited period of time, and
must demonstrate to the satisfaction of a patent examiner that his or her invention is useful,
novel, and nonobvious. Most patent applicants eventually succeed, but not all. And compliance
with these requirements is costly. Copyright law, in the overwhelming number of countries that
adhere to the Berne Convention, is radically different. In those countries, there are no
administrative preconditions to the acquisition or enforcement of copyright. So, for example, if
you happen to be taking notes while watching this lecture, and (as we discussed previously) your
notes contain a bare minimum of creativity, then you have acquired a copyright in your notes.
Similarly, if you take a snapshot of your family, and that photograph is minimally creative, then
you acquire a copyright in the photograph. No formal grant, no governmental imprimatur is
necessary.
Historically, what underlay this hostility to formalities? The traditional explanation is that
the countries most influential in the shaping of the Berne Convention subscribed to the so-called
“natural rights” theory of copyright. If an author’s control over his or her creations is a natural
right, then the interposition of governmental formalities would seem unacceptable. Professor
Chris Sprigman, who has written most insightfully about this issue, persuasively argues that this
traditional explanation is unconvincing. It’s more likely that the drafters of the Berne Convention
provisions pertaining to formalities believed that disparate administrative requirements in
different countries would frustrate authors’ ability in practice to secure global protection for
their works. Whatever the reason, the current draft of the Convention is firmly set against
formalities. This issue might seem technical and unimportant, but for two reasons it’s not. First,
lawmakers in some countries have long been hostile to the Berne Convention’s prohibition on
formalities. The premier example is the United States, which, as we will see, retained many
formal requirements for copyright protection until late in the 20th century. Reluctance to
surrender those requirements helps to explain why the United States did not join the Berne
Convention until 1989. The second reason is that an unexpected byproduct of the absence of
formalities is that our social environment is increasingly clogged with billions of modestly
creative cultural products over which someone enjoys copyright protection, but persons who
wish to make use of those products have no effective way of ascertaining the identity of the
owners of those copyrights. Copyrights, as you will soon see, are everywhere, but identifying the
persons to whom they belong is often infeasible. As a result, some scholars and lawmakers
advocate the reinstatement of formal requirements for copyright protection. The result would
be to reduce sharply the number of copyrighted works and thus the density of the legal soup
through which we daily move. The principal impediment to such a reform is the Berne
Convention.
The third of the three main dimensions of the Berne Convention consists of a set of
obligations, imposed on all member countries, to establish minimum levels of copyright
protection. For example, member countries must extend copyright protection to certain kinds of
works, must grant the authors of those works specific exclusive rights, must allow those rights to
continue for specified periods of time, and so forth. The details of those minimum standards will

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be examined in subsequent lectures. For present purposes, the main point is that, although the
Berne Convention has lots of such requirements, it contains no effective mechanism for
punishing member countries when they fail to comply with their duties in this regard. As a
result, countries that want the benefits of the Berne Convention, but don’t want to comply with
all of its obligations, are free as a practical matter to join up – and then delay or refuse to comply
with the provisions that they find unattractive. The United States between 1989 and 1994
definitely fell into this category.
The posture of the United States changed substantially with the adoption of the TRIPS
agreement. The history of the negotiations that resulted in the TRIPS agreement is intricate –
much too intricate to be explored here. If you’re curious, the chronology is reviewed in the
series of slides that can be accessed through the link associated with subtopic “origins.” Today,
the geographic coverage of the TRIPS agreement rivals that of the Berne Convention. All
member countries of the World Trade Organization – as of January 2016, 162 nations – are
subject to the agreement. In important respects, the TRIPS agreement parallels the Berne
Convention. Like Berne, TRIPS adheres to the principle of national treatment. Also like Berne,
TRIPS imposes on member countries the obligation to establish certain minimum levels of
copyright protection. As the map indicates, these obligations pertain to: – the kinds of works
that are subject to copyright protection (including, for example, computer software); –the
entitlements that copyright owners must be given; –the duration of copyrights and so forth. We
will return to the details under these headings in subsequent lectures. That said, TRIPS differs
from the Berne Convention in three major respects. First, it imposes upon member countries
obligations, not merely to establish legal rights, but also to establish effective remedies when
those rights are violated. Some of those remedies – for example, pertaining to the availability of
preliminary injunctions – were more expansive than some member countries had previously
adopted and so required the adoption of new laws. Second, the TRIPS agreement, because it is
part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has (unlike the Berne Convention) a
mechanism for compelling member countries to comply with their obligations. Specifically, the
GATT contains a dispute-resolution procedure that enables a member country to initiate a
complaint against another member country that has failed to live up to its TRIPS obligations.
Details concerning the handling of such disputes can be found by pursuing the links in the map.
The principal penalty imposed upon a country found to have failed to comply with its obligations
under the agreement is so-called “cross-sectoral” retaliation. In other words, the complaining
country is permitted to impose trade sanctions on other goods. This process is far from perfect,
but it does have teeth.
The third of the three respects in which the TRIPS agreement deviates from Berne is
related to those teeth. As you can see from the map, the TRIPS agreement incorporates by
reference all of the obligations imposed on member countries by the Berne Convention except
one: article 6bis. What’s that? That article, it turns out, is the provision of the Berne convention
that covers moral rights. Recall that moral rights have a lower status in common-law countries
than in civil-law countries. The result of the exclusion of article 6b is that countries such as the

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United States, reluctant to adhere fully to the Berne Convention obligations with respect to
moral rights, are still able to give them short shrift without running the gauntlet of WTO dispute-
resolution proceedings. The TRIPS Agreement is the most controversial aspect of copyright law –
and indeed, of the law of intellectual property as a whole. Debate concerning the merits and
demerits of TRIPs – and, in particular, whether it’s been good or bad for developing countries –
has been intense since the agreement was first adopted. If you follow the link associated with
the subtopic, “Merits and Demerits,” you will find a few slides, summarizing the principal
contending positions on this issue. Later in this lecture series, once we have on the table more
information concerning the actual impact of TRIPS, we’ll return to this fundamental issue. We
come next to two 1996 treaties, both of them negotiated and administered by the World
Intellectual Property Organization. They have almost identical geographic coverage; currently, 93
and 94 countries respectively. The first requires member countries to expand somewhat the
rights of authors; the second requires member countries to expand the rights of performers and
producers. The most novel and important provision in both of these treaties is the obligation
imposed on member countries to reinforce technological protection measures. Specifically, both
require member countries to penalize in some way the circumvention of encryption systems or
the removal of information contained in copies of copyrighted works that identify the copyright
owners. A major branch of copyright law has grown out of these treaty provisions. We will
consider that branch in lecture eleven.
The most recent of the seven multilateral treaties is the Marrakesh Treaty on Exceptions
for the Visually Impaired, which was wrapped up in Morocco in July of 2013. There are over 300
million visually impaired people in the world. Their ability to gain access to copyrighted material
in formats that they can apprehend has long been curtailed by the combination of copyright law
and the reluctance of copyright owners to grant permission for the creation of digital versions of
their works that, if they escaped into the wild, could corrode their primary markets. The
Marrakesh Treaty attempts to overcome that impediment by requiring member countries to
adopt laws that permit the reproduction and distribution of published works in formats
accessible to the visually impaired and then to permit organizations that serve the visually
impaired to take them from one country into another. The hope is that this new regime will
eventually result in the standardization of accessible formats – thus increasing the set of
materials available everywhere and saving money. The Marrakesh Treaty is unique among the 7
multilateral agreements in one important respect: it’s the only one that requires member
countries to limit the scope of copyright, rather than requiring member countries to create
minimum levels of protection.
Overlaid on the pattern of obligations created by these multilateral agreements are a few
regional agreements, which further constrain the freedom of member countries to shape their
national copyright systems. The most prominent of the regional organizations that generate
such agreements is the European Union. Several EU directives listed in the map oblige countries
within the Union to manage their copyright systems in particular ways. Less well known is the
African Intellectual Property Organization (commonly known as OAPI), the members of which

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are subject to similar obligations. We’ll take up the details of these regional directives later. The
framework created by this welter of multilateral and regional agreements is not stable. On the
contrary, countries – and major interest groups within countries – struggle constantly to tilt the
framework in their favor. Sometimes the struggle involves interpretation of existing provisions.
One of the most important of those provisions is known as the three-step test. This is not a
separate treaty. It’s rather a recurring principle, variants of which can be found in most of the
treaties we’ve already reviewed. These variants are not identical, but they’re similar. Shown on
the screen is the version contained in the Berne Convention-specifically in article 9(2) of the
Convention. I’ve inserted, in brackets, letters that divide the so-called 3 steps. With those
insertions, the provision reads: “It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union,
to permit the reproduction of such works a in certain special cases, provided that such
reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not
unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author.” The TRIPS Agreement contains a
similar provision – although note that the TRIPS version, unlike the Berne version, applies to all
“exclusive rights” enjoyed by copyright owners, not merely to the right of reproduction.
Analogous provisions can be found in other treaties.
What’s going on here? What these provisions are designed to curb is the impulse of some
countries to limit the scope of copyrights by granting exceptions or privileges to users who wish
to employ copyrighted works in ways that would otherwise be illegal. The basic idea underlying
the three-step test is that such exceptions may not cut too deeply into the rights of owners. But
how deep is too deep? The language of the treaty provisions is notoriously vague on that crucial
point. As a result, many different interpretations of the so-called three-step test have
proliferated. Some are quite strict. If widely adopted, they would require the United States, for
example, to abandon or at least to curtail significantly its fair-use doctrine – which we will
consider in detail in lecture #9. Others are substantially more permissive. An intermediate
position on the spectrum of interpretations, which has much to recommend it, is the
interpretation offered by Professors Berndt Hugenholtz and Ruth Okediji, set forth on the map:
“Limitations and exceptions that (1) are not overly broad, (2) do not rob right holders of a real or
potential source of income that is substantive, and (3) do not do disproportional harm to the
right holders, will pass the test.” The debate concerning the meaning of the three-step test will
likely continue for quite a while. Another source of instability in the International Framework is
that countries – often nudged by interest groups – are constantly attempting to supplement the
treaties we have considered with additional bilateral or plurilateral agreements. Three ongoing
efforts of this sort are listed in the map. The AntiCounterfeiting Trade Agreement – commonly
known as ACTA – has been under negotiation since 2006. It differs from all of the treaties we’ve
considered thus far, both in the small number of countries that were involved in the
negotiations, and even more importantly in the fact that those negotiations were conducted
largely in secret. Despite considerable resistance to that secrecy and to some of the substantive
provisions that emerged from the negotiations, ACTA looked well on its way toward ratification
and adoption until July of 2012, when the European Parliament, responding in part to growing

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public outcry, balked – refusing its consent to the agreement by a vote of 478 to 39, with 165
abstentions. It is now unlikely that ACTA will ever enter into force.
Next in line is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement or TPP. This too was negotiated by
a small group of countries (shown on your screen) in a series of confidential meetings. The final
draft was released to the public in November of 2015. The legislatures of the participating
countries ??? including Congress in the United States – are currently considering whether to
approve the agreement. The outcome of their deliberations is far from certain. If it is approved
by the requisite number of countries and enters into force, the TPP will lead to some medium-
sized changes in the global copyright system. Copyright law in the US will change very little.
However, some of the other participating countries (and countries that later join the group) will
have to adjust their laws. Three such adjustments are particularly significant. First, roughly half
of the participating countries will be obliged to increase the duration of copyright protection –
from the life of the author 50 years to the life of the author 70 years. Second, some countries
will be obliged to enhance their prohibitions on circumvention of technological protection
measures. Finally, some may be obliged to adopt or modify statutory provisions permitting
successful plaintiffs to recover so-called statutory damages – although their duties in this regard
are less severe than they would have been if the original draft of the TPP had survived. Whether
these three changes are good or bad, we will consider in Lectures 6, 11, and 12 respectively.
More modest in ambition and thus less controversial is the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual
Performances, which, if it comes into effect, will expand the moral rights of actors and other
audiovisual performers. We will discuss those rights in lecture #8. The general point is that, while
the broad contours of the International Framework are firmly in place, many important details
are in continued flux. Typically, the representatives of major institutional holders of copyrights
and other intellectual property rights push for treaty provisions that require member countries
to increase the scope of their rights, while public-interest organizations play defense, resisting
reform. With the exception of the Marrakesh Treaty, the public-interest organizations rarely
offer treaty provisions of their own.
This concludes our preliminary review of the structure of the international framework of
copyright law. To repeat, my ambition in this section of the lecture has not been to itemize all of
the features of that framework. That would be impossible in a single lecture – or even an entire
course for that matter. Rather my goal has been to convey to you the key principles and trends –
and to mark the locations of the treaty provisions to which we will return when examining
specific features of copyright law. Next week, we will focus, not on copyright law, but on theory.
We will begin our examination of the questions: What concerns or values underlie copyright?
And how might copyright law be reshaped to advance those concerns or values more
effectively?

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FAIRNESS AND PERSONALITY THEORIES

2.1. Introduction
This second lecture turns from copyright law to copyright theory. By theory, I mean arguments
concerning when and why copyrights should be created, and what the scope or limit of those
rights should be. Next week in the third lecture, we’ll return to the law of copyright. Specifically,
I’ll examine the rules in the United States and in other countries that determine what kinds of
works fall within the zone of copyright protection.
Before zeroing in on the specific theories that will occupy us during this lecture, I should
say a bit more about what these theories do and why they matter.
Here’s the first and most obvious role of theory. As you might expect, when expanding or
revising copyright law, lawmakers frequently deploy arguments concerning how much legal
protection creative works ought to get. When engaged in debates of these sorts, lawmakers, or
their advisers, sometimes advert directly to formal theories developed by economists, political
theorists, and philosophers that address that issue, and even more often to less formal variants
of those theories in general circulation in popular discourse. The result is that, in order to
understand how copyright law has assumed over time its current form and how it’s likely to
evolve in the future, you need to know, among other things, the content of the theories that the
lawmakers in practice attend to.
The next role of theory is more instrumental. As you saw in the last lecture, and as you will
see frequently in future lectures, crucial doctrines in copyright law remain ambiguous. As a
result, lawyers, arguing for their clients, frequently are obliged to make normative arguments
about what the law should look like. Consequently, to be an effective advocate, or an informed
litigant, again you need to know the contents of the available theories that pertain to the
appropriate scope of copyrights. It’s not enough to know what the law is. You have to be able to
argue effectively about what it should be.
The third role of theory is, in my view, the most important. My goal is to help you make
your own informed judgments concerning the respects in which our current copyright system is
socially beneficial or pernicious and where the law should go tomorrow. This is a subject that
everyone has a stake in, not merely lawyers. Copyright law is changing very rapidly. Its impact on

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the economy and culture is large. Public debate, concerning its appropriate ambit, is increasingly
intense. My hope is that by the end of this course, you will be able to participate in that debate,
intelligently and effectively. To do so, you need to know some theory.
Historically, there have been four main clusters of copyright theories. Theories of the first
type focus on fairness. They argue that the law should be crafted to give authors what they
deserve. In other words, the rights or rewards to which authors are morally entitled, either
because they worked hard or because they have contributed importantly to our culture.
Theories of this sort tend to be somewhat more popular and influential in common law
countries, such as Great Britain and the United States, but they have grip everywhere. Theories
of the second type focus on personality. They argue that the law should be crafted to give
people the rights or powers or protections they need in order to fully realize or enjoy
personhood. These theories tend to be somewhat more popular in civil law countries. But they
have increasing influence in other jurisdictions, including the United States.
Theories of the third sort focus not on the interest or moral entitlements of individual
creators, but on the welfare of society at large. They contend that copyright laws can and should
be crafted to produce the greatest good of the greatest number. The way that familiar
utilitarianism criterion is usually translated is that the law should create a system of incentives
that will induce potential authors to generate works from which we will all benefit, and then
make the fruits of those efforts widely available. In other words, the law should combine in an
optimal mixture. On the one hand, stimuli for creativity. And on the other, mechanisms for
distributing creative works to consumers.
Theories in the fourth cluster similarly look to the well-being of society at large, but define
that well-being more capaciously. They contend that the law should be crafted so as to foster a
just and attractive culture. In determining what a just and attractive culture would be, these
theories do not limit themselves to aggregate consumer welfare measured by what consumers
themselves currently want, but instead seek to identify and cultivate conditions that will support
widespread human flourishing.
So, those are the four approaches. The labels that we will use for the four clusters are
fairness, personality, welfare, and culture.
All four of these theories, as we will see, are branches or variants of broader theories
dealing with intellectual property rights as a whole, which in turn are branches of even more
general arguments dealing with property rights of all kinds, including property and land –
commonly known as real property – and tangible personal property.
The roots of these four arguments, as we will see, are old, extending back at least as far as
the 17th century. But many of the applications of those theories to intellectual property – and
specifically to copyright – are quite recent.
I’ve been using the term cluster deliberately. It’s a mistake, as I’ll try to show you, to think
of these theories as unitary and determinant. It’s an understandable mistake, because some of
the theorists themselves claim to have identified the one true theory and to be capable of
generating, from their preferred approach, unique correct answers to every specific issue that

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arises in the law. That’s a very ambitious contention. And in my view, it doesn’t hold up. But the
element of openness, or indeterminacy, in each of these theories does not mean that they are
pointless. Rather, each one offers a set of concerns or issues that merit attention and deepens
our analysis of those concerns and issues. This power to set agendas and to guide and enrich
analysis – I’ll try to show – can be extremely helpful. So, with those cautionary words in mind,
let’s wade into the first of the approaches.

2.2. Fairness
In 1783, the author Joel Barlow wrote a letter to the Continental Congress in the United States
urging the adoption of copyright legislation. Here’s the heart of his letter.

There is certainly no kind of property in the nature of things so much his own as the
works which a person originates from his own creative imagination. And when he has
spent great part of his life in study, wasted his time, his fortune, and perhaps his health
in improving his knowledge and correcting his taste, it is a principle of natural justice
that he should be entitled to the profits arising from the sale of his works as a
compensation for his labor in producing them, and his risk of reputation in offering
them to the public.

This letter was both influential and typical. 12 of the 13 American states adopted
copyright statutes, moved in large part by sentiments of the sort expressed in Barlow’s heartfelt
letter. Since then, authors, lobbyists, legislators, and judges have frequently invoked similar
arguments to justify or expand copyrights. An excellent collection of examples can be found in a
1996 article by Stewart Sterk. Here are a few. In 1906, the famous composer John Philip Sousa
sent a telegram to the chairman of the congressional committee considering legislation that
would have expanded public performance rights, in which Sousa argued as follows.

Earnestly request that the American composer receives full and adequate protection for
the product of his brain. Any legislation that does not give him absolute control of that
which he creates is a return to the usurpation of might and a check on the intellectual
development of our country.

An expansive declaration of this general sort of comes in the 1954 decision of the United
States Supreme Court in the case of Mazer versus Stein.

Sacrificial days devoted to such creative activities deserve rewards commensurate with
the services rendered.

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 The most general idea, latent on all of these passages, is that a person who works hard
deserves to be compensated, and that the law should be crafted to ensure that he or she
receives that compensation. Stating this broadly, the idea enjoys very wide public support, at
least in Western democratic societies. Social psychologists tell us that most people tacitly
subscribe to what the psychologists sometimes call equity theory. The central principle of equity
theory is that justice entails giving each person in a collective enterprise a share of the products
of that enterprise proportional to his or her contributions to it. A more specific and controversial
variant of this general attitude is that a person who works hard deserves to control the fruits of
her labor. In other words, she should not only be compensated appropriately. She’s entitled to a
property right in her creations, the right to do with them what she wishes. When seeking
support for that idea and guidance in construing it, lawmakers and scholars commonly looked at
the political theory of the 17th century British philosopher John Locke. Locke’s writings are
attractive for at least two reasons. First, his ideas have been highly influential in Anglo-American
political culture, although to a lesser extent in continental European political culture. Thus, if one
can ground a policy argument in Locke’s work, the stature of that argument increases. Second,
Locke did not offer an unqualified defense of property rights. Rather, he offered an influential
justification of private property balanced by various analytical devices meant to ensure that the
interests of the public at large would not be impaired by private property rights. To most
modern writers who seek similar balances, Locke’s complex approach is intriguing and inspiring.
I’ll spend a few minutes now summarizing the main features of Locke’s general theory of
property rights. This argument is likely to be familiar to many of you, but not to all. Once we’re
done, we’ll consider the application of Locke’s argument to intellectual property, and to
copyrights in particular.
Most of Locke’s theory is distilled in chapter five of his Second Treatise of Government.
The heart of that chapter is a generative vignette, an evocative story. In that story, a person – for
Locke, that person is a man – comes upon a parcel of land that no one yet owns, or, more
precisely, that is held in common. The man works hard to make the land productive. How? Well,
he doesn’t say precisely, but you can imagine him removing the trees and the large rocks,
breaking open the soil, ensuring that it’s adequately irrigated, and so forth. He then plants
seeds, which grow into plants, which, properly tended, produce fruits and vegetables. Engaging
in these activities, Locke argued, the man acquires a natural property right, not merely to the
crops but to the land used to grow them. Here’s the key passage.

Though the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a
property in his own person. This, nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his
body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he
removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his
labor with and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby, makes it his
property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath,

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 by his labor, something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men, for
this labor be the unquestionable property of the laborer. No man but he have a right to
what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common
for others.

All of this happens, Locke argued, in a state of nature. In other words, the farmer’s rights
are natural rights, not dependent upon state recognition. But once a state is formed, it has a
duty to recognize and enforce natural rights acquired in this fashion. According to Locke, the
ability of a person to acquire natural property rights in this fashion is, however, limited in three
ways. These limitations are commonly known as provisos.
The first is known as the sufficiency proviso. According to Locke, the acquisition of natural
property rights by the farmer only occurs if he has left, as you’ll recall, as much and as good for
others. This restriction is analytically very important, as we’ll see. But to Locke, it did not seem
especially problematic because, at the time he wrote, the world contained lots of what Locke
thought of as unowned land, most notably in North America. Today, of course, the sufficiency
proviso would impose much stricter limits on the ability of a person to acquire real property
through labor.
The second proviso is known as the spoilage proviso. According to Locke, if the farmer has
grown so many crops that he’s unable to consume them and they rot in his barn, he not only
forfeits his right to the unused crops, but also his right to as much of the land as was necessary
to grow them. In other words, his legitimate holding shrinks. Again, this restriction was not
particularly important for Locke because in his view, it was rendered largely irrelevant by the
invention of money. After the adoption of a medium of exchange, if you grew more crops than
you could eat, you could exchange the surplus for hard currency, which you could then use to
purchase other goods and services. The result? A surplus did not go to waste, and the legitimacy
of your holdings was not threatened.
The third and last of the provisos, less clearly recognized in chapter five but implicit in
other portions of Locke’s work, is sometimes referred to as the duty of charity. This restriction,
emphasized by Wendy Gordon in a pioneering article, entails an obligation to let others share
one’s property in times of great need, so long as one’s own survival is not threatened.
So, that, in brief, is the core of Locke’s general theory of private property. Many nuances
and controversies lurk in this quick summary. In particular, I have not said anything about the
longstanding debate concerning the extent to which Locke should be understood as an apologist
for capitalism. If you’re curious about such matters, feel free to explore some of the materials
listed in the bibliography, to which there’s a link on the map. But we’re going to press on to
consider the application of Locke’s theory of real property to copyright.
It’s widely thought that Locke’s theory provides an even stronger justification for
intellectual property than it does for property in the land. The following circumstances underlie
this assumption. First, the public domain, by which I mean the large body of unowned cultural

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products that all authors draw upon when creating their own works, provides a plausible
analogue to the land held in common that figures so importantly in Locke’s argument. Next, with
respect to many kinds of intellectual property, labor seems to provide a disproportionately large
source of its value. To create a novel, a writer, of course, needs a few tangible, raw materials –
some paper, some pencils, nowadays a laptop computer, and so forth. But much more of the
value of the novel derives from the writer’s work than from those materials. Consequently, it
seems more appropriate to confer on her ownership of the novel than it does to confer
ownership of the land upon Locke’s homestead farmer. Finally, in ways that will gradually
become more obvious as we proceed through these lectures, Locke’s famous provisos seem to
align in a suggestive fashion with several of the so-called exceptions and limitations that
copyright law imposes upon the rights of authors.
For all these reasons, Locke’s theory of property seems to many observers to provide both
a potent justification for the system of copyright law and, equally important, a guide when
determining how far that law should reach. That widespread assumption turns out to be
overstated. Most fundamentally, it’s less obvious than it first appears that Locke’s argument has
any bearing at all on intellectual property. Even if one can get past that initial hurdle, it turns out
that key features of Locke’s argument contain ambiguities that blur its application to the kinds of
issues that arise in the copyright context.
Let’s take up the threshold difficulty first. In a shrewd Explanations for why labor upon
article, Seana Shiffrin points out that one can find in chapter unowned land generates natural
five of the Second Treatise six different explanations for property rights
why labor upon unowned land generates natural property 1. Necessary to effectuate
rights. Those six rationales are summarized in the map in
right to means of
front of you. First, natural reason, Locke argued, informs us
subsistence
that people have “a right to their preservation.” And the
only practical way of effectuating that right is by 2. Religious obligation to
appropriating – in other words, owning – the materials we subdue the earth and
need for food and shelter. This is more than a right, in cultivate it for benefit of life
Locke’s view. It’s a duty. We have a religious obligation to 3. Intuitions regarding self-
preserve ourselves. More broadly, God commanded us to
ownership
subdue the Earth, specifically to “improve it for the benefit
4. Moral value of work
of life.” And the only way to do that is to labor upon it and
5. Intuitions regarding
then, again, appropriate the fruits of that labor. Next, Locke
argued that our intuitions tell us that a person has a proportionality
“property in his own person,” including, as we saw in the 6. Imagery of beneficial
passage I read earlier, “the labor of his body and the work transformation
of his hands.” When we mix the work of our hands, which
we own, with unowned raw material, it seems natural, he
argued, that the former should color the latter.

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 Locke’s fourth argument is that work is virtuous. God gave the world, he argued “to the
industrious and rational, not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.”
Virtuous workers deserve rewards. Fifth, it seems natural, Locke argued, that ownership of a
finished product should track ownership of the most valuable component thereof, which he
argues is typically labor. Sixth, and finally, Locke throughout chapter five draws sustenance from
the language of transformation. He depicts the homestead farmer’s activities as attractive, in
part because of the way they alter the landscape from wild to domestic, from raw to cultivated,
from chaotic to ordered, and from nonproductive to productive. All of these changes seemed to
Locke self-evidently worthy of commendation.
Once one has catalogued the foundations of Locke’s theory of real property, it becomes
much less clear that his argument has force in the context of intellectual property. In particular,
as Shiffrin points out, only the fourth and fifth of the six rationales seem to provide clear-cut
justifications for a novelist’s acquisition of a property right in her novel. Presumably, the novelist
owns the work of her hands, just as much as the farmer, and her labor is just as virtuous. But her
survival is not dependent on controlling her novel, nor does a novel seem pertinent to her
religious obligation to subdue the Earth. The relevance of the other two arguments is uncertain.
In short, there’s trouble at the threshold. But let’s assume that rationales four and five – the
moral value of work and intuitions regarding proportionality – are indeed adequate to launch a
Lockean justification for copyright. We can thus move on to more detailed questions concerning
the implications of Locke’s approach for the law.
Quickly, we encounter other difficulties. Perhaps the most fundamental is what sort of
labor is deserving of a reward? What counts, more specifically, as virtuous intellectual work?
There are at least four possibilities, again listed in the map. The first, which seems closest to
Locke’s original understanding, is that labor consists of time and effort – hours spent in a chair,
typing, or standing in front of an easel, painting. But as Justin Hughes has shown, we often speak
of meritorious work in other terms, tacitly defining it as something you’d rather avoid doing or
as something that creates social value. Finally, as Lawrence Becker suggests, we sometimes
speak and act as if creative labor is more meritorious than mechanical or drudge labor. These
differences matter for copyright. Suppose, for example, that a particular writer or a particular
class of artists love their work and would rather do it than anything else. The avoidance theory
of labor – in other words, the interpretation that defines labor as something you’d rather not do
– would suggest that writers of this sort should not be given copyrights in their creations,
whereas the other interpretations would confer upon them legal protection. Perhaps poets, who
seem especially passionate about their work, should be denied copyrights. Another example –
suppose you work hard, but you’re bad at what you do. Indeed, your labor reduces rather than
enhances the social value of the materials you labor upon. To take a classic hypothetical
example, you find a beautiful piece of naturally sculpted driftwood on the beach, and you paint
it pink, reducing its beauty. Do you deserve a copyright in your sculpture?
Here’s another challenge. An important dimension of Locke’s argument is that the
magnitude of the reward – or the property right – acquired by our laborer should be

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proportional to the amount of labor he or she has invested. But how do you decide how large a
reward or property right is appropriate?
An illustration – Scott Lieberman is a cardiologist who lives in Tyler, Texas. He’s long been
fascinated by the space program and is an avid amateur photographer. On February 1, 2003, Mr.
Lieberman figured out that the space shuttle Columbia would pass over his home in East Texas
around 9 o’clock in the morning on its way to a landing in Florida. He and his wife went out into
the yard and pointed their cameras at the sky. As it happened, this was just the moment when
the Columbia began to break apart. One of Lieberman’s images captured that horrific incident.
He submitted the photo to the local newspaper, which, in turn, forwarded it to the Associated
Press. By the next afternoon, Lieberman’s photo was on the cover of Time Magazine. As you
know from the first lecture, as a matter of copyright law, Lieberman surely is entitled to a
copyright in his photograph, so the AP and Time needed Lieberman’s permission to print and
publish the photo. But what is the magnitude of the appropriate or, in Lockean terms,
proportional reward to which Lieberman is entitled? He himself seems not to have been
mercenary, but he could have demanded quite a large fee from the AP. Should he have been
able to do so? Locke’s theory points us in the general direction by emphasizing the principle of
proportionality, but it doesn’t give us much guidance in determining what, exactly,
proportionality means in cases like this.
The way in which the issue is framed matters quite a lot. If you focus on the amount of
effort that went into pressing the shutter at the moment the space shuttle passed overhead,
then it might seem that Lieberman is morally entitled to only a small reward. By contrast, if you
take into account the cost of his equipment, his years of self-training, and so forth, then the
appropriate reward might be much larger. But putting that important nuance to one side, it’s
apparent that the largest source of the value of Lieberman’s photo arises from luck – being in
the right place at the right time. What’s an appropriate – in other words, proportional – reward
for that? Yet another difficulty – how exactly should one construe the Lockean concept of the
commons? Various options are listed on the map. One possibility would be to treat the concept
of the commons as equivalent to the idea/expression distinction that we discussed in the first
lecture. As you’ll recall, copyright law in all countries excludes from protection facts or ideas.
Only an author’s distinctive expression of facts or ideas is shielded. Perhaps the root of that
doctrine is the Lockean proposition that facts and ideas constitute part of the commons, upon
which authors apply their labor. But this, an initially attractive interpretation, quickly crumbles.
For one thing, an author’s ideas, if they’re original, don’t seem to be part of the commons, the
existing stock of cultural materials, yet they cannot be owned. Another problem arises out of the
fact that, for Locke, labor upon a tract of land held in common resulted in ownership of that
tract. By contrast, labor upon facts and ideas does not, as we’ve seen, result in ownership of
those facts and ideas. In short, Locke’s theory doesn’t seem to fit well, the way the copyright law
is currently organized.
Last but not least, the application of the provisos – the famous three Lockean provisos – to
copyright law is tricky. Scholars wrestle over the best interpretation of those provisos and over

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the proper application of each interpretation to intellectual property. Part of the problem arises
from the ambiguity of the provisos themselves. For example, should the sufficiency proviso be
construed to prevent the acquisition of property rights, when the result would be to leave
unowned raw materials in sufficient amount for others to appropriate? Or rather, should it be
construed more broadly to prevent the acquisition of property rights only when the overall
welfare of other people is impaired? The answer makes a big difference to copyright law. In
other cases, the proviso itself seems reasonably clear cut, but its application to intellectual
property is unclear. For instance, although most scholars think that the spoilage proviso is
irrelevant in the context of copyright because novels don’t rot, Benjamin Damstedt has argued
plausibly that when an author or an inventor secures an intellectual property right over a socially
valuable innovation but then refuses to make it widely available to consumers, the result is a
kind of spoilage, and the law should devise some mechanism to override the creator’s selfish
choice.
Scholars are likely to continue to wrestle with these puzzles. My own sense is that it’s
unlikely that any scholar will succeed in identifying a unique, true, or best interpretation of
Locke’s original theory in the context of copyright. Locke himself supported literary property but
had relatively little to say about why, and his highly influential remarks about property and land
contain too many ambiguities to provide crisp answers to the kinds of questions we must resolve
today in the context of art, literature, architecture, software, and so forth. This should not be
terribly surprising, nor should it be terribly disturbing. The real value of Locke’s theory is not that
it gives us definitive answers, but that it encourages us to ask particular kinds of questions. What
resolutions to particular disputes over IP, or over the rules governing kinds of disputes, would
treat the parties most fairly? In other words, what would give them what they deserve? Locke’s
original writings and the many layers of commentary upon those writings sensitize us to some of
the considerations that seem relevant to answering those questions. Most importantly, they
urge us to be attentive to the role of labor in creating intellectual products, and to give the
laborers the rights they deserve, while insuring that the public at large is not disadvantaged. But
what that guideline means in particular contexts is largely up to us. Set forth on the map are a
few of the issues to which fairness theories direct our attention.
How can we ensure that the many contributors to composite intellectual products are
fairly rewarded? A premier example consists of films, which arise out of the creative
contributions of many different people – screenwriters, actors, directors, set designers, costume
advisers, camera operators, and so forth. As we’ll see, the copyright systems of different
countries handle the rights for those various contributors in quite different ways. When we get
to that doctrine, we should and will ask which, if any, of the national systems fairly compensate
all of the contributors to a film? Another variant of the same general question – at the end of
this lecture series, we’ll consider the shifting rules governing so-called traditional knowledge.
These are the cultural products of indigenous groups. When we do so, one normative issue will
be what system of rules, if any, takes appropriate recognition of the fact that traditional
knowledge typically results from the intellectual labor of many generations of people?

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 The issue of proportionality will also come up frequently in this course. Here’s just one
context. The value of many copyrighted works derives, in part, from the labor of the copyright
owner, but also, in part, from materials taken from the public domain. Classic examples include
Disney’s animated versions of folktales, such as Snow White or Cinderella, or historical
narratives, such as Pocahontas. Should the scope of Disney’s copyrights in such adaptations of
traditional materials be smaller than the scope of copyrights and films incorporating more
original plots? The kinds of considerations that Lockean scholars attend to suggest that the
answer is yes, but it’s hard to determine how, exactly, one would implement that guideline.
Another example – should considerations of the sort highlighted by fairness theory
prompt us to reconsider the absence of copyright protection for factual works, many of which
require considerable effort and investment to produce? As we’ll see, European countries
currently offer reasonably generous copyright-style protection to databases, which are
compilations of factual materials. The United States is much less generous. In this respect, is
Europe right and the United States wrong? In the same vein, should the writers of
autobiographies have more control over the narratives of their own lives than they currently do
under contemporary copyright law?
Ensuring that people who engage in creative labor are fairly rewarded creates a
presumption that the answer to each of these questions is yes. Whether that presumption is
overridden or trumped by other considerations, we’ll take up in future lectures. So, here’s one
last, crucial issue. Does fairness require only giving authors appropriate monetary rewards, or
does it also require giving them control over the physical embodiments or performances of their
works? Rob Merges, a leading IP scholar and a founder of the Berkeley Center for Law and
Technology, has recently argued for the latter position.
Merges’s stance in these debates is interesting. For most of his career, Merges
approached difficult policy questions involving the law of intellectual property from the
perspective of utilitarian theory, the approach that we’ll take up in lecture number four. In other
words, he sought to identify the set of rules that would be socially optimal in each situation.
Eventually, however, he became convinced that utilitarian theory is inadequate. In particular, it’s
incapable, he now believes, of generating a solid justification for the entire intellectual property
edifice. So, here’s a passage, in which he expresses this disillusionment.

In my research, I’ve become convinced that with our current tools, we will never
identify the optimal number of patented copyrighted and trademarked works. Every
time I play the archaeologist and go looking for the utilitarian footings of the field, I
come up empty. Try as I might, I simply cannot justify our current IP system on the basis
of verifiable data showing that people are better off with IP law than they would be
without it. Maximizing utility, I’ve come to see, is not a serviceable first-order principal
of the IP system. It’s just not what IP is really all about at the deepest level.

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 Now, Merges has not abandoned his utilitarian calculator altogether, but he has relegated
it to what he calls a middle – intermediate – layer in his theory of intellectual property. For deep-
level inspiration and guidance, he now relies on the writings of Locke and Kant. One of the
lessons that Merges derives from his explorations of those writers is that monetary
compensation for deserving authors is inadequate, that respect for their work and their
autonomy necessitates giving them property rights over their creations. Decades ago, Merges
had advocated the same position from the standpoint of cost/benefit analysis. Now he offers an
alternative, non-consequential justification.
Much later in this series of lectures, we’ll take up the question of what, if anything, should
be done to alleviate the ongoing crisis in the entertainment industry resulting, in part, from the
ubiquity of peer-to-peer copying. At that point, Merges’s argument concerning whether
compensation is adequate or whether property rights are essential will become relevant. We’ll
see whether his contention holds up. This concludes our review of the cluster of arguments
known as fairness theory. We’ll now turn to the second of the four clusters, commonly known as
personality theory.

2.3. Personality
The famous architect Meinhard von Gerkan designed the striking building shown in Figure 9. It
serves as a train station in Berlin. It stands on an historically important spot, in what we used to

Figure 9: Berlin Hauptbahnhof, designed by Meinhard von Gerkan

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be No Man’s Land between East and West Germany. As you can see, it’s quite a remarkable
structure. It was also expensive to build. It took eight years and cost 700 million euros. To cut
costs, Deutschebahn, the German railway company that owns the station, decided not to install
the cathedral-like vaulted ceiling that von Gerkan originally designed, but instead installed a
cheaper, flat metal ceiling designed by another architect. Outraged, von Gerkan brought a
lawsuit. Altering his plans, he insisted, was equivalent to “ripping pages out of a novel.” The
court agreed that his original design had been defaced, and consequently, that his rights had
been violated. On that basis, the judge ordered the ceiling rebuilt, even though it would
reportedly cost 30 million euros. Here’s another case. The Canadian sculptor Michael Snow
created this sculpture of a set of 60 realistic flying geese, which hangs in Toronto’s Eaton Center,
which is a shopping mall. During Christmas season in 1982, the mall decided to hang a red ribbon
around the neck of each goose as part of its Christmas display. Snow found the ribbons, as he
said “ridiculous.” They undermined his intention, which had been to create a naturalistic image
of birds in flight. Snow sought an injunction, compelling them all to remove the ribbons. Judge
O’Brien of the Ontario High Court of Justice agreed with Snow’s position. An artist’s subjective
intent concerning the purpose and character of his work of art deserves weight, the judge
concluded, so long as it’s reasonable, and Snow’s intent was. The judge ordered the ribbons
removed.
The moral intuitions that underlie these and other rulings are different from the intuitions
that underlie what we have called Fairness Theory. They’re less concerned with rewarding labor
and more concerned with respecting and protecting a special kind of emotional or psychic bond
between artist and creation. Both von Gerkan and Snow had been well compensated for their
efforts. In that sense, they’d already been rewarded appropriately. But morality, and
consequently, law, many people believe, should go further, should recognize an artist’s
continuing control over his creations. To do otherwise would be to cut at the artist’s soul.
The source and political philosophy of this approach is not Locke, but Kant and Hegel. I
mean that in a special sense. As Cyrill Rigamonti has argued, it’s not clear that the legal doctrines
underlying the cases that I just described were, in fact, influenced by either Kant or Hegel.
Rather, when contemporary scholars and lawmakers look to philosophy for sustenance and
guidance when filling out their moral intuitions, they look to Kant and Hegel, and more broadly,
to the personality theory of real property with which Kant and Hegel are commonly associated.
As I did with the fairness approach, I’ll begin with a brief review of the underlying theory of real
property and then consider its implications for copyright. The heart of personality theory is the
proposition that certain kinds of bonds with objects are crucial to human flourishing, and
consequently, that the law should respect those bonds by creating and enforcing private
property rights. Arguments of this sort come in many flavors. Put differently, over the centuries,
different philosophers have identified a wide variety of ways in which private property rights can
contribute to human flourishing.
The first of these is peace of mind. This is emphasized by Charles Fried in this book Right
and Wrong. Awareness that, by using resources, you are disadvantaging countless other people,

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some of whom are desperately poor, can be morally exhausting, Ways in which private property
Fried contends. Private property rights, by assuring you that you rights can contribute to human
own those resources, provides relief from that painful and flourishing
perhaps disabling emotion. The second argument, highlighted by 1. Peace of mind
Jeremy Waldron in his justly famous book The Right to Private
2. Privacy
Property, is privacy. One of the functions of a property right is to
3. Autonomy
provide you a place where you can either be alone or enjoy
intimacy with others. The home, protected by private property 4. Self-realization as a social
rights, is a haven in a heartless world. The kind of control over being
information enabled by copyright can also help shield privacy, as 5. Self-realization as an
it has done, for example, for the reclusive but litigious author JD individual
Salinger, who aggressively pursues other writers who encroach
6. Security and leisure
on his informational and artistic domain, for example, by
7. Responsibility
quoting his letters in a biography, or more recently, writing a
8. Identity
sequel to one of his novels. The third theme, explored in detail
by John Stuart Mill and Abraham Lincoln, is autonomy. The 9. Citizenship
ability, provided by property rights, to control resources is 10. Self-expression
necessary, so the argument goes, to enable persons to become
independent and self-directing. The fourth, emphasized by the legal scholar Carol Rose, is that
property rights facilitate self-realization as a social being. By owning and trading things, people
help shape their social environments and establish their places in communities. Commerce, Rose
contends, is humanizing, not dehumanizing.
The fifth is perhaps the most famous and, in current scholarship, the most influential of
the variants. It contends that property rights are crucial to self-realization as an individual, not as
a social being. By owning and thus controlling objects, a person is able to assert his or her will,
and thereby to be recognized as a free agent by others. Authors who, building on the work of
Hegel and Kant, explore this theme in depth, include Margaret Jane Radin, Justin Hughes, and
again, Jeremy Waldron. Here’s an illustrative passage from Waldron’s book.

These philosophical themes form an important part of Hegel’s conception of freedom

and of the argument for private property that he develops on that basis. Self-assertion
can be understood as a man’s assertion of himself against nature. Natural resources by
themselves are blankly material with no point or purpose of their own. If they are to
have a point or purpose, they must be given one by being occupied by human goals and
purposes. By investing a natural object with purpose, an individual becomes aware of
the priority of will in a world composed largely of objects that cannot actively possess
it. Thus, he ceases to regard himself as a mere animal part of nature and begins to take
seriously the special and distinctive features of rationality, purpose, and will.

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 The sixth argument is that property rights afford people security and leisure, thereby
freeing them from the mind-numbing obsession with obtaining the means of survival and
enabling them to pursue artistic and cultural callings. Waldron and George Fitzhugh fill out this
theme. The seventh variant, explored by the British philosopher TH Green, in addition to Mill,
emphasizes the importance to human flourishing of responsibility. Ownership and management
of property cultivates virtues like prudence and foresight, which, in turn, are tied to full
personhood. The eighth, which figures prominently in the writings of Radin, centers on identity.
Selfhood, Radin contends, depends in part upon the ability to project a continuing life plan into
the future, which, in turn, is fostered by property rights. You can readily see how this theme
might arise with respect to artistic creations, at least unique artistic creations. Destruction or
modification of those creations might well threaten the author’s means of maintaining an
identity, not just a reputation, but a sense of self. The ninth theme is not prominent in
contemporary scholarship, but was once very important. The central idea here is that property
rights enable owners to become virtuous citizens, to participate in political deliberation
responsibly and selflessly. Civic virtue, in turn, is central to personhood. This idea loomed large
in the writings of classical Republican political theorists, including many of the people who
contributed to the founding of the United States. Finally, control over resources, and in
particular, control over one’s own creative products, may facilitate self-expression, which, in
turn, is necessary for self-fulfillment. This idea can be found in the writing of some philosophers,
like TH Green, and also in the work of many artists themselves. Here’s an example.

Figure 10: Two cartoons by Gary Larson

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 Gary Larson, as many of you know, is a famous cartoonist with a distinctive drawing style
and an irreverent, even macabre, sense of humor (examples of his work are shown in Figure 10).
The first major paper to carry his cartoons, the Seattle Times, dropped them because some
readers denounced them as sick and offensive. Fortunately, the San Francisco Chronicle picked
up the series, and the rest is history. Despite his iconoclasm, Larson was a strong defender of a
particular conception or kind of copyright. His stance is well expressed in an open letter he
wrote, criticizing his fans for copying his cartoons and posting them on their home pages.

Years ago, I was having lunch one day with a cartoonist, Richard Guindon, and the
subject came up how neither of us ever solicited or accepted ideas from others. But
until Richard summed it up quite neatly, I never really understood my own aversions to
doing this. “It’s like having someone else write in your diary,” he said. And how true
that statement rang with me. In effect, we drew cartoons that we hoped would be
entertaining, or at the very least, not boring. But regardless, they would always come
from an intensely personal, and therefore, original perspective. To attempt to be funny
is a very scary, risk-laden proposition. Ask any stand-up comic who’s ever bombed on
stage. But if there was ever an axiom to follow in this business, it would be this – be
honest to yourself, and most important, respect your audience. So, in a nutshell –
probably an unfortunate choice of words for me – I only ask that this respect be
returned. And the way for anyone to do this is to please, please refrain from putting
The Far Side out on the internet. These cartoons are my children of sorts. And like a
parent, I’m concerned about where they go at night without telling me. And seeing
them at someone’s website is like getting the call at 2:00 in the morning that goes,
“Uh, dad, you’re not going to like this much, but guess where I am.”

Two aspects of this letter bear emphasis – first, the contention that public self-expression
is very scary and risky, and the law should help create conditions that enable and encourage it;
and second, the conception of one’s artistic creations as one’s children. The need to control
those creations, Larson argues, is like the need to keep track of one’s kids. When we examined
Locke’s theory of property, we saw that only some of the ways in which he fleshed out his
arguments seemed germane to intellectual property. The same is true here. In my tour of the 10
variants of personality theory, I’ve tried to flag those that seemed most relevant to the interests
of artists. I hope, by now, it’s clear that those are numbers 2, 5, 8, and 10. To review,
maintenance of artists’ ability to control, at least in some ways, their creations is arguably
necessary to respect, first, their privacy; next, their capacity to achieve individual self-realization;
next, their identities; and finally, their opportunities for self-expression. The countries where
belief in these connections had the greatest influence are located in continental Europe. Not
surprisingly, those same countries have the legal systems that are most protective of artists.

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More specifically, in those countries, artists enjoy a set of entitlements, commonly referred to as
moral rights.
In its full-blown version, the concept or system of moral Moral rights of artists
rights encompasses six distinct entitlements. The first is the
1. Right of attribution
right of attribution, which is the right to be given credit for
2. Right of integrity
things you have created and not to be given credit for works
3. Right of disclosure
that you did not create. The second is the right of integrity,
which is the right to prevent the destruction or mutilation of 4. Right of withdrawal
one’s creations. This is the best known and probably most 5. Right against excessive
important of the rights. It underlaid the von Gerkan and Snow criticism
cases we discussed at the outset of this section. The right of 6. Droite de suite
disclosure is the right to decide if and when to make one’s
works public. Suppose, for example, that a painter has been commissioned to create a portrait
of a particular subject and has already been paid the contract price. The painter paints the
portrait, but is unhappy with it. The subject demands that it be delivered. May the painter
refuse? In jurisdictions that respect the right of disclosure, the answer is yes. The painter will
have to indemnify the person who commissioned the painting, perhaps by returning the
contract price, but does not have to turn over the painting itself. The right of withdrawal, rarely
exercised, is the right in principle to demand that works one has come to regret be returned.
Suppose, for example, that Picasso came to regret his Blue Period. He could demand that their
current possessors return all of those paintings. Again, an artist exercising this right would have
to indemnify, in advance, the persons obliged to relinquish the works in question.
The right against excessive criticism, also rarely exercised, in principle enables an author
or artist to recover against a critic who abuses him or her. Finally, the droit de suite is the right to
collect a fee when one’s works are resold, for example, when the current owner of one of your
paintings resells it to another collector.
Now, here’s a brief reminder of ground we covered in the first lecture. As we discussed
there, the Berne Convention purports to require member countries to recognize two of these
moral rights – specifically, the right of attribution and the right of integrity. But as we saw, the
Berne Convention lacks teeth, and the TRIPS Agreement, which does have teeth, does not
incorporate the provision of the Berne Convention pertaining to moral rights. The net effect is
that countries, like the United States, that are reluctant to recognize moral rights are, as a
practical matter, free to evade their treaty obligations. Late in this lecture series, we’ll examine
what’s known as the Visual Artists Rights Act, which is the provision of US copyright law that
implements a quite truncated version of moral rights. For the time being, we’re concerned not
with the contours of the law, but with the theory that provides the best support for the moral
rights system. And that theory, as I’ve suggested, is the personality theory
Scholars who follow this line contend that intellectual products are manifestations or
extensions of the personalities of their creators. An artist defines herself in and through her art.
The artist, consequently, is morally entitled to considerable control over her works. Why,

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exactly? Partly because those injuries result in corresponding impairment of the creator’s self,
and partly because maintaining a connection to and control over her works is one of the ways in
which an artist establishes and sustains an identity. The classic version of this argument focused
on the interests and rights of the lone artist or author. Historically, the strongest version of
personality theory was associated with romanticism, which celebrated solitary artistic geniuses –
the novelist or painter in the garret projecting his or her vision onto paper or canvas. Nowadays,
it is widely, although not universally, recognized that that conception of creativity is unrealistic
or at least rare. Awareness that creativity is more often collaborative and that many artists
incorporate not merely the ideas of their predecessors, but some of their predecessors’
materials, has prompted some scholars, writing in the vein of personality theory, to argue for
important adjustments to its doctrinal implications. Most importantly, if we wish to ensure that
all persons have opportunities to engage in self-fulfilling creative activities, we may need to
liberalize the rules governing their transformative uses of already existing artistic products.
When we discuss the efforts of scholars to adapt Locke’s labor-desert theory of real property in
the context of intellectual property, I suggested that those scholars confronted serious
difficulties, arising out of the ambiguity of key concepts in Locke’s approach. The same is true of
personality theory. Listed on the map are a few of the difficulties the scholars working this vein
face.
At the most primary level, it’s not obvious whether an artist who invests herself in a work
of visual art should be able to prevent others from imitating her creations. Some commentators,
emphasizing the self-expression inherent in the making of the imitation, argue no. Others
disagree. For obvious reasons, this goes to the heart of copyright law. Assuming that an artist
has the right to control copying of her creations, may she alienate that right? For example, may a
composer assign to a music publisher all of her rights in her composition? As we’ll see, this is
conventional in most jurisdictions. Is it legitimate? Some scholars, purporting to draw on the
writings of Kant, argue no. Others, seeking guidance from Hegel, argue yes.
Here’s a more specific contemporary question. In many American states, celebrities enjoy
the right to control, and therefore, the right to charge for, commercial uses of their identities.
Shown in Figure 11 is one of a series of advertisements that provoked a famous application of
that principle. In the late 1980s, the consumer electronics company Samsung introduced a set of
what were intended to be humorous ads, ostensibly set into the future, each of which
juxtaposed a hypothetical news headline with the depiction of a durable Samsung product.
The right-hand side advert in Figure 11 is the one that got Samsung into trouble. The
hypothetical news story, which appears at the top of the ad, suggested that the game show
Wheel of Fortune would still be broadcast in 2012. However, the letters on the game board
would be turned not by Vanna White, the actress who had become famous in this role, but by a
robot, which would literally take White’s place.
The right-hand side advert in Figure 11 is the one that got Samsung into trouble. The
hypothetical news story, which appears at the top of the ad, suggested that the game show
Wheel of Fortune would still be broadcast in 2012. However, the letters on the game board

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 Figure 11: White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (1992) – magazine adverts run by
Samsung; the one in the top right was the subject of the lawsuit

Figure 12: The real Vanna White and the image of the robot in the Samsung advert

would be turned not by Vanna White, the actress who had become famous in this role, but by a
robot, which would literally take White’s place.
Shown in Figure 12, on the left side is the real Vanna White, and on the right side, a blow-
up of the image of the robot that appeared in the Samsung ad. White argued plausibly that the

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color of the robot’s hair, the color and style of its dress, and above all, its pose, was intended to
evoke her. She brought a lawsuit, arguing that the advertisement constituted a commercial
appropriation of her identity. And she prevailed. The theoretical question posed by this case and
many similar cases is whether a celebrity’s persona is a sufficiently important embodiment of
personhood that it, like a painting, should be shielded against non-permissive uses. Some
scholars argue yes, indeed regard the answer as self-evident. Others, like Michael Madow,
disagree, contending, among other things, that a celebrity’s fame typically owes as much to the
media and the audience as it does to the creative contributions of the celebrity herself and thus
should not be analogized to works like von Gerkan’s train station or Snow’s geese. These are
hard questions. As I suggested when we were discussing the application of Locke’s argument to
copyright, it’s very unlikely that the answers to such questions can be derived from a careful
reading of the canonical texts in this theoretical tradition, namely the writings of Kant, Hegel,
and so forth. The value of personality theory, I suggest, is not to provide us determinate answers
to modern problems, but rather to sensitize us to and to help us reflect upon the ways in which
control over intellectual products can influence opportunities for individual or group self-
fulfillment. In that spirit, here are a few additional ways in which personality theory has been or
might be applied to suggest ways of thinking about specific issues that arise in contemporary
copyright law.
How long should a copyright last? The duration of a patent, as many of you know, is quite
short – 20 years from the date of the patent application. As we’ll see in most countries today,
copyrights last much longer – typically for the life of the author plus 70 years. If the principal
function of a copyright is to reflect and protect an author’s personhood interests in his or her
creations, perhaps that term is too long. Perhaps it should last for no more than the life of the
author. Or more narrowly, perhaps moral rights should expire with the death of the author.
Another example: as we’ll discuss in later lectures, many jurisdictions, including the United
States, have rules that confer upon employers the copyrights in the works prepared by their
employees. These rules are highly controversial. One ground in which they are commonly
criticized is that they fail to respect the employee’s personhood interests in their creations.
A related criticism of contemporary copyright law that arguably is also fueled by
personality theory is that several doctrines in combination inhibit the ability of creative people
to remain economically independent and thus in control of their creative activities and products.
Copyright law, in other words, is biased toward the interests of companies and fails adequately
to support intellectual entrepreneurs. One of the sources of that bias, so it’s argued, is the set of
procedural rules that govern copyright lawsuits and the remedies available to successful
litigants. Those rules operate, as we’ll see, to the advantage of parties with deep pockets and
emotional fortitude, neither of which is typically true of the kind of autonomous artists that are
celebrated by personality theory.
Another example – it’s widely thought that, in general, artists are not good at business
and thus tend to sign away their rights too quickly or for too little money. Most copyright
systems contain some rules designed to protect artists or their families against the

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consequences of their folly or ignorance. Some scholars, drawing in part on personality theory,
argue that those protective devices are insufficient and should be strengthened. Finally, as I
suggested a minute ago, some scholars contend that, if all persons are to have opportunities for
self-fulfillment analogous to those enjoyed by a Picasso or a Wordsworth, copyright law should
be amended to increase people’s freedom to make derivative uses of existing creative works,
such as photographs, films, and sound recordings. This might be achieved through adjustment of
one of the major defenses to copyright infringement, namely the doctrine of fair use or fair
dealing, which will be considered in detail late in the course. In countries like the United States
that currently provide expansive protection for moral rights, the same adjustment might require
some curtailment of the famous right of integrity. This last possibility is perhaps the most
counterintuitive and eye-opening of the reform proposals we’ve considered thus far. It entails
invoking personality theory to qualify one of the primary conventional doctrinal embodiments of
that same theory. By the end of this series of lectures, I hope you are in a position to make your
own judgment concerning the persuasiveness of this proposal.
So, that’s it. That concludes our examination of the first two of the four theories of
copyright, namely fairness and personality-based theories. In the next lecture, I’ll discuss the
subject matter coverage of copyright, what kinds of creations are protectable and what kinds are
not. Then, in the lecture after that, I’ll return to copyright theory and take up what has become
the most influential of the four approaches, namely the utilitarian-based welfare theory. This, as
we’ll see, looms even larger in policy and law than the arguments we’ve addressed today.

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THE SUBJECT MATTER OF COPYRIGHT

3.1. Literature (and Software)

In this lecture, I put theory to the side and return to the law, focusing on the subject matter of
copyright, the kinds of things that copyright law applies to.
There are two main themes to this lecture. First, the subject matter coverage of copyright
law has grown dramatically over the years, and is now a good deal larger than you might think.
Certainly, it reaches far beyond its core, namely fine art and literature. Second, copyright law is
not unitary or homogeneous. Rather, the rules governing the different kinds of things now
subject to copyright protection vary considerably. Partly as a result, the business models
associated with the different kinds of works also vary. This second theme I refer to as the
disaggregation of copyright. I’ll begin to develop it in this lecture, but it will figure in future
lectures as well.
I’ll begin with a brief overview of the history of the subject matter coverage of copyright,
and then start over and examine each of the sectors in more detail.
US copyright law originates in a 1790 federal statute. Only three kinds of works were
protected under the original statute – books, maps, and charts. Over the course of the 19th and
20th centuries, Congress and the courts cooperated in expanding the set of protected creations.
Prints were added by statute in 1802. Musical compositions added in 1831. Dramatic works, in
effect, were added to the cluster by an 1856 statute which granted the owners of copyrights in
books the right to control public performance of their works, which is the only form of
protection truly valuable to playwrights. This extension was confirmed by subsequent statutory
amendments. Photographs were added by statute in 1865, as we saw in the first of the lectures
in this series. In 1883, in the Burrow-Giles case, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional
challenge to the addition of photography, but only because this posed studio photo of Oscar
Wilde was, in the court’s judgment, a quote “useful, new, harmonious, characteristic and
graceful picture”. Gradually, the aesthetic requirement implicit in this ruling was softened, and
copyright protection was tacitly extended to photographs of all sorts.
Paintings and drawings were added to the set of protected works in 1870, as were statues
– meaning three-dimensional works of fine art – a type of work later subsumed into the broader

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category of works of art and reproductions of works of art. Around the turn of the century,
advertisements were accepted into the fold. During the 19th century, courts had generally been
hostile to the extension of copyrights to ads, on the ground that they did nothing to “stimulate
original investigation, whether in literature science, or art, for the betterment of the people”.
This skeptical position was rejected by Justice Holmes in the Bleistein case, which was also
discussed in lecture number one. Bleistein, as you’ll recall, extended copyright protection to a
circus poster. Holmes reasoned “a picture is nonetheless a picture, and nonetheless a subject of
copyright, that it is used for an advertisement”.
Motion pictures were invented by Thomas
Edison and his assistant William Dixon in the 1890s.
Figure 13 is a photo of one of the first machines
that they developed to view their primitive movies.
By 1903, an intermediate appellate court had
recognized movies as copyrightable subject matter,
a position later confirmed by Congress. Lectures,
sermons, and addresses were added to the list of
copyrightable materials by statute in 1909.
Subsequently fictional characters and plots were
recognized by judicial decisions as objects of
protection. This, as you might imagine, is a tricky
subject to which we’ll return shortly. A complex
series of steps between 1909 and 1954 had the
overall effect of extending copyright protection to
some useful articles. Which ones, we’ll consider in a
Figure 13: The Dickson-Edison Kinetoscope
moment. Sound recordings, as distinct from the
compositions they embody, were added to the fold in 1972. Pantomimes and choreographic
works were added as part of the 1976 general reform of the copyright statute. Software was
formally added in 1978, although, as we’ll see, early forms of protection for software occurred in
the 1960s. Last but not least, architecture was grudgingly given special protection by statute in
1990 in response to the United States’ belated accession to the Berne Convention. Figure 14
shows all of these elements and the order in which they were added to copyright law over time.
That’s where things stand today. Two gradual, intertwined conceptual shifts underlie this
steady expansion of the zone of coverage. The first, which is nicely traced by Oren Bracha, is a
movement from a conception of copyright as trade-specific regulation to a conception that sees
copyright as founded on the general principle of the right of creators to control their original
works. This change was partially completed in the 1909 general reform of the copyright statute,
and fully completed in the 1976 reform. The second of the overall changes, emphasized by Peter
Jaszi, is a shift in what copyright is thought to protect, from the text to the work. At the start of
the 19th century, lawyers and judges thought that copyright law protected the sequence of
words used in a book – in other words, the text alone – against verbatim reproduction. By the

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 Figure 14: The growth of US copyright law

early 20th century, by contrast, they thought it shielded the market value of the underlying work,
no matter how it was expressed. As we’ll see in lecture number seven, the effect of this
reconceptualization was to render illegal, for the first time, many forms of unauthorized use,
including translations, abridgments, and, perhaps most importantly, motion picture adaptations.
Now that we’ve completed a brief historical overview of the growth of US copyright law
during the last two centuries, let’s go back and examine in more detail each of the sectors of
copyrightable subject matter. For this purpose, we’ll be using the map on copyright law, which I
hope is by now familiar to you. As I mentioned, during this survey I’ll highlight the ways in which
the rules governing the different kinds of things now subject to copyright protection vary, and
how, as a result, the business models associated with those types of works also differ. The
underlying thesis, to repeat, is that the copyright system is disaggregated.
As the map indicates, the statutory basis for the subject matter coverage of copyright is
Section 102 of the federal statute. In the first lecture in this series, we discussed subsection
102(b), which embodies, as we saw there, the idea/expression distinction, and related grounds
for excluding work from copyright protection. We now focus on 102(a), which details the kinds
of things that copyrighted law includes. As you can see, the language of 102(a) is capacious. It
itemizes various kinds of things that are subject to copyright protection, but it also includes a
blanket clause indicating that quote “original works of authorship, of any sort, can be
protected”. In other words, the itemized list below is non-exhaustive.

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 17 USC § 102 Subject matter of copyright: In general

(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accord-ance with this title, in original works of
authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed,
from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise com-municated, either
directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the
following categories:

(1) literary works;

(2) musical works, including any accompany-ing words;

(3) dramatic works, including any accom-panying music;

(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;

(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;

(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

(7) sound recordings; and

(8) architectural works.

(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to
any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or
discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, il-lustrated, or
embodied in such work.

The first entry in the itemized list consists of literary works. Such works are often thought
to be the heart of copyright protection. Included in this category are many things you would
naturally think of as literary – for example, novels, short stories, poems, newspaper or magazine
articles, and so forth. Also included are some less obvious things, such as catalogs, and, as we
saw earlier, advertising copy. Last, but not least, the term “literary works” is now construed to
incorporate computer software. The history and economic implications of this highly counter-
intuitive interpretation are very complicated.
Here’s a brief introduction to the topic of software, a subject to which we’ll return several
times. Before plunging into the details of the law, it’s important to differentiate the kinds of
activities that some – not all – software firms hope to curb.
The first consists of consumer reproduction of object code. By object code, I mean the
collection of ones and zeros that embody the working version of the program. By consumer
reproduction, I mean the behavior of individual software users. So, for example, if I borrowed a

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disc that you had purchased containing PowerPoint or Final Activities that some software
Cut Pro and made a copy of one of those programs onto my firms hope to curb
own laptop hard drive, my behavior would fall into this first 1. Consumer reproduction of
category. Commercial reproduction of object code consists of
object code.
the same conduct on a commercial scale. The vendors on the
2. Commercial reproduction
streets of Beijing or Rio selling discs containing pirated versions
of the Microsoft Office Suite are engaged in commercial of object code.
reproduction of object code. Much different is the activity of 3. Incorporation of parts of
incorporating parts of the source code of a software program source code in new
into a new program. Source code is the version of the program programs (AKA “follow-on
in a human-readable language, typically the language which
copying”).
was originally written before it was converted or compiled into
4. “Nonliteral” copying.
object code. Copying portions of the source code is sometimes
known as follow-on copying. This behavior includes a wide
range of behavior, from the creation of modestly improved versions of existing programs, to the
creation of radically new programs that incorporate small bits of existing programs. Fourth and
finally, some developers – not all – wish to prevent what is sometimes referred to as “non-
literal” copying. This consists of the creation of new programs that have the same structure,
sequence, or organization as existing programs, but use none of the code of the existing
programs. Suppose, for example, that I created a program that worked exactly like Photoshop,
enabling me to compete with Adobe, but I wrote my own code from scratch, my conduct would
fall into this fourth category. The reason for differentiating these four categories is that, as we’ll
see often during this course, both the legal doctrines and the policy issues that they raise differ
considerably.
Now let’s turn to the law. The history of efforts to use law to discourage or penalize the
behaviors I just summarized proceeded roughly as follows. In the 1950s and ‘60s, when the
computer industry was just getting off the ground, a few integrated firms provided – typically
industrial – customers both hardware and associated software. These products typically were
task-specific, and thus were often customized for each client. The sellers and buyers of software
were usually – though not always – in contractual privity. Under this combination of
circumstances, the existing law of trade secrecy provided reasonably good protection against
competitors. Typically, the software and hardware firms would provide their customers copies of
the object code of their programs while retaining the source code. US courts ruled that public
distribution of object code did not result in forfeiture of trade secrecy protection, so long as the
source code was kept secret and was reasonably hard to reverse engineer. The combination of
trade secret law and the concentrated structure of the software industry made non-permissive
copying rare. Gradually, however, the effectiveness of trade secrecy protection diminished.
Several factors were at work. They included the gradual improvement of decompilers, which
facilitated reverse engineering, the increased demand from customers for access to source code,
and the fact that, in any event, trade secrecy does not inhibit verbatim reproduction of object

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code which is made public. Some firms responded to these changing conditions by increasing
their reliance on the law of contracts. They began to demand that their customers agree to
various contractual restrictions on their ability to reproduce, modify, or redistribute the
programs provided to them. This strategy also worked reasonably well for a while, but its
effectiveness was undermined by two circumstances. First, the firms came increasingly to
depend not upon expressed voluntary acceptance of contractual terms by their customers, but
instead upon so-called “shrink wrap” or “click-through” licenses. The phrase “shrink-wrapped
license” refers to, ostensibly, contractual commitments that were printed on the outside of the
boxes that were sold to customers. A common term provided that, by breaking the cellophane
that enclosed the boxes, the buyer agreed to all the other provisions. The validity of such
commitments was far from certain. A decades-long struggle to settle this question was, in the
end, inconclusive. If you’re curious about the details of that struggle, including the efforts of a
group of academics to prevent the modification of the Uniform Commercial Code that would
have resolved the matter in favor of the software firms, follow the link in the map associated
with the topic Contracts.
The second limitation of contracts, from the standpoint of the software firms, grows out
of the peculiar structure of the law of federalism in the United States. Briefly, contract law is
state law, whereas copyright law is federal law, and under some circumstances, federal law will
trump or preempt state law. Skeptics of contractual limitations on modifications or
redistribution of software sometimes challenge those limitations on the grounds that they were
preempted. Another struggle, this time over the scope of copyright preemption, ensued. Most of
the cases that were fought over this issue eventually upheld contractual limitations against
preemption challenges, but the controversy undermined the overall effectiveness of this
approach.
By the late 1970s, the structure of the software industry was changing fast. The increased
use of integrated circuits and microprocessors made the price of microcomputers drop rapidly.
No longer was software produced and sold primarily by the hardware manufacturers. Instead,
separate software firms began manufacturing and distributing both operating systems and
application programs designed to run on devices produced by other firms. These changes,
combined with increased dissatisfaction with trade secrecy and contracts – the reasons I just
suggested – prompted some software firms to seek increased protection from the law of
copyright.
Initially, copyright law was not very hospitable. To be sure, as early as 1964, the register of
copyrights in the United States had expressed a willingness to register copyrights in software,
but several uncertainties in the relevant law and procedural hurdles limited usage of this option.
As of 1977, a total of only 1,200 programs had been registered, 80% percent of them by either
IBM or Burroughs. In 1974, as part of the long ramp-up to the ’76 general reform of the
copyright statute, Congress created a commission known as CONTU to consider the extent to
which copyright protection for software should be clarified and expanded. The 1976 act itself
recognized copyright protection for software, but did not settle all issues. CONTU’s 1978 report,

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which was adopted and implemented by Congress in 1980, cleaned things up. The net result was
that software developers came to enjoy, in the United States, all of the entitlements enjoyed by
authors of other, more traditional works. Europe soon followed suit. And finally, copyright
protection for software was mandated by the TRIPS Agreement, and is, thus, now close to
universal. This is not the end of the story, however. Copyright protection to not proved to be a
panacea, partially confirming the arguments raised by CONTU’s critics, who thought copyright
protection for software was a bad idea from the beginning. The limitations of copyright
prompted a subset of software firms to press for patent protection, first in the United States,
then in Europe. They met with only mixed success. How and why copyright law proved less than
ideal is a large and important question, which we’ll take up in another lecture.
Figure 15 is a timeline showing when the various forms of intellectual property for
software were introduced into law.

Figure 15: A timeline of the creation of forms of intellectual property for software

3.2. Drama and Choreography

Dramatic works are almost as close to the heart of copyright law as literary works. The premier
example of a dramatic work is, of course, a play. As you might expect, you may not reproduce
the script of a play without the permission of the owner of the copyright in it. Nor may you
publicly perform the play without the owner’s permission. This rule is not always honored, but
the rule itself is clear enough.
Choreography is a much more recent addition to the catalog. One of the reasons for its
late arrival is that the particular dances whose status was considered in some of the early
litigated cases happened to offend the judges making those decisions. For example, in the Dane
case, which was decided by the New York Supreme Court in 1963, the work at issue was a mock
strip tease that the plaintiff developed and then performed during an audition for the musical
Gypsy. The court refused to extend copyright protection to this routine, reasoning,

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 The words dramatic or dramatico-musical composition as used in the statute must be
held to include only those representations and exhibitions which tend at least to
promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Where a performance contains
nothing of literary dramatic or musical character which is calculated to elevate,
cultivate, inform, or improve the moral or intellectual natures of the audience, it does
not tend to promote the progress of science or the useful arts. Thus, not everything put
on stage can be subject to copyright. While the plaintiff’s performance was no doubt
amusing and entertaining to many, it does not fall within the purview of the statute as
a production tending to promote the progress of science and the useful arts

Recall our discussion in lecture number one of the principle of aesthetic neutrality, which
is commonly traced in the 1903 Bleistein case. The passage I just read is one of the many
examples of judges ignoring that ostensible principle altogether. The unfortunate effect of such
cases is that some famous and deserving choreographers were left out in the cold. For example,
Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma, which was – and deserved to be – one of the most
popular musicals of all time. Her dances – in particular, the dream ballet – contributed
importantly to the plot of the play. She was paid a modest contract price by the producers,
reportedly $15,000. However, unlike Rogers and Hammerstein, who composed the musical score
for the play, de Mille received no royalties when it was produced, because her choreography,
unlike their musical compositions, enjoyed no copyright protection. The gap in the law – the
absence of protection for choreography – was filled as part of a comprehensive 1976 reform,
which became effective the start of 1978. The result is that today, choreographers enjoy the
same copyright protection as do playwrights. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear what
constitutes choreography. What about figure skating routines, for example? The statute itself
does not define the term. The Copyright Office has developed its own definition:

Choreography is the composition and arrangement of dance movements and patterns,

usually intended to be accompanied by music. As distinct from choreography,
pantomime is the act of imitating or acting out situations, characters, or other events.
To be protected by copyright, pantomimes and choreography need not tell a story or be
presented before an audience.

Courts, when construing the copyright statute, are not bound by this administrative
decision. But they tend to give it weight. As dance and performance art continue to evolve in the
future, tricky questions concerning the scope of this definition are likely to arise with increased
frequency.

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 In the United States, choreographers face one more hurdle if they are to secure copyright
protection for their works. They have to capture their routines in some stable medium. As you
can see from the language of section 102a, copyright in the United States extends only to works
that are “fixed in a tangible medium of expression”. This so-called fixation requirement is
peculiar to the US. Most countries have no such rule. So, what does fixation mean? The term is
defined in Section 101.

A work is fixed in a tangible medium when its embodiment in a copy or phono record by
or under the authority of the author is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to
be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than
transitory duration. A work consisting of sounds, images, or both that are being
transmitted is fixed for the purposes of this title if a fixation of the work is being made
simultaneously with this transmission.

The overwhelming majority of works for which authors might seek copyright protection
easily satisfy this standard. Novelists typically write their novels down. Photographers capture
their images in negatives, prints, digital files, and so forth. However, on occasion, potentially
copyrightable works fail to qualify for protection because their creators neglect this
requirement. So, for example, if a jazz musician in a live, unrecorded performance improvises in
an original way on a classic public domain composition, that musician will get no copyright
protection in his innovation. As a matter, this means that a member of the audience, after
hearing the performance, is free to perform or record it himself without fear of copyright
liability.
Here’s a hypothetical case that may suggest the scope of the fixation requirement. A
mandala is a highly-detailed painting typically made out of fine-grained colored sand by Buddhist
monks or priests. Mandalas represent the dwelling spaces of tantric deities. Most are elaborate,
and require a long time to create, but they don’t last long. If they’re jostled, they disappear.
More importantly, it’s conventional, after completing a mandala, to undo it by pouring the sand
into a body of water, often a river. Among other things, this custom emphasizes the
impermanence of possessions and the importance of not being too attached to them.
Traditionally, mandalas were created and dissolved in private religious ceremonies. Recently,
however, the Dalai Lama has encouraged monks to create them in public, in part to educate
people about the culture. Some have been created, briefly, in the United States. In the unlikely
event that a creator of a mandala sought copyright protection in it, would he trip over the
fixation requirement? In other words, would he lose because this work was not fixed in a
tangible medium of expression? Probably not. A mandala is not fixed in the ordinary sense, but it
would seem to qualify under the statutory definition. Its embodiment in sand is “sufficiently
stable to permit it to be perceived or reproduced for a period of more than transitory duration,”
as is evidenced by the existence of the photo above. Parenthetically, the monk might trip over a

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 Figure 16: Buddhist monks from the Namgyal Monastery creating a sand mandala

separate requirement for copyright – namely, the originality requirement discussed in lecture
number one. The reason is that the mandalas created by monks typically replicate traditional
designs. But the fixation requirement would probably not be a problem.
Returning to the topic at hand. The primary form of creative work that with some
frequency does run afoul of the fixation requirement is choreography. The reason is that
choreographers commonly fail to write down their innovations. In part, this is because it used to
be difficult to do so. Dance notation has existed for a long time, but it’s cumbersome and
incomplete. Nowadays, it’s easier to fix a choreographic work. The standard method is to
videotape a rehearsal. Nevertheless, some choreographers still forget this. In the United States,
the result is that they forfeit copyright protection.
Stepping back from this example. What underlies the fixation requirement in general?
There are two standard answers, but neither is particularly persuasive. The first answer is that
the language of the constitutional provision that, in the United States, underlies copyright law,
limits its scope to “writings.” An ephemeral work, it is sometimes said, does not qualify as a
writing. In light of how broadly the term writing is construed in other contexts – to incorporate,
as we’ve seen, software and photos, for example – this textual argument seems weak. The
second explanation is that there’s an important policy underlying the requirement of fixation –
namely, that it serves an evidentiary function. Supposedly, it forces authors and artists to write
down their works and the result is to provide judges and juries who are called upon to resolve
subsequent disputes good information concerning what exactly those works contained.
This argument is a branch of a policy argument one finds in many fields of the law. The
basic idea is that formalities have important social functions. So, for example, the rule found in
many jurisdictions that a will indicating who gets your property on your death must be written

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down and signed by two disinterested witnesses serves to caution people concerning the
importance of what they’re doing when they create wills, channels their behavior into standard
forms that are more easily implemented, and, again, provides good evidence concerning what
they intended. The conventional justification of the fixation requirement in copyright law fits
easily into this family of policy arguments. That conventional justification is also, however,
vulnerable to the standard retort – namely, that formalities are largely ineffective if people are
unaware of them, which tends to happen when people are not “repeat players.” If many artists –
and many choreographers in particular – are unaware the fixation requirement, it’s unlikely to
have a socially beneficial disciplining effect. A further indication that the fixation requirement is
unnecessary can be gleaned from the fact that most countries apparently get along just fine
without it.

3.3. Music
Copyrights in music differ from copyrights in literary and dramatic works in several ways.
Perhaps the most important is that there are two different kinds of copyrights that involve
music. The more traditional of the two are copyrights in musical compositions. As you can see,
section 102 (a), refers to these as copyrights in musical works, including any accompanying
words. These have been around for a very long time. The second type, which was added to the
federal copyright statute only in 1972, consists of copyrights in sound recordings. As I mentioned
earlier, in most countries legal rights to sound recordings are known as neighboring rights. In the
United States, however, they are referred to as copyrights.
The legal rights associated with these two types of copyrights and the complex business
models that capitalize on those rights are perhaps best seen by tracing the life history of a
typical piece of popular music. I’m going to tell this hypothetical story using a diagram (Figure
17). As you’ll soon see, the narrative is complicated. Don’t be discouraged if not all features of
the story are clear right now. We’ll return to it several times during this lecture series.
Imagine that I’m a pretty good composer, but not much of a musician. I compose a song.
It has a memorable melody and some conventional sentimental lyrics. I wrote it down on some
sheet music, so I satisfy the fixation requirement. I thereby, as you know, acquire a copyright in
my composition. I could if I wanted retain ownership of my copyright, but as a typical composer I
lack the business skills or time necessary to exploit it effectively. So instead, as is now customary
in the United States, I sign all of my rights to a music publisher. There are tens of thousands of
these in this country. From this point forward in the story, the publisher will retain the copyright
and the composition. In other words, the publisher will not assign it further. Rather, the
publisher will make money for itself and for me by issuing licenses to a variety of other
organizations – in other words, permissions to engage in activities that otherwise would violate
copyright. The most important of these licenses consist of the right to make so-called
mechanical copies of the composition. Typically, such a mechanical license will be issued to a
record company, which is interested in making and selling sound recordings of my composition.
The independent rights of the musician who actually makes that recording we’ll discuss in a

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 Figure 17: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of music works
(compositions), and their interactions

minute. Back to the narrative, the publisher could in principle enter into such a license with the
record company on its own, but it’s customary in the United States to use the services of an
intermediary, namely the Harry Fox Agency.
If the CD and other products embodying the recording of my song are commercially
successful, the music publisher, who as we saw now holds the copyright in it, will begin to
exploit other licensing opportunities. For example, the publisher will likely issue a reproduction
license to one of the four major sheet music printers in the United States, which will then print
and sell sheet music, which in turn will be purchased by amateur guitarists who want to learn
how to play my song. If the song is sufficiently popular and evocative that a movie studio wants
to include in the soundtrack of a movie, then the music publisher and the studio will negotiate a
so-called synchronization, or sync, license. If there’s demand for my music in other countries, the
publisher will likely issue a so-called sub-publishing license to a similar publisher in one or more
other countries. The terms of these several contracts will vary, but it’s typical for the music
publisher to turn over to me half of the license revenues it earns from these various sources,
keeping the remainder, of course, for itself.
So now let’s return to the musician, the performer, whose recorded rendition of my song
is crucial to the success of my composition (refer to Figure 21). As I mentioned earlier, the
creative contributions of the performer will generate a second independent copyright in the

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sound recording. It’s possible that the performer will have to share that copyright with a sound
engineer, but we’ll put that nuance to one side. As was true of the composer, it would be
possible for the performer to retain that copyright, but at least until quite recently, it was
customary for performers to enter into so-called recording contracts with record companies.
Such recording contracts also have many complex terms, some of which are likely to be onerous
which we’ll discuss in a few weeks. The central term, however, is straightforward. The performer
assigns his copyright in the sound recording to the record company. By now I hope the color
scheme of this chart is apparent. The blue figures represent artists, the people who make
creative contributions to the finished product. These are the folks who, in the rhetoric of
copyright law, are commonly referred to as creators. Red designates an assignee of a copyright.
Purple designates a licensee, and yellow designates an intermediary. Arrows signify transfers of
legal rights. As you can see, the legal position of the record company is the most complex. For
the reasons I’ve sketched, the record companies occupy two legal positions – it’s the assignee of
the sound recording copyright and one of the licensees of the musical composition copyright.
That’s why it’s shown in the chart as half red and half purple.
We’re not done yet, however. The music publisher, which, to repeat, holds the copyright
in the original composition, enjoys one additional valuable entitlement, namely the exclusive
right to authorize so-called “public performances” of the composition. Such performances
include playing the song at a park or a theater and more importantly, broadcasts of recordings of
the composition.
If the recording distributed by the record company is popular, several companies are likely
interested in making such public performances. They include radio stations, perhaps television
stations, restaurants that play music in the background, and nowadays webcasters.

Figure 18: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of sound recordings, and their interactions

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 The publisher could in principle negotiate individual licenses with these companies, but
that would be time consuming and inefficient. So instead, the publisher will almost certainly use
an intermediary to manage its public performance rights. In most countries there’s only one
such intermediary, but in the United States there happen to be three. They are known as BMI,
ASCAP, and SESAC. They’re called Performing Rights Organizations, or PROs. Whichever PRO the
publisher selects will issue so-called blanket licenses to all of the companies that I mentioned
earlier. The reason these are called blanket licenses is that instead of paying a small fee for each
song it plays, the licensee pays a flat fee – typically a small percentage of its gross revenues – to
perform any of the compositions in the PRO’s repertoire. The PRO then pays to the music
publisher a slice of the total amount of the license fees it collects, a slice roughly proportional to
the relative frequency with which my song is played. And the publisher in turn gives half of that
slice to me. The net result – the more popular a song, the more money flows to the publisher
and to the composer. Notice again the color scheme. Yellow indicates an intermediary. Purple
indicates a licensee.
Do the radio and television stations, restaurants, and webcasters shown in the lower left
of this chart have to pay license fees not just to the music publisher at the top but also to the
record company in the bottom right? In most countries, the answer would be yes. After all, a
radio station when it plays a song is performing not just the composition whose copyright is held
by the publisher, but also the recording of a particular rendition of the song whose copyright,
otherwise known as a neighboring right, is owned by the record company. It would seem to
make sense for the radio station to pay both copyright owners, and in most countries it must.
Nevertheless, in the United States radio stations engaged in traditional analog broadcasting do
not make such payments. The reason is that in the United States, the owner of a copyright in the
sound recording, unlike the owners of copyrights in other sorts of works, does not enjoy an
exclusive right of public performance.
You’ll recall that I discussed this unusual feature of US law briefly in lecture number one
and the tensions it creates between the United States and the member countries of the Rome
Convention. The principal reason for the anomalous position of the United States on this issue is
that in 1972, when sound recordings were first given federal copyright protection, broadcasters
in the United States had considerable lobbying power, and they successfully blocked adoption of
a public performance right for sound recordings. That political explanation is buttressed by a
plausible policy argument. The broadcasters argue that they shouldn’t have to pay license fees
to the record companies because they argue broadcast of songs help the record companies by
bringing those songs to the attention of potential purchasers of records, CDs, and so forth. In
other words, the promotional benefit of broadcast substitutes for a license fee. Record
companies, not surprisingly, disagree.
In 1996 and 1998, the record companies succeeded in obtaining from Congress a partial
modification of this longstanding rule, specifically by securing an amendment to the copyright
statute that gave them public performance rights for their sound recordings. However, that
amendment was limited to performances that occurred in the form of a digital audio

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transmission. The upshot is that today, when webcasters perform recorded music digitally over
the internet they must pay license fees to the record companies. How those license fees are
calculated we’ll discuss in lecture number eight. For the time being, you need to know only that
this legal relationship is managed by yet another intermediary, the organization SoundExchange.
Record companies have not been satisfied by this adjustment to the statute. They want full-
blown public performance rights, which would enable them to charge traditional radio stations,
large restaurants, and so forth who make use of their recordings. Congressmen sympathetic to
their position periodically introduce bills that if adopted would have that effect. The name of the
most recent version of this proposed legislation is the Performance Rights Act. Shown in Figure
19 is the press release by the trade association of the recording companies welcoming the
introduction of this legislation. Notice the reference to the difference between the situation in
the United States and the situation in most countries.

Figure 19: Press release by the

Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) welcoming the
introduction of the Performance
Rights Act

RIAA Applauds Introduction of New Performance Rights Legislation

WASHINGTON – The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a member of

the musicFIRST Coalition (www.musicfirstcoalition.org), applauded the introduction of
bipartisan, bicameral legislation requiring that FM and AM broadcasters, like their
satellite and online competitors and like virtually every other industrialized nation in
the world, fairly compensate musicians and labels when music is played on the radio.

The broadcasters, for their part, continue to push back. Set forth in Figure 20 is their own
summary of their stance. Notice that they continue to emphasize the “free promotion” that

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they’re providing record companies. And notice also their strategic characterization of the
proposed legislation as a tax. Finally, you’ll see that they too have a group of sympathetic
congressmen.

Figure 20: Press release by the

National Association of
Broadcasters (NAB) opposing the
introduction of the Performance
Rights Act

A Performance Tax Puts Local Jobs at Risk

Issue

During the past two Congresses, at the behest of the big record labels, a bill was
introduced to impose a new performance fee, or tax, on local radio broadcasters. The
Performance Rights Act would have imposed a devastating new government mandated
fee on local stations simply for airing music on the radio – airing the music that
provides free promotion to the labels and performers. A performance tax could
financially cripple local radio stations putting jobs at risk, stifle new artists trying to
break into the recording business and harm the listening public who rely on local radio.
To date, no performance tax legislation has been formally re-introduced in the 112th
Congress, although Rep. Nadler (NY-08) recently circulated a draft bill to the same
effect.

For better or worse, this is a reasonably good illustration of the way in which lobbying
over copyright typically works. For more details concerning the still ongoing negotiation over this
particular issue, follow the link shown on the left-hand side of these two slides.

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 So, that in brief is the pattern of legal rights in the US recorded music industry. The
arrows, as I’ve indicated, show transfers of legal entitlements. For the most part, money flows
between organizations through the channels cut by the legal rights (see Figure 21), with one
exception. For a long time, record companies have paid radio stations significant amounts of
money, known informally as payola, to induce them to play the record company’s recordings
over the airwaves, lending credence to the broadcasters’ contention that radio play serves as an
effective form of advertising. At its peak, roughly $100 million a year flow through this channel.
Legal impediments to such payments have been slowly increasing for decades, and enforcement
of those legal impediments has also been increasing. For a while, record companies evaded
these tightening rules by using third-party intermediaries, known confusingly as indies, to make
their payments, but this loophole is also shrinking. Today much less money is flowing through
this channel than was true 40 or even 10 years ago, but the river has not dried up completely.
One final dimension of this legal and financial system merits emphasis. I mentioned earlier
that the most important of the licenses issued by the music publisher is the so-called mechanical
license that it grants to the record company. Suppose, to return to our story, that the first
commercial recording of my song proved so popular that a second musician affiliated with a
different record company wants to do a cover of the song, meaning a new rendition of it. Does
the second record company have to obtain a separate mechanical license from the publisher?
The answer is, you might suppose, yes. However, the second record company is not obliged to
negotiate a voluntary license with a music publisher. Rather, so long as the second record
company pays a modest fee just set by the government, it’s free to make and distribute a new

Figure 21: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of sound recordings and the payments between
them (in green)

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recording, and neither I nor the music publisher can object. Currently that fee is about $0.09 per
copy sold of the new recording, more if it’s a long song. Separate fees apply to ringtones and
recordings delivered to customers through interactive streaming.
This is the first example we’ve seen in this series of lectures of a so-called “compulsory
license”. We’ll see several more in future lectures. Not surprisingly, the central feature of a
compulsory license is that the copyright owner is compelled to issue it. It has no choice but to
accept the governmentally set fee. Typically, that fee is lower than the amount the owner would
demand if the license were voluntary. Equally important, a compulsory license deprives the
copyright owner of creative control. Suppose, for example, that I or the music publisher acting
on my behalf don’t like the second sound recording artist and think he will butcher my song. As a
result, I’d prefer not to grant him a license of any sort. Nevertheless, neither I nor the publisher
can refuse.
To be sure, the statutory provision that creates this rule contains a few limitations, one of
which is that the second recording artist may not “change the basic melody or fundamental
character of the work”. But that restriction is construed very leniently. Here’s an example that
illustrates the application of this rule and its cultural impact. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix composed the
song “Little Wing.” He and his group, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, recorded the song on their
1967 album, “Axis: Bold as Love”. In terms of our diagram, Hendrix occupied both of the blue
zones because he was both the composer and the performer of the song. This is reasonably
common in rock music. Compositions that fit this pattern are known as controlled compositions.
The contracts typically used to handle them differ modestly from the contracts we’ve discussed
thus far, but not in ways that merit our attention right now. I’m going to play the famous
opening segment of Hendrix’s composition, so listen carefully.

[Music: Jimmy Hendrix, “Little Wing”.]

(Lyrics) Well she’s walking through the clouds with a circus mind that’s running wild.

This song has inspired generations of musicians. A few of the many commercially
distributed covers are shown in Table 2. Some of these covers could fairly be described as
faithful adaptations that preserved the essential character of Hendrix’s original. An example
might be the version by Santana and Joe Cocker. Here it is.

[Music: Santana and Joe Cocker, “Little Wing”.]

(Lyrics) Well she’s walking through the clouds with a circus mind that’s running wild.

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 Hendrix himself might also have been pleased Table 2: Selected “Covers” of Hendrix, Little Wing
by the extraordinary instrumental recording of the
song by Stevie Ray Vaughan, one of the few guitarists ▪ Allman Brothers ▪ Def Leppard
better than Hendrix himself. So, if you don’t know the ▪ Eric Clapton ▪ Kirk Hammett
recording, pay close attention because this is one of ▪ Sting (Metallica)
the best guitar solos of all time. [Music: Stevie Ray ▪ Steve Ray Vaughn ▪ Tuck & Patti
Vaughan, “Little Wing”.] Not all covers come as close
▪ Nigel Kennedy ▪ Stanley Jordan
to Hendrix’s original vision. Some would likely have
▪ The Corrs ▪ Divididos
set his teeth on edge. Examples include Laurence
▪ Laurence Juber ▪ John Mayer
Juber’s acoustic rendition, which is technically very
impressive but suburban or new age in mood, or The ▪ Santana & Joe
Corrs’ pop rendition. Here’s a slice of the latter. Cocker

[Music: The Corrs, “Little Wing”.]

(Lyrics) Now she’s walking through the clouds with a circus mind that’s running wild.
Butterflies and zebras, moonbeams and fairy tales. All she ever thinks about is riding
with the wind.

I hope you’ll recall from the last lecture our discussion of the powerful bond that many
artists feel with their creations. That bond, you’ll remember, prompted the sculptor Michael
Snow to object when ribbons were hung on the necks of his geese and underlay Gary Larson’s
plea to his fans not to use his cartoons in their websites. The law, as we saw, often comes to the
aid of such artists, particularly in countries that recognize strong versions of moral rights. By
contrast, the law, and consequently the culture, of the music industry is radically different.
Composers know that once they have authorized the commercial distribution of one recording
of their composition they could no longer enjoy what in moral-rights terms is referred to as a
right of integrity. In other words, they can’t prevent other musicians from altering their creations
by making and distributing covers, some of which will be very different from the versions the
composers had in mind. Nor may the first recording artist object when a second recording artist
makes a cover. Interestingly neither composers nor performers seem especially troubled by this
prospect. And the legal privilege of making covers has an important cultural benefit. Each
generation of musicians can test their skills, can show their chops, by attempting their own
recorded renditions of the classic works of their predecessors. Now to be sure, they have to pay
a modest fee when they sell recordings of their adaptations, but they don’t have to ask
permission.
Does this seemingly fundamental difference between music on the one hand and other
fields of art reflect differences in the nature of the cultural products in question? For example,
the fact that most sculptures are unique, whereas sound recordings can be replicated

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indefinitely. Alternatively, have the feelings and expectations of composers and musicians
evolved in response to the relatively unprotective rules that govern – at least in the US music
industry? These are hard questions, and I don’t know the answers. The answers matter. For
example, if the first explanation is right, we should probably reexamine the contention of the
directors of black-and-white classic movies that they should be able to block colorization of their
masterpieces, a contention that some countries, not including the United States, currently
respect. By contrast, if the second explanation is right, we may need to reconsider just how deep
are the psychic bonds celebrated by the personality theory of copyright.

3.4. Audiovisual Works

The next type of copyrightable work on the list consists of motion pictures and other audiovisual
works. A motion picture is defined in the statute as an audiovisual work consisting of a series of
related images, which, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion, together
with accompanying sounds, if any. Some audiovisual works, such as film strips or sets of slides,
don’t fit this narrow definition. But that doesn’t make much difference in practice, because the
copyrights in all audiovisual works are handled in basically the same way.
Fortunately for our purposes, the legal rules governing copyrights in motion pictures are
simpler than the rules governing copyrights in music. But the business models that depend upon
motion picture copyrights are at least this intricate. Again, I’ll use a diagram to sketch the main
features of those rules and models. In this lecture, I’ll give you a quick overview of the structure.
Then, in subsequent lectures, we’ll return to specific sectors of this structure, and discuss the
rules and controversies that have arisen in those sectors.
As we saw, a typical piece of recorded music implicates two copyrights – the copyright in
the musical composition and the copyright in the sound recording. Much of the complexity in
the music industry arises out of the complex relationship between those two rights. By contrast,
in the typical film, there exists only one copyright – in the motion picture itself. In the United
States, this copyright is ordinarily owned by the producer of the film (refer to Figure 22).
Sometimes that producer will be an individual person. More often, the producer will consists of
a company, which creates the film, aided by a motion picture studio, which typically finances
and distributes it. Finally, the producer is sometimes a branch or subsidiary of the studio itself. In
this presentation I’ll assume the producer is an independent company.
To create the film, the producer, of course, needs the assistance of myriad artists –
screenwriters, actors, directors, and so forth. Do those artists share in the copyright in the film?
In some countries, the answer is yes. And then complex contractual arrangements are necessary
to acquire all of their rights. In the United States, by contrast, the answer is no. Copyright in the
film is owned by the producer, which hires the various artists. The character of the deals used by
the producer to assemble the creative contributions of the artists vary. Suppose, for example,
the producer wishes to adapt an already-existing novel. The producer might negotiate an
assignment of the copyright in the novel – indeed, we’ll see an example of this in a minute – but

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 Figure 22: Parties involved in the copyrighting and licensing of movies, and their interactions

that’s rare. It’s much more likely that the producer will obtain a license to make a so-called
derivative work based upon the novel, leaving the copyright in the hands of the novelist.
What about the screenwriters, actors, director, and composer, whose work is, of course,
essential to convert the novel into a motion picture? Decades ago, it was common for the
producer or studio to hire such people as long-term employees, in which case their creative
contrib utions would belong to the producer or studio. Today, by contrast, these relationships
are more likely to be arm’s-length, but the legal outcome is similar. The way in which this is
achieved today is 66uthori h so-called work-for-hire agreements, which we’ll examine in detail
in lecture number five. If the movie is filmed on site, rather than in a studio lot, the producer
customarily obtains – and pays for – releases from the owners of the buildings that will appear in
the background of the scenes. It’s far from clear that such releases are legally required. Lawyers
for the producers typically take the position that the owners of the buildings have no
enforceable rights, and, thus, that the producer could, if it wished, make and show the film
without paying them anything. However, the insurance companies that provide the producers’
so-called errors and omissions insurance tend to be highly risk-averse, and demand that the
producers obtain these releases. If the producer wishes to include an existing sound recording in
the soundtrack of the movie, the producer will obtain a so-called master use license from the
record company that owns the copyright in the sound recording, and a synchronization license
from the music publisher that, as we saw, owns the copyright in the composition embodying the
recording.
What do these various artists and copyright owners obtain in return for entering into
these contracts and licenses? In most cases, they’re paid a negotiated flat fee. However, a few of

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the most important contributors – for example, the key actors and perhaps the director – may
negotiate a share of the back-end profits generated by the film. So, to return to our story, the
producer, which now owns the copyright in the completed film, typically enters into a perpetual
worldwide – sometimes universewide – distribution agreement with a major motion picture
studio. Like the music publisher, who figured so prominently in the previous section of this
lecture, the studio then typically makes money by issuing a series of licenses to companies that
wish to present the film to consumers in one way or another. Typically, the first set of such
licenses is granted to theaters, which then show the film to their patrons, collecting box office
revenues. The terms of the deals between the studios and the theaters have changed
dramatically over time. Nowadays, when the dust settles, typically between 40% and 50% of the
revenues collected by the theaters are paid to the studios. When attendance in theaters begins
to decline, the studio is likely to enter into similar licenses with pay TV companies, airlines, and
so forth, permitting them to show the film to their subscribers or passengers. Next, the studio
will probably grant a similar license to a television network, which will broadcast the film –
leavened, of course, with advertisements – to the public at large. Cable companies may pick up
the network signals, and relay the broadcast to their own customers. When they do so, they
have to pay the studios fees. But the amounts of those fees are governed by another
compulsory licensing system of the sort we discussed in connection with the music industry.
More on this later.
The studio then may begin to exploit ancillary sources of revenue, which are increasingly
valuable. For example, it may issue a mechanical license to a record company, which will
produce CDs and other products containing the recording of the soundtrack of the movie. The
studio may authorize a merchandise manufacturer to make and sell dolls, lunch boxes,
backpacks, and other products, based upon the characters or plot of the movie. Sometimes,
advertisers will pay to use components of the film in their ads.
Last, but not least, the studio will likely authorize sales of copies of the film to video stores
and, now, online distributors, which will make them available, either by sale or rental, to
customers.
We’ll return later to several litigated cases that implicate one or another part of this
overall business model.

3.5. Fictional Characters

A relatively recent addition to the set of copyrightable works consists of fictional characters. A
character described in a larger fictional work, such as a novel or a movie, now enjoys copyright
protection independent of the work in which he or she appears. The primary practical
implication of this principle is that no one without permission may write a sequel to a fictional
narrative that includes one or more of the characters who appeared in the original. To be sure,
not all fictional characters get this protection. To qualify, a character must be important.
US courts have articulated two different tests for determining which characters are
shielded. The first test, commonly known as the Sam Spade Test, was announced long ago by the

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Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. To be protectable under this approach, a character must,
“constitute the story being told.” The facts of the case that prompted the Ninth Circuit to adopt
this restrictive approach were as follows: Dashiell Hammett, the author of the classic detective
story, The Maltese Falcon, assigned the copyright in the story to Warner Brothers, which made a
film based on the book. Subsequently, Hammett granted the copyright to the Sam Spade
character, older than his incarnation in The Maltese Falcon, to CBS. Warner Brothers brought
suit, contending that Sam Spade already belonged to Warner Brothers. The Ninth Circuit
eventually rejected this argument, announcing the Story Being Told Test and suggesting that
Sam Spade did not satisfy it. So that’s the first approach. The Ninth Circuit has never expressly
repudiated it; however, in several recent opinions, the court has implicitly distanced itself from
that approach, moving toward the rule applied in all other US jurisdictions, which is simpler and
more lenient. Under the second approach, a character is protected under copyright law so long
as he or she is well delineated.
Here’s a relatively recent controversy that suggests the scope of this doctrine.
Sylvester Stallone, as you probably know, wrote the scripts for each of the first three
Rocky movies. He then also played the role of the title character, Rocky Balboa. In each of the
three movies, Rocky is depicted as an underappreciated, sullen, but heroic boxer. In 1982,
Stallone and MGM were considering producing yet another, fourth, movie in the series. An
unaffiliated author by the name of Timothy Anderson wrote a script for such a fourth movie. The
central figure in the script was, of course, Rocky. This time, Rocky is depicted as fighting a
Russian boxer in a contest with strong nationalist overtones. MGM apparently seriously
considered using Anderson’s script, but eventually decided not to do so. When MGM and
Stallone eventually produced their own version of Rocky IV in which Rocky is depicted as fighting
a Russian, Anderson brought suit, contending that his copyright in his script was infringed by the
MGM Rocky IV movie. The district court rejected Anderson’s argument on several grounds, one
of which is central to the issue before us. In the court’s judgment, the character of Rocky clearly
satisfied both the old Sam Spade Test and the modern Well Delineated test. Indeed, in the
court’s judgment, this was obvious. The Rocky character, “has become identified,” says the
court, “with specific character traits ranging from his speaking mannerisms to his physical
characteristics.” Presumably, the court is here referring to Stallone’s famous physique, which is
more or less the same in all four of the movies. Anderson’s script, the court pointed out,
appropriated the character of Rocky without permission. Indeed, says the judge, the character
was “lifted lock, stock, and barrel from the prior Rocky movies.” As a result, Anderson’s script
constituted an infringing derivative work. In US copyright law, infringing derivative works are
denied copyright protection, at least if the material taken from the plaintiff’s work pervades the
infringing derivative. The net result was that even if the MGM Rocky IV movie closely tracked
Anderson’s script, Anderson could not prevail because his script was tainted by its unauthorized
inclusion of the copyrighted character, Rocky, and thus did not, itself, enjoy copyright
protection.

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 Application of these principles is reasonably straightforward in cases like Anderson’s, in
which the character at issue is stable and well-etched, and in which the defendant appropriates
that character verbatim. But many monitor modern controversies don’t fit this pattern. For
example, some of the most famous fictional characters evolve over the course of their
commercial careers. An important example would be Superman, whose depiction in the original
comic books changes as he becomes more popular, as the narrative associated with his
character shifts, and finally, when he becomes associated in the minds of the public at large with
the face and body of Christopher Reeve. Which, if any of the Superman incarnations, thus enjoys
copyright protection? Difficult to say. Here’s another complicating factor: it’s sometimes said
that a fictional character is more likely to enjoy protection if he or she is presented visually – as
in a comic book or movie – than if he or she is described in prose. But this advantage could
become a disadvantage if more than one actor plays the part of the character, thereby blurring
the character’s characteristics. The premier example is James Bond, who has now been
presented by six different actors. Tuxedos and a British accent can only go so far in obscuring the
differences among these depictions.
In circumstances of these two sorts, in which the character changes significantly over
time, or in which the character is associated with several different actors, does the character
forfeit copyright protection? Typically, no. Modern courts are quite forgiving of indeterminacy of
these sorts. Pretty much the only kind of character who will fail to qualify for copyright
protection nowadays is a lightly sketched, so-called stock character. In other words, a simple or
familiar stereotype. This exclusion, you will probably notice, is a cousin of the scenes a faire
doctrine, which we discussed in lecture number one, which denies copyright protection to an
image or scene that has become standard in a genre.
This exclusion doesn’t much matter, however, because there’s usually not much point in
appropriating stock characters.
So, to return to the main line, a crucial implication of the protectability of fictional
characters is that almost all fan fiction, which is increasingly common nowadays, is legally
problematic. Now, I hasten to add that fan fiction may escape liability under one of the
affirmative defenses to copyright infringement that we’ll discuss in detail in lecture number
nine. But the fact that fan fiction almost always lifts one or more character from a famous work
creates a legal risk.

3.6. Architectural Works

An important category of copyrighted work consists of works of visual art, which are known in
US law as pictorial, graphical and sculptural works – sometimes abbreviated as PGS works.
Included in this zone are, of course, paintings, posters, statues, and so forth. Most of the other
things that fall into this category are obvious. However, two dimensions of the protection
extended to PGS works are not obvious and merit closer attention.
The first is that nowadays copyright law is often used to shield the logos that
manufacturers apply to consumer products. Here's an example. The Omega watch company has

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obtained a US copyright on the design shown in Figure 23,
which it calls the Omega globe design. From lecture number,
one you should remember how and why a Swiss company
can get a US copyright. Omega engraves a version of this logo
on the underside of its watches, which are manufactured in
Switzerland. Omega then sells these watches all over the
world. Typically, it sells them for lower prices in poor
countries than it does in more wealthy countries. Some years
ago, Costco, using an intermediary, purchased some of the
watches that Omega had sold cheaply outside the United
Figure 23: Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale
States, imported them into the United States, and began
Corp. – the Omega globe design
selling them in its US stores for prices lower than those used
by Omega’s authorized US dealers. Omega brought suit contending that this so-called parallel
importation violated Omega’s copyright in the logo – not its trademark or patent rights, but its
copyright. Now, the legal rule underlying this lawsuit and the outcome of the suit we’ll consider
later when we discuss the rights of distribution and importation in lecture number eight. For
now, I just want to emphasize the expansive reach of the subject matter of copyright and how
companies like Omega have tried to use that expansive coverage to engage in geographic price
discrimination.
The second non-obvious dimension of the category of PGS works involves what is
sometimes called applied art or industrial design. Those terms refer, roughly, to three-
dimensional objects that are intended to be both useful and attractive. Objects of this sort
permeate modern consumer culture. Just look around the room or space where you are located
right now; most likely, you'll notice many objects that fit this general definition. Possibilities
include an unusual lamp, a container of bottled water, a distinctive coffee mug, the shape of a
laptop computer or tablet, your eyeglasses (if you wear them), a doorknob or window fixture, a
decorative table or chair, and so forth. Each of these things combines, in some way, art and
function. In the United States, three different systems of law are potentially available to the
creators of new objects of this sort. Copyright law, design patent law, and the protection that
trademark law extends to so-called “trade dress.” Some innovations qualify on more than one of
these systems, but others may fail to qualify under any. It depends on the shape and history of
the particular object and all too often on the whims of the tribunal evaluating that object. If
you're curious about the potential reach of design patent law or trademark law, feel free to
follow on your own the links in the relevant branches of the map using the interactive version of
the map available through the CopyrightX website. For obvious reasons, I'll concentrate in this
lecture on the possibility of copyright protection for objects of this sort.

The history of copyright as it pertains to three-dimensional works

1870: statute reaches three-dimensional “fine art”

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 Bleistein (1903): expansive, relativist conception of art

1909: statute reaches “works of art, models or design for works of art”

1910 – 1948: Copyright Office construes narrowly

Regulation § 202.8 (1948): works of art “include works of artistic craftsmanship, in so

far as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned”

Mazer (1954): uphold § 202.8

1959: Copyright Office adopts § 202.10I, incorporating separability principle

Courts develop concepts of physical and conceptual separability

In the late 19th century, it was clear that copyright law did not extend to works of this sort.
Three-dimensional works of fine art were shielded, but not the kind of consumer products to
which I directed your attention a minute ago. Then gradually, through a series of steps itemized
on the map (and above), Congress, the Copyright Office, and the courts liberalized the relevant
rules in the United States. Today, the governing general principle is that copyright protection is
available to so-called “useful articles” if, and only, if the aesthetic and functional features of the
article at issue are separable.
The first step in applying this principle is to determine whether a particular object qualifies
as a “useful article” within the meaning of the copyright statute. The reason why this initial
determination is so important is that if an object does not constitute a useful article then the
ordinary more lenient rules of copyright law apply, whereas if it does constitute a useful article it
has to pass more stringent tests. So what does “useful article” mean? The statute defines it as
follows: “an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the
appearance of the article or to convey information.” Some applications of this definition will be
straightforward. For example, Rodin’s sculpture does not constitute a useful article because its
function is to depict itself – to depict a thinker. By contrast, a lamp – no matter how beautiful –
is a useful article because it has a function other than looking good, namely illuminating the
room in which it's located. In other instances, however, application of this definition will be
trickier. If a particular object is deemed to fall into this special category then its creator gets
copyright protection, to repeat, only if its aesthetic and functional dimensions are separable.
How might they be separable? Traditionally there were two options. The first of these
options, which arises rarely, is that the aesthetic and functional dimensions might be physically
separable. For example, as the treatise writer Melville Nimmer suggests, the stylized Jaguar
shape that is attached to the hood of a Jaguar automobile enjoys copyright protection because it
can be physically removed from the car without impairing the car's utilitarian function. Likewise,
the utilitarian components of the car can be removed from the Jaguar without impairing its
aesthetic features. With respect to most useful articles, physical separability of this sort is not

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feasible. The creators of such objects may still obtain copyright protection, however, if they can
demonstrate that the aesthetic and utilitarian features are conceptually separable. So what does
that mean? The conceptual separability inquiry is the most
intriguing and least satisfying aspect of this doctrine. Until very Interpretations of conceptual
recently, the United States Supreme Court provided very little separability
guidance concerning how this concept should be interpreted 1. Is form dictated by
and applied. As a result, the lower courts were forced to develop
function?
their own interpretations. By the early 21st century, five distinct
2. Which aspect of the article
families of interpretations of the term “conceptual separability”
had emerged. is primary?
The first of the five approaches asked whether the form of 3. Separate concept
the object at issue is dictated by its function. If so, conceptual 4. Stand on its own as work
separability does not exist. This variant was emphasized by the of art?
majority of the judges in the influential 1985 Barnhardt case,
5. Intent of the creator
which involved the two sets of mannequins shown in Figure 24,
which were copied by a competitor without permission. The majority, in that case, contended
the shapes of the mannequins were required by their function – namely, displaying clothes in
stores – and consequently that their utilitarian and aesthetic features were inextricably
combined, and thus copyright protection was unavailable.
The second of the five approaches asked which aspect of the object in question is primary.
So, for example, the court in the Kieselstein-Cord case concluded that the ornamental aspect of
the belt buckles shown in Figure 25 was primary and their utilitarian function, namely holding
pants up, was subsidiary, and thus that they did enjoy copyright protection.

Figure 24: Carol Barnhart Inc. v. Economy Cover Figure 25: Barry Kieselstein-Cord v.
Corporation (1985) – mannequins Accessories by Pearl, Inc. (1980) –
belt buckles

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 The third approach was made famous by judge Newman's dissenting opinion in the
Barnhart case which I mentioned a minute ago. It came to be known as the “temporal
displacement test.” The key question under this approach was whether the object “stimulates in
the mind of the beholder a concept that is separate from the concept evoked by its utilitarian
function.” If so, there is conceptual separability; if not, not. The phrase “temporal displacement”
came from Newman's contention that the two concepts – utilitarian and non-utilitarian – must
occur to the beholder not simultaneously but separated in time.
The fourth approach asked whether the article can stand on its own as a work of art. If so,
it enjoys protection. There were two different ways of elaborating this. Paul Goldstein suggested
that we inquire whether the article could constitute a work of art “traditionally conceived,”
which is related he argues to whether the article would be equally useful without its aesthetic
feature. The reference to art “traditionally conceived” naturally draws us back into the debate I
discussed in the first lecture concerning the best way of defining art. For the reasons I reviewed
there, resolving that question would be difficult, although perhaps unavoidable. By contrast,
Goldstein's fellow treatise writer, Nimmer, pointed to a more empirical interpretation, asking
whether a significant number of copies of the article would be purchased if it had no utilitarian
use. This approach was adopted by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the Galiano case,
which involved uniforms for employees of the Harrah’s gambling casino. Applying the test, the
court concluded that the plaintiff “makes no showing that its designs are marketable
independently of the of their utilitarian function as casino uniforms,” and therefore that the
uniforms are not entitled to copyright protection.
The fifth and last of the approaches focused on the intent of the creator of the article –
the individual designer – who determined its final shape. This approach was adopted by the
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the Brandir case, which involved the following facts.
David Levine was playing around with some wires, making miniature sculptures in his home. Ge
twisted one wire into the shape of a bicycle and another into the shape of a ribbon and placed
both along with other designs on his mantelpiece. A friend of his pointed out that the ribbon
shape could serve as a useful rack for the miniature bicycle. Inspired, Levine worked with a
friend to refine the design and eventually begin manufacturing and selling commercial versions

Figure 26: Brandir International, Inc. v. Cascade Pacific Lumber Co. – the Bandir ribbon rack

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under the company name Brandir International. His product is depicted in Figure 26, together
with another photo showing how bicycles can be locked to it. The rack proved popular and a
competitor, Cascade Pacific Lumber, began producing knock-offs. Brandhir brought a copyright
infringement suit against Cascade. The outcome of the case hinged on whether the ribbon rack
satisfied the conceptual separability test. Relying on a 1983 article by Robert Denicola, the court
announced the following test: “if design elements reflect a merger of aesthetic and functional
considerations, the artistic aspects of a work cannot be said to be conceptually separable from
the utilitarian elements. Conversely, where design elements can be identified as reflecting the
designer's artistic judgment exercised independently of functional influences, conceptual
separability exists.” Applying this approach, the court ruled against Brandir, emphasizing several
ways in which Levine had modified the shape of the original abstract sculpture in order to make
it durable and to accommodate as many bicycles and mopeds as possible. Because the shape of
the product did not reflect “artistic expression uninhibited by functional considerations,” it could
be copied by a competitor with impunity. As one might expect the result of this decision was
that other companies began manufacturing and
selling competing versions of the ribbon rack.
In 2016, the divergence of views among
the various courts of appeals on the proper
approach to conceptual separability prompted
the United States Supreme Court to attempt to
settle the matter. The case in which the court
addressed the issue involved the following facts.
Cheerleaders in the United States entertain the
fans who attend sporting events. Typically, they
wear brightly colored uniforms, perform in
gymnastic maneuvers, and encourage the fans to
cheer on the team hosting the event. Although
the cheerleaders at college-level competitions
are best known, in part because those
Figure 27: Two of cheerleading uniforms offered by
competitions are often televised, quite young
Varsity Brand
people often – though not always girls –
participate in this activity. The Varsity Brands company designs, manufactures, and sells
cheerleading uniforms. Two of their products are shown in Figure 27. Varsity has applied for and
been granted copyright registrations on many of their designs. The drawing submitted in
conjunction with five of those registrations are shown in Figure 28. The Star Athletica company
also manufactures and sells cheerleading uniforms. Allegedly, Star produced and sold uniforms
that incorporated these five of Varsity's designs. Varsity brought suit for copyright infringement.
The crucial issue in the case was whether Varsity's sesigns qualified for copyright protection at
all and that issue reduced to the issue of whether the design and function of the uniforms were
separable. The trial court concluded no; the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit concluded yes;

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 Figure 28: Five of the cheerleading uniform registrations belonging to Varisty Brand

and the Supreme Court, seeking to resolve the conflict among the various courts of appeals on
this general question, agreed to hear the case. In the end the court, by a vote of 6 to 2, upheld
the Sixth Circuit's judgment that the uniforms did enjoy copyright protection. The majority
opinion, written by Justice Thomas, announced a new test for separability which will govern all
future cases involving useful articles. The key components of the new test are set below.

We hold that an artistic feature of the design of a useful article is eligible for copyright
protection if the feature (1) can be perceived as a two- or three-dimensional work of art
separate from the useful article and (2) would qualify as a protectable pictorial,
graphic, or sculptural work either on its own or in some other medium if imagined
separately from the useful article.

This new test, you should recognize, is a variation on the separate concept test originally
developed by Judge Newman – although, oddly, Justice Thomas did not acknowledge as much.
In his justification for this approach, Thomas expressly repudiated some of the other tests.
Goldstein's variant of the standalone test, Nimmer’s variant of the standalone test, and the
intent of the creator test that, as we saw, drove the Brandir bike rack case. Implicit in Thomas's
opinion is repudiation of the other pre-2017 approaches. The application of this new approach
to the facts of the case, Justice Thomas contended, was simple: one can easily identify the
decorations on the uniforms as features having pictorial, graphic, or sculptural qualities, thus
satisfying test one. As to test two, if the arrangement of colors, shapes, stripes and chevrons on
the surface of the cheerleading uniforms were separated from the uniform and applied in
another medium, they would of course qualify as two-dimensional works of art.
We don't yet know how this new approach will be interpreted and applied by the lower
courts, but already many legal commentators have weighed in and the large majority of
expressed disappointment or dismay. To be sure, a few aspects of the star test have been
praised. For example, by rejecting the subjective intent of the creator test, the Supreme Court

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has probably limited the scope of discovery in cases of this sort, thus sharply reducing litigation
costs as well as curbing wasteful strategic behavior by designers. And, as Jane Ginsburg, points
out the new approach has reduced to some degree the relevance of whether an artistic design is
first developed in two dimensions and then applied to a useful article or incorporated in the
useful article straight away. All to the good. But other aspects of Thomas's approach have been
sharply criticized. Almost all commentators agree that it is distressingly vague and thus give gives
poor guidance to litigants and lower courts. Some commentators contend that it is too easily
satisfied and thus will expand dramatically the set of useful articles that enjoy copyright
protection. Others, like Marc McKenna, lament the absence of any discussion in the court’s
opinion of the policies or theories underlying the separability requirement, which in turn
reduces the chances that when applied the new test will be either coherent or socially
beneficial. Whether these criticisms are well-founded remains to be seen.
This leaves us with one more type of three-dimensional object that now enjoys copyright
protection: architecture. Inclusion of architecture in the list was a long time coming and its
implications are still not entirely clear. Here's a bit of background. The original 1886 version of
the Berne Convention included architectural plans in the set of things that member countries
were obliged to protect, but not architectural works per se. Application of this principle would
mean that if you copied the drawings that an architect had prepared to guide the construction of
a building you would be liable for infringement, but not if you were able to construct an identical
building without use of those plans. In 1890, the Belgian scholar Jules de Borchgrave published
an article criticizing the state of affairs and arguing that works of architecture deserve protection
identical to that enjoyed by other works of art, such as painting and music. Borchgrave’s
argument slowly took root in European copyright systems, first in Belgium, then in France. For a
while, some European countries resisted adoption of his proposal on the ground that it could
prevent replication of ordinary non-innovative buildings, but when reassured that the proposal
would only apply to “original artistic work,” they acquiesced.
A key step in this campaign was the addition of architectural works to article 2(l) of the
1908 version of the Berne Convention. As you know, the United States did not join the Berne
Convention until 80 years later. Until it did so, copyright protection for architecture in this
country was skimpy. Again, architectural plans were shielded, as they were in most countries, so
that unauthorized reproduction of such plans was unlawful; however, the majority view in the
United States was that an architect whose plans were copied without his permission could not
permit the construction of buildings using the infringing plans. The buildings themselves were
potentially protectable as useful articles, just like the types of industrial design we have recently
considered, but as such they had to satisfy the conceptual separability test. Only if the aesthetic
components of a building were separable from the utilitarian features did the building enjoy
protection against non-permissive copying. Rarely was this true.
When the United States did finally join the Berne Convention, Congress considered
whether formally to extend copyright protection to architectural works. It initially decided not to
do so, persuaded that the protections available for useful articles were adequate, but

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commissioned a report from the Copyright Office on the subject and that report urged that the
law be modified. Congress in response adopted the Architectural Works Copyright Protection
Act, which became effective in 1990. The key provisions of the new statute are set forth below.

17 USC § 102(a) amended to extend protection to “architectural works”

“An ‘architectural work’ is the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium
of expression, including a building, architectural plans, or drawings. The work includes
the overall form as well as the arrangement and composition of spaces and elements in
the design, but does not include individual standard features.” § 101

Limited to “buildings”

Author = architect

Infringement

Effective 1990

Notice that it's limited to “architectural works,” which are defined as “the design of a
building.” Courts in the United States have construed building to be limited to freestanding
structures. The most important implication of this new statute is that in the United States
architectural works no longer have to run the gauntlet of the conceptual separability test in
order to be protected. To be sure, like all types of copyrighted work, a piece of architecture must
be original to be protectable, but as we've seen the standard for originality is very lenient.

Figure 29: The Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind

Here's an example of a building design that would clearly pass muster. In 1989, the Polish-
born architect Daniel Libeskind won a competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Figure
29 shows a photograph of the building taken from directly above it and a second aerial

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photograph taken from a slight angle. As you can see, the shape of the building is unusual – a
complex zigzag. Here's how Libeskind himself explained the structure.

From the Museum Website:

The new building is full of artistic expression: the architect Daniel Libeskind named it
“Between the Lines” on account of two linear shapes which form its structure. The “Line
of Connectedness” expressed in the window design symbolizes the cultural exchange
between Jews and non-Jews and the ways in which they influenced each other. The
“Line of the Voids” is a series of empty rooms, which runs in a straight but disrupted
line through the building. These empty rooms represent the cultural gaps left in
Germany after the Holocaust.

The groundplan has been interpreted in many different ways. Some see it as a lightning
bolt striking the city of Berlin. Daniel Libeskind, the architect, likens it to a
deconstructed star of David.

The Libeskind building is formed of two main lines: the line of connection, tortuous and
infinite, 78authorized the cultural exchange between Jews and Gentiles and their
mutual influences; a second line, straight but broken into discrete fragments, runs
through the length of the house – it is the line of the void.

His architectural partner and wife, Nina Libeskind, emphasized the theme mentioned at
the end of the second paragraph likening the shape of the building to a broken star of David. In
the late 1990s, the Australian architect Howard Raggatt was commissioned to design the new
National Museum of Australia to be located on a peninsula in the center of Canberra. Raggatt’s
much celebrated design is shown in the aerial photo in Figure 30. Until the Australian Museum
had been finished, no one, apparently, noticed the resemblance between its central building and
the Jewish Museum in Berlin, but once the connection was suggested, the parallelism became
unmistakable (see Figure 31).
This case never resulted in litigation. Had it done so, it most likely would have resulted in
liability. Since 1968, Australian copyright law has extended to, among other things, a building or
model of a building, whether the building remodel is of artistic quality or not. Certainly, if this
standard is construed in the same way that current US standard is construed, Libeskind’s design
would qualify for protection and the Australian building resembling it sufficient to satisfy the
legal standard of substantial similarity. The fact that the case nevertheless was not litigated
bears emphasis. Why not? We can't be sure, but probably two factors were at work. First,
copyright litigation is very time-consuming and expensive; as a result, only a tiny percentage of
potentially actionable cases ever end up in court. Second, architects – at least high-end
architects – seem especially loath to rely on copyright to protect their work. As David Shipley

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 Figure 30: The National Museum of Australia, designed by Howard Raggatt

Figure 31: Compare the National Museum of Australia (left) to the Jewish Museum in Berlin (right)

notes, the large majority of the cases that have been brought alleging violations of the
Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act involved not high-end buildings but mundane
mass-produced works. The designers of noteworthy buildings by contrast seem to rely more on
peer pressure and public condemnation to discourage knock-offs. Indeed, such extra-legal
sanctions were deployed in this particular instance. The Libeskinds publicly expressed outrage

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and the press, both in Germany and in Australia, condemned what one paper called
“architectural kleptomania.” The director of the Australian Museum, who apparently had not
known of the relationship between the two buildings, expressed some misgivings, publicly
acknowledging that “had we known we might well have asked for that particular reference not
to be included.” Interestingly, however, Raggatt himself seems to have had no regrets. The
overall design of the Australian Museum is postmodern in character, alluding to many other
structures. Raggatt readily admitted to having been inspired by the Jewish Museum and does
not seem to resist the inference drawn by many observers that he deliberately intended to
analogize the treatment of Aborigines in Australia to the treatment of the Jews in the Holocaust.
As one might imagine, that suggestion remains highly controversial in Australia. The more
general point latent in this example is that there is no consensus, even among architects,
concerning the definition and significance of copying when it comes to designs of buildings.
What to one person constitutes plagiarism or theft may to another seem quotation or allusion.
The law now sides with the former but is rarely invoked. What the relevant norm should be is
one of the questions I hope you'll be in a position to answer.

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WELFARE THEORY

4.1. The Utilitarian Framework

Today, we return to copyright theory. I’ll be examining the third of the four general approaches
to copyright law, which is known as the welfare theory. The first segment of today’s lecture will
describe the overall framework of the utilitarian perspective that underlies the welfare theory.
The second segment will examine how, viewed through the lenses of the welfare theory,
copyright law functions. In the third and last segment, I’ll explore a few of the many applications
and implications of the welfare theory. I will refer to the second of the two maps I’ve been
employing in this course, which addresses theories of intellectual property.
The fairness theory, which I discussed two weeks ago, centers on the proposition that
labor gives rise to a natural property right in the fruits of that labor. Somewhat more specifically,
creative or intellectual labor, so the argument goes, gives rise to a natural right to a reward or a
set of entitlements proportional to the amount of labor invested. Law, the argument continues,
should recognize and enforce that natural right. In lecture number two, I discussed some of the
implications of the labor theory and the ways in which it finds expression nowadays in many
copyright systems, including that of the United States. I also discussed some of the difficulties,
complexities, and ambiguities associated with the theory.
The second of the four main approaches, also considered in the second lecture, is the
personality or personhood theory. Its premise is that law should provide people, especially but
not exclusively artists, property rights over objects or intangibles that they need in order to fully
realize their selves. This argument is grounded in the writings of Kant and Hagel. In the second
segment of lecture number two, I examined some of the contemporary applications of the
personality theory. In particular, the ways in which it has informed the practice in European
countries of moral rights. I also discussed some difficulties for complexities associated with that
argument.
We turn to the welfare theory, which has a very different heritage. The foundation of the
welfare theory is, as I mentioned, utilitarianism. Its patron saints are Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill, who established, starting in the late 18th century, a distinctive approach to political
thought and eventually economics. The key idea of utilitarianism, undoubtedly familiar to most

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of you, is that government and law in particular should be organized so as to promote the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. Somewhat more specifically, law should be
organized to induce people to behave in ways that redound to the benefit of the public at large.
How? Primarily by creating combinations of incentives and penalties to nudge people in socially
beneficial directions.
Two characteristics of this orientation bear emphasis and cause it to contrast sharply with
the fairness theory, its primary rival. First, the utilitarian approach is prospective in orientation.
In other words, it looks forward in time. It seeks to craft the law in a way that will induce people
in the future to behave in a fashion that will increase overall happiness or welfare. By contrast,
the fairness theory, as we saw, is retrospective in orientation. It seeks to create rights that
appropriately reward people for their conduct in the past. The second characteristic of the
utilitarian approach that differentiates it from the theories we’ve discussed thus far is that it’s
collective rather than individual in orientation. It focuses on the welfare of society as a whole
rather than on doing justice to or serving the human needs of its individual members.
So, that’s the starting point – the foundation of this approach. The way this venerable
broad perspective is brought to bear on intellectual property is through the concept of public
goods. This is a phrase common in economics, although less familiar outside the field of
economics. I’ll begin by defining it and then discuss its implications. A “public good”, economists
tell us, is a good that has two related features – it’s non-rivalrous and nonexcludable. By way of
contrast, consider an apple. An apple is said to be rivalrous because consumption of the apple by
one person is inconsistent with consumption of it by a second person. If I eat the apple, there’s
nothing edible left for you. Partly because it’s rivalrous in this sense, it’s naturally excludable. In
other words, as long as the apple is in my possession, it’s difficult for you to gain access to it. A
non-rivalrous good is one whose consumption is not inconsistent with its availability to other
people. A classic example of this phenomenon that figures prominently in the literature of
economics is a lighthouse or other navigation aid. Suppose that I erect a lighthouse on a rocky
headland. The purpose of the lighthouse is to warn ships not to come close to the rocks, thereby
enabling them to avoid catastrophe. The benefit of that warning can be provided simultaneously
to a nearly unlimited number of ships and their captains. Making the lighthouse signal available
to one ship does not diminish its availability or benefit to other ships. The lighthouse is for that
reason said to be non-rivalrous. For a related reason, it’s also said to be nonexcludable. As
should be apparent by now, it would be difficult for me, the creator of the lighthouse, having
made the signal available to one ship, to prevent others from benefiting from it. Consequently, it
would be very difficult for me to charge for access to the good. In theory, I suppose, I could
construct a fence of some kind 10 miles out from the lighthouse – in other words, on the horizon
this photo – and then charge ships who want to enter the gates. But that’s plainly impracticable.
These two characteristics of lighthouses largely explain why there are almost no privately
constructed lighthouses or other navigation aids anywhere in the world. The reason is that no
private party has an appropriate financial incentive to construct such a socially beneficial facility

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because the builder would be unable to charge the persons and organizations who benefit from
it.
Navigation aids are the example of public goods most commonly deployed by economists.
Here are some others. National defense. Once the benefit of an army or navy is made available
to one resident of a country, it can be enjoyed by everyone else in the country. Roads can be
used by a very large number of drivers simultaneously without impairing usage by others. Now,
as any commuter can attest, there’s an outer limit to the number of cars that could use a road
simultaneously, but short of that limit, roads function as public goods. Most important for our
purposes, the kinds of things that are at issue in intellectual property, specifically inventions and
reproducible art, are classic examples of public goods.
Here’s a simple illustration. Suppose that I’m a poet. I write a poem. I make it available to
one poetry lover. She reads it and likes it. She’s likely to want to share it with others. Why? Well,
partly, of course, because of the natural human impulse to share things. But, also, partly because
by sharing it she would not be giving up anything. Even after sharing it, she could reread or
recite it anytime she wants. The practical result is that I will have great difficulty charging
successive readers for access to my poem. Instead, it is likely to spread from one reader to
another without my knowledge or permission. Public goods, such as – as we’ve seen –
lighthouses, roads, and poems, are special in a couple of ways. First, usually though not
invariably, they have especially large social benefits. Second, they’re likely to be underproduced.
In other words, to be generated at socially suboptimal levels. In this respect, I, the hypothetical
poet, am in the same position as a private party considering building a lighthouse: recognizing
the difficulty of collecting money from readers, I’m likely to be discouraged from producing the
poem in the first instance, and society at large will consequently suffer. If lawmakers wish to
prevent this unfortunate outcome, they have to act in some way, have to provide a special
stimulus for the creation of public goods. How governments
can provide such a stimulus we’ll consider in just a minute. Circumstances that exacerbate
Before doing so, however, we have to consider several the problem of public goods being
circumstances that will either exacerbate or mitigate the underproduced
hazard that public goods will be underproduced and thus 1. High costs of creation
increase or decrease the need for governmental intervention. 2. High uncertainty
Listed to the right are some circumstances that are
3. Low marginal cost of
commonly said to exacerbate the public goods problem. First,
production
high cost of creation. If a public good costs a lot to generate,
the risk that it will be under produced is especially serious. In 4. Ease of reverse
the intellectual property context, the premier example is new engineering
pharmaceutical products, which, taking into account the money 5. Positive externalities from
spent on failed experiments, cost roughly $800 million to $1 the public good
billion dollars apiece to produce. The second exacerbating
circumstance – also true of the pharmaceutical industry – is high uncertainty. If a potential
innovator is unsure of success, he or she is especially likely to give up at the threshold. This

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tendency is exacerbated in social settings where potential innovators are risk-averse. By
contrast, high degrees of uncertainty are less problematic in social settings where potential
innovators are risk preferers, meaning naturally inclined to gamble. This is an interesting
contested theme in the context of intellectual property because some commentators – relying
either on anecdotal evidence or, in a few cases, empirical work – contend that some kinds of
artists are risk preferers. This matters from utilitarian standpoint because to the extent artists or
authors are gamblers by temperament, we should be at least marginally less concerned with
giving them strong legal protections.
A third circumstance that is said to exacerbate the public goods problem is low marginal
cost of production. If it’s easy to make copies of an innovation, then the risk that it will be spread
willy-nilly without any compensation to the original creator are especially high. Again, drugs
provide a clear example. New pharmaceutical products, at least if they consist of so-called small
molecules as opposed to biologics, are easy to replicate cheaply. As a result, the hazards of
under production are high. In the copyright context, this worry is even more serious nowadays
with respect to digital embodiments of recorded entertainment, sound recordings (which we
discussed last week), or films. It’s virtually costless to reproduce and redistribute digital
recordings. In other words, the marginal cost of the copies is close to zero. That creates well
known hazards for the creators of such things, increasing the argument for some kind of
governmental response.
In the same vein, ease of reverse engineering exacerbates the public goods problem. The
easier it is to figure out how a particular product was created, the easier and cheaper it will be to
replicate it without permission. Most copyrighted materials are highly vulnerable on the score.
Reverse engineering a poem, for example, is a simple matter. There are, however, a few
exceptions. I discussed one of them in the previous lecture – software. Software enjoys a
modest, natural shield against some kinds of copying. After a program is written in a language
comprehensible to people, it is compiled into so-called object code – the sequence of ones and
zeros comprehensible to computers. Proprietary software is typically distributed to the public
only in object code form. In other words, the source code, the human readable code, is not
contained in the CD-ROM you purchase or the copy of a program that you download. Now, there
exist things called decompilers – devices that enable one to infer source code from object code –
but they remain imperfect. As a result, software developers are able, by keeping the source code
secret, to discourage replication of that code. Members of the public can, of course, make
verbatim copies of the object code – that’s what the term software piracy usually refers to – but
they have a harder time getting at the source code, and thus a harder time modifying or
adapting the program. The key to this modest amount of natural protection is the difficulty of
reverse engineering.
Last, but not least, the public goods problem is especially worrisome when the product in
question has strong positive externalities, meaning that it confers benefits not merely on
immediate consumers, but also on third parties. The context in which this issue arises most
often is with respect to informational products that have infrastructure or generativity benefits,

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to use terminology developed by Brett Frischmann and Jonathan Zittrain. The key example is the
set of protocols that underlie the internet. The reason that such externalities matter is that
would be especially tragic if the incentives for the creation and improvement of such things were
insufficient to foment them.
So, to review, there are five main circumstances that can exacerbate the public goods
problem and thus heightened the need for governmental intervention to overcome it. Those
circumstances are high creation costs, uncertainty, low marginal cost of production of copies of
an innovation, ease of reverse engineering, and strong
positive externalities. Circumstances that mitigate the
On the other side of the ledger are circumstances problem of public goods being
that mitigate the public goods problem and therefore underproduced
reduce the need for governmental involvement. First, in 1. Lead time protects first
some contexts, innovators obtain through lead time
mover
enough of an advantage over copyists to enable them to
2. Custom or extralegal
recover the costs of their innovations, thus reducing the
need for a governmental stimulus. Justice Breyer of the norms protect first mover

United States Supreme Court, long ago when he was an 3. Opportunities for
assistant professor at Harvard Law School, wrote an article increasing excludability
developing this argument in the context of trade books. through self-help
One of Breyer’s contentions was that the writers and
4. Alternative motivations for
publishers of so-called trade books – for example, the
production
textbooks that are used in US high schools – enjoy at least
5. Philanthropy
a moderate lead time advantage. It takes a while, he
contended, to reproduce and redistribute books of the
sort. During the window of time before competitors can enter the field, the first publisher can
earn quite a bit. Perhaps enough to render uncertain the social need for copyright protection
with respect to such books. Hence the title of Breyer’s famous article, “The Uneasy Case for
Copyright.” Another context in which lead time may be sufficient adequately to support
innovation is fashion, meaning the design of high-end clothes. At least until recently, a fashion
designer enjoyed a window of time between the first introduction of a new design and the
moment when knock offs became available. During that window, the designer could and did sell
his or her dresses and suits for a very high price to wealthy and fashion conscious, or perhaps
prestige conscious, consumers. As a result, innovation has long flourished in fashion, despite the
fact that in many countries, including the United States, new clothing designers do not enjoy
copyright protection or indeed any other type of intellectual property protection. Now, this
argument, I hasten to add, is controversial. Some commentators and designers disagree sharply,
and most commentators acknowledge that the lead time window is getting shorter as the
technologies for quickly reverse engineering and replicating fashion innovations are advancing.
Another circumstance that may reduce the public goods problem and therefore reduce
the need for governmental involvement is the presence of customary or extralegal norms that

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forbid or discourage unauthorized, uncompensated usage of the good in question. Again, trade
books may be an example. If there is a custom adhered to by all of the publishers in the field not
to knock off each other’s works, then the need for legal intervention diminishes and indeed may
evaporate altogether. This argument may also be found in Breyer’s article. Another potential
example of extralegal norms is stand-up comedy. Professors Dotan Oliar and Chris Sprigman
argue in a recent article that comedians have a fairly elaborate set of customs that discourage
so-called stealing jokes. Not all comedians abide by those norms – Robin Williams, for example,
is famous for defying them – but most do. To the extent these customs are effective, then legal
intervention may be less necessary to provide an incentive for the creation of new jokes.
A third circumstance that can mitigate the public goods problem consists of opportunities
for increasing excludability through self-help. That’s a somewhat cumbersome phrase, but here’s
the basic idea. In some contexts, innovators can use self-help maneuvers to prevent
promiscuous reproduction – the creation and distribution of knockoffs of their innovations.
Innovations in the fields of soft drinks and chocolate, for example, are usually protected by
keeping the formulas for the innovations secret (think Willy Wonka). Encryption is a modern
analog to secrecy. In some contexts, innovators nowadays are able to impede reproduction of
copies of their innovations by encasing each copy in a technological wrapper of some kind (think
Blu-ray disc). I’ll return to this strategy in just a minute.
Yet another self-help technique relies on contracts. An example: in the United States, in
contrast to many other countries, the primary databases for legal materials are not free. Instead,
they’re hosted by private companies, specifically Lexus and Westlaw, and those companies
charge a fair amount of money for access to their databases of judicial opinions and statutes.
How? How do they protect themselves from competitors who have an obvious incentive to copy
their databases and make them available more cheaply? Well, for the most part, not by relying
on copyright law. In the United States, in contrast to many other countries, governmental works
including judicial opinions and statutes are not covered by copyright. They are in the public
domain – anyone is free to copy them. The way in which Lexus and Westlaw nevertheless
discourage competition and maintain their business models is by requiring
Alternative motivations
subscribers to agree to limitations on copying and redistributing the
for production
materials. Violation of those agreements is not copyright infringement, but
▪ Passion
it’s actionable as a breach of contract. The net result: Lexis and Westlaw
▪ Prestige/fame
don’t need intellectual property protection to maintain their business
▪ Tenure
models.
▪ Norms of science
The fourth circumstance that mitigates the public goods problem is
▪ Advertising
that with respect to some kinds of innovations, alternative motivations for
▪ Collaborative
production can substitute for governmentally organized incentives. A non-
voluntary creation
exhaustive list of such alternatives is set forth on the right. The most
obvious: passion. Many artists love their work and would continue to do it even in the absence
of any monetary reward whatsoever. To the extent that’s true, the utilitarian argument for
intellectual property or any other governmental intervention falls away because the good in

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question will not be underproduced. Assume for the moment that all poets write for love, not
for money. That, from the utilitarian standpoint, would provide a compelling argument for
withdrawing copyright protection from poetry. Now, there are other arguments reviewed
previously in this lecture series for affording poets strong intellectual property protection. But
from the utilitarian standpoint, the fact, the possible fact that a particular producer is motivated
by non-monetary incentives reduces the need for law.
Prestige, fame, tenure – these play powerful roles in academic communities. Most
scholars make no money whatsoever from their articles. Some make money on books, but from
articles, almost never. So why do scholars write them? Well, first, to get tenure. And then, in
some cases, to increase their prestige or renown.
Less selfish is the next entry on the list – the norms of science. Specifically, truth seeking.
This figures, at least to some degree, in all fields of scholarly endeavor. Most people who work in
research universities are primarily focused on contributing to human knowledge, not on earning
more money. Scholars who’ve written powerfully about the implication of this fact for patent
law and about the risks we run by contaminating this ethos with monetary incentives include
Arti Rai and John Golden.
Advertising – I mentioned this in a previous lecture. In some contexts, intellectual
property products will be generated even in the absence of legal protection because they serve
as advertising for other things. For example, it’s sometimes said controversially that sound
recordings function as advertisements for performances, specifically for concerts, and thus that
we should not be troubled from a utilitarian standpoint by the decline in the monies that could
be earned by selling copies of the recordings themselves.
Next, collaborative voluntary creation. In some contexts, people love to contribute
without monetary rewards to collective creative enterprises. A rich array of such settings is
examined by my colleague Yochai Benkler in two articles*. Perhaps most familiar modern
example is Wikipedia, which now rivals in influence and accuracy proprietary encyclopedias like
the Encyclopedia Britannica. The people who have built Wikipedia don’t make any money. So
why do they do it? Well, primarily because it’s fun. It’s fun not just to contribute to knowledge,
it’s fun to engage in a collaborative enterprise of that sort. Again, the general point is that to the
extent such motivations are operating, the need for governmental incentives diminishes.
Finally, that need is also reduced to the extent that innovators in a particular context are
supported by private philanthropy. For example, as Mike Scherer emphasizes, once upon a time,
philanthropy was a main way in which musical composition was funded. Another example: in the
United States today, the news, gathered and broadcast by Public Radio stations, is funded in
significant part by listeners who voluntarily contribute funds. Again, to the extent that’s true, the
need for governmental support is reduced.
So, to review, we’ve identified a special and especially important category of goods known
by economists as public goods that are subject to a unique danger. The danger is that unless

*
Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin” (2002) and Benkler, “Sharing Nicely” (2004).

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government stimulates in some way their production, they will be generated in socially
suboptimal quantities. There are, with respect to some such goods, circumstances that
exacerbate the hazard of under production and thus intensify the need for governmental
engagement. Conversely, there are with respect to other types of public goods circumstances
that reduce or mitigate the difficulty, and thereby reduce the need for governmental
engagement.
So, let’s assume that we’re dealing with one of the many types of intellectual products
where the public goods problem is serious. Say, full length entertainment films or new vaccines.
If a government recognizes the risk that such things will be under produced and seeks to
overcome it, how could it do so? Well, over the centuries, governments have attempted to
resolve the public goods problem in five different ways. I’ll survey them briefly and then zero in
on the one that’s most relevant to this course of lectures.
Number one – the government can provide the public good Government solutions to the
itself. Recognizing that it will be under produced by private public goods problem
parties, the government can produce it. An example is space 1. Government provides the
research. In most advanced countries, government agencies
good
conduct space research. In other words, governments don’t rely
2. Government selects and
on private parties to do the research. Rather, governments take
on the task themselves. In the United States, this approach may subsidizes private
be corroding a bit, but it’s still the dominant one. Similarly, much innovators
agricultural research is currently conducted in government labs. 3. Government issues prizes
Likewise, the provision of national defense is almost always done to successful private
by a government. Mercenary armies are rare, at least in the
producers
modern world. The final example mentioned earlier – navigation
4. Legal reinforcement of
aids. Throughout the world, almost all lighthouses and buoys and
self-help strategies
so forth are built and operated by governments. Not surprisingly,
the density of those aids varies with the amount of money each 5. Government protects
government is able and willing to devote to the project. So, there producers against
are many more buoys per mile along the coast of the United competition
States than, say, along the coast of Croatia.
Number two – instead of providing the public good itself, a government can select and
subsidize private parties who are able and willing to provide the good. The premier example of
this strategy in the United States is the $27 billion per year that the National Institutes of Health
pay to private parties – typically universities – that, in the government’s view, are likely to
conduct socially beneficial medical research. Much smaller scale is the grant program of the
National Endowment for the Arts, which subsidizes some kinds of cultural production. In Europe,
governments commonly subsidize private filmmakers. In other words, give them grants that
supplement the money they can earn from box office revenues, performance licenses, and so
forth. Where do the European governments get the money that they then pay to the
filmmakers? Well, sometimes from general tax revenues. Sometimes by taxing television

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stations or television advertising. Implicit in this portion of the system is a controversial
judgment that film is a more worthy art form than television programming. Finally, sometimes
the European governments get the money through taxes on box office receipts. That at first
seems very odd, until one realizes that the governments are trying in this fashion to diversify the
kinds of films that are produced. In other words, a portion of the ticket prices paid by the
patrons of mainstream films are used to subsidize films that are less popular, perhaps because
they’re unconventional, or because they’re made by first time filmmakers. Arguably, the
ultimate objective is to elevate the tastes of moviegoers. Whether the European governments
are justified and successful in this regard is a question to which we’ll return later in this lecture
series.
Number three – instead of giving private parties grants in hopes that they will then
generate public goods, the government can offer to give the private parties prizes if they
generate socially beneficial public goods. In the context of inventions, the former Soviet Union
and the People’s Republic of China have pursued this strategy aggressively. In the United States,
it’s used much less often, but innovations in atomic energy are stimulated by the government in
this fashion. In the artistic context, the Audio Home Recording act in the United States contains a
mechanism for distributing government funds to the owners of the copyrights in popular songs.
Several European countries have much more extensive levee systems that work essentially the
same way, all reliant prizes to induce innovation that arguably would not otherwise occur.
Solution number four consists of legal reinforcement of self-help strategies. A few minutes
ago, I mentioned that in some contexts, secrecy or encryption can substitute for governmental
funding and supporting innovation, specifically by providing innovators protection against
competition and thus helping overcome the public goods problem. Secrecy and encryption are
not perfect, however. They’re threatened by economic espionage, by faithless employees, and
by encryption circumvention. So, governments can come to the innovator’s aid not by paying
them money, but by establishing and enforcing penalties for evading the innovators private self-
help strategies. That’s basically what trade secret laws do. It’s also the essence of the Boat-hull
Protection Act in the United States, which forbids certain ways of reverse engineering the design
of recreational boats. Last, but not least, this approach underlies the recent addition to the
copyright universe of so-called anti-circumvention rules. In brief, these rules impose fairly strong
penalties upon non-permissive trafficking in circumvention technologies, and in some cases,
upon the act of encryption circumvention itself. The idea behind these rules is to buttress
encryption as a strategy for discouraging non-permissive reproduction of cultural products. I
mentioned these rules in the first lecture. And we’ll come back to them and examine them in
detail in the 11th lecture.
This brings us finally to the fifth, and for our purposes here, the most important of the
approaches. The fifth strategy for overcoming the public goods problem is that governments
sometimes protect the producers of public goods against competition through law. So, here’s a
quaint example. In the 19th century, governments would sometimes authorize private companies
to create toll roads or bridges. In other words, to construct turnpikes or bridges over rivers, and

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then charge the travelers who wanted to use them. But here’s the key feature. When doing so,
governments would frequently promise the companies that no competitor would be permitted
to construct a rival road or bridge, at least for a certain period of time. The purpose and the
effect was to enable the companies to charge high tolls, at least for a while. High enough to
defray the construction costs and to make a tidy profit. Now, a footnote. The governments
didn’t always make good on their promises. For example, the famous Charles River bridge case
in the United States arose out of a breach of a promise of this sort. A promise to limit the set of
bridges across the Charles River here in Cambridge to the first developer. Investors’ expectation
that governments might renege in this way limited the effectiveness of this approach. Putting
that important nuance to one side, the key point is that governments sometimes encourage
private parties to make socially beneficial things not by giving them grants or offering them
rewards or helping them to lock up their ideas, but by suppressing competition, giving them for
limited periods of time monopolies. Intellectual property, and the law of copyright and patent, in
particular, constitute an application of this approach. At least when viewed through the
utilitarian glasses, the point of such laws is to give authors and inventors exclusive rights to make
and distribute copies of their creations, and thereby to charge high prices for them. High enough
to offset the cost of creating them in the first instance and, even more importantly, to induce
creative people to become authors and inventors rather than lawyers or financiers.
In the next segment of this lecture, I’ll examine in detail how the copyright system works,
how exactly it functions to overcome the public goods problem.

4.2. The Incentive Theory of Copyright

This is the second segment of a lecture on the welfare theory of copyright. In this portion,
I’ll examine in more detail how copyright law works – specifically, how it functions from the
standpoint of the welfare theory. Along the way, I’ll point out a few of its advantages and
disadvantages, again, viewed from the standpoint of welfare. For this purpose, we’ll be using a
slightly fictionalized real-world example.
Cambridge Documentary Films is a small documentary filmmaking company. It’s run by
two people, Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich. It’s called Cambridge Documentary Films
because it used to be based here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it’s now housed in Santa
Barbara, California. Cambridge Documentary Films, or as we will call them, CDF, produces very
high-quality, short documentaries. One of those documentaries is Defending Our lives. It’s 30
minutes long. Its subject is the scourge of domestic violence. Domestic violence is a
phenomenon that, as many of you know, is global in character. If anything, it’s increasing in
severity. This film examines the subject by talking with, doing interviews with, many of the
women who’ve been subjected to domestic violence. It won the Academy Award for Short
Documentary in 1993. Because of the continued salience of the social problem and the quality of
the film, demand for the film remains sizable and fairly constant, and as a result, CDF continues
to sell copies of it.

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 So, that’s the real-world case. We’re going to use an adapted, simplified version of that
case to explore the way in which the copyright system works. First question: suppose CDF wants
to make some money by distributing copies of the film in DVD format. How much should CDF
charge for each copy? To answer that question intelligently, CDF would need some more
information. I’m going to supply you hypothetical, but reasonably realistic, data of the sort they
would need. For simplicity and clarity, I’m going to present that information graphically. To those
of you who’ve studied some economics, graphs of the sort you see in Figure 32 will surely be
familiar to you. The x-axis, the horizontal axis, represents quantity – in this case, the quantity of
DVDs containing the film Defending Our Lives. The vertical axis is money – we’ll use dollars, but
we could use any currency – to represent first the cost of those DVDs, and then the revenue that
they could generate for CDF.
The first thing we’d want to know
in order to determine how much CDF
should charge is the cost of producing
the DVDs. CDF surely doesn’t want to
charge less than the cost of generating
them. So here are some numbers. It
turns out that producing and distributing
a DVD is inexpensive. It costs
approximately $1 to reproduce the film
in the physical disc, $0.90 to package it,
and $0.80 to distribute it to customers.
So roughly speaking, $2.70 is the cost of
making and distributing each copy of the Figure 32: The basic axes
film. That cost doesn’t vary much with
how many copies you make. Expressed graphically, this means that the marginal cost of
producing DVD copies of Defending Our Lives is low and flat – flat because it doesn’t change, as I
indicated, materially as the total number of copies produced increases or decreases. Now, this is
not true of all cultural products. With respect to some, there are economies of scale, meaning
that the marginal cost of making copies of them goes down the more you produce. There may
be a few types of cultural products, though examples are hard to think of, in which the marginal
cost of making copies goes up if the materials used to produce them are scarce. But many,
perhaps most, will have marginal cost curves that look roughly like the one in Figure 33, low and
flat.

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 But this information actually doesn’t
get us very far. As any business school
professor will tell you, the seller of a
commodity should be paying primary
attention when pricing that commodity not
to the cost of producing it, but to what
potential buyers of the commodity are able
and willing to pay. How would CDF get
information of that sort? Perhaps through
consumer surveys, focus groups, or
projections on the basis of what earlier
films sold for. To keep things simple, we’ll Figure 33: The marginal cost of producing a DVD
supply them with the information they are
seeking. Looking at Figure 34, if CDF set the
price of the DVDs up where the red dot (A1)
is located on the vertical axis, a modest
number of people (A2) would pay for it each
month. The high price would keep it out of
the hands of most potential customers. If,
by contrast, it’s priced at a lower point (B1),
the number of people who would purchase
it is larger (B2). Still lower price (C1), still
larger a number of purchasers (C2). And if
CDF priced it at 0 (D1) – in other words, if
they just gave the DVDs away – an even
Figure 34: Plotting price vs demand
larger number of people (D2) would accept
it and watch it each month. The number
here is not infinite, because not everyone is interested in domestic violence. Put differently,
there are other things they’d rather do with their time. But as one might expect, the total
number of copies sold would be greatest if the price were 0.
It will turn out to be helpful to plot these pairings on the two-dimensional space of the
graph. A3 is a representation of the combination of price and quantity associated with the red
option. B3, and C3 represent the blue and green respectively. Finally, yellow is already marked at
the bottom. When you connect up all these dots, the result is a demand curve (Figure 35). To
keep things simple, I’ve chosen combinations of price and quantity that would generate a
straight line, rather than a curve. In the real world, the shape of this line would, of course, be
more complex. But a simple straight line enables us to illustrate the basic principles more clearly.
The demand curve, to repeat, is merely the accumulation of many observations of the sort we
just did; namely, for any given price, how many copies of the movie could CDF sell each month.

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 Having built the curve, we can
now remove the scaffolding. OK, so
against this backdrop, what should CDF
charge for the DVDs? In other words,
where along this curve should CDF
position itself? We’ll try to answer that
question first in a hypothetical
environment in which copyright law
does not exist, and then in a
hypothetical environment in which
copyright protection is available.
If copyright law does not exist,
Figure 35: The demand curve
then the CDF managers will quickly
recognize that, sooner or later, if they
wish to sell significant numbers of DVDs,
they will have to set the price very low.
They could, of course, begin by setting
the price up at C1 (Figure 36). The result
will be that, in the first month, they
would sell a modest number of copies
and earn a fair amount of money. More
specifically, they would earn the amount
of money equal to the number of copies
sold times the price of each copy; in
other words, revenue equal to the
Figure 36: A possible initial price for the DVD and the resultant
shaded area. But if they did this, CDF revenue
would very quickly face competition,
because a rival would purchase one of
their copies and then replicate it, selling the knockoffs for a lower price.
So, let’s suppose that this occurs in month number two (Figure 37). By choosing price R2,
the competitor would sell a much larger number of DVDs. But even more seriously, it would
eliminate or largely undermine the demand for the CDF authorized version. CDF’s market would
more or less go away. So, to respond, CDF would be obliged, if they wished to continue to sell
films at all, to lower their price in the third month (C3 in Figure 38). In the fourth month, the rival
would respond by lowering its price (R4), and CDF will be obliged to lower its price (C5), and so
forth, until the price of the copies of the film fell all the way down to almost the marginal cost of
producing copies. The general point illustrated by this simple sequence is that, in the absence of
copyright, copying and competition will drive the price down to marginal cost or nearly so.
In two related respects, this is socially beneficial. Indeed, in most contexts, antitrust law is
designed to generate exactly this behavior. First, the total number of DVDs produced and

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distributed in this scenario is very large, meaning that a lot of people get the benefit of access to
the film. Second, the consumer surplus generated by this pricing pattern is very large. Consumer
surplus is just a term that represents the difference between the price that a given consumer
pays for the product and the value of that product to the consumer, measured most easily by
the maximum amount the consumer would be willing to spend. A rough measure of the total
surplus generated by a particular marketing practice is the area between the demand curve,
which represents consumers’ willingness
and ability to pay, and the price of the
product; in other words, the green zone in
the graph in Figure 39. So, you might think,
great, we hope this scenario does indeed
occur. The trouble is that the CDF
managers, anticipating this effect, won’t
produce Defending Our Lives in the first
place, because they will recognize that
they will be unable even to recoup their
costs. Or, perhaps more realistically, they
won’t make any more of their wonderful
films in the future. So, the seemingly large
social benefits associated with the absence Figure 37: A rival copies the DVD and sells it at a lower price

of copyright protection turn out,

unfortunately, to be illusory. Very few films
will be produced in this legal environment.
So, wait a minute, you may be
thinking, won’t some of the alternative
motivations that are sources of revenue for
filmmakers that I discussed in the first
segment of this lecture prompt CDF to
keep making films? Perhaps, for example,
CDF can get a government grant. Or
perhaps private philanthropists will come
forward. Maybe. But for the time being,
Figure 38: Competition drives the price down to (almost) the
we’re focused exclusively on the incentives marginal cost
that the copyright system can generate.
So, ignore for the moment the possibility of other sources of funding.
Returning to our story, the purpose of copyright law is to avoid this outcome. How? By
suppressing competition in the production and distribution of embodiments of the creative
work; in this case, the film – in other word s, to eliminate CDF’s rivals. If the managers enjoy
protection against competition, how, then, will they price the film? Well, if they have very good
and detailed information concerning the ability and willingness to pay of every individual

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customer, plus the capacity to vary the
price of the DVDs, then the managers
will charge each customer the
maximum amount that they can. So, for
example, if the managers know that X is
able and willing to spend P(X), they will
charge that much. If they know that Y is
able and willing to spend P(Y), they’ll
charge that much. If they know that Z is
able and willing to spend P(Z), they’ll
charge that much. And the result is that
the managers will enjoy, through this
Figure 39: At marginal cost, there is a consumer surplus, but
pricing strategy, monopoly profits that
there is no incentive to make the film
occupy the same area in our graph
that, in the competitive model, was
devoted to consumer surplus (see
Figure 40).
From the standpoint of the CDF
managers, this, of course, is
wonderful. It gives the m a very large
return on their original investment.
From a social welfare
standpoint, it’s beneficial in two
respects. The total output, meaning
the number of consumers who get
copies of the film, is maximized. And
the prospect of these large potential Figure 40: Perfect price discimination leads to maximum
profits will induce CDF to keep making “monopoly profits”
the films from which we all benefit and
will draw many other aspiring documentary filmmakers into this field. On the other hand,
consumers are much less happy with this outcome, because each individual consumer has paid
the most that he or she would be willing to pay.
The result: the large amount of consumer surplus, generated by the competitive scenario,
has been altogether replaced here by producer surplus. In other words, all of the benefit that, in
the previous narrative, was reaped by consumers, in this scenario goes to CDF, the producer.
So, what we’ve just illustrated is profit-maximizing behavior by a copyright owner who can
engage in so-called perfect price discrimination – in other words, differentiate perfectly among
buyers, charging each one the maximum amount that he or she would be willing to pay. Now, as
you can imagine, this never happens. Perfect price discrimination is impossible. Later in this
lecture series, I’ll discuss some circumstances in which, aided by copyright law, the producers of

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informational goods can engage in
imperfect forms of price discrimination.
But for now, let’s assume that CDF doesn’t
have good information about their
consumers and thus cannot and does not
discriminate at all. In other words, we’ll
assume that CDF will charge the same
price for every copy of the DVD.
OK, so now how much will the
managers charge? Well, they might
determine the price by experimentation.
Remember, the demand for Defending
Our Lives is stable. So, the managers could Figure 41: Price experimentation in month 1 and the resultant
experiment. In month one, they could set revenues

the price at p. They discover that u

number of consumers buy it. They earn
revenues of the amount shown in Figure
41. This is broken down into two zones
(Figure 42): the cost to them of producing
and distributing the DVDs, and their
profit. So, they try an alternative
approach. The next month, the managers
lower the price slightly to q. They discover
that v number of c onsumers buy it, a
larger number, not surprisingly, because
the price is lower. Figure 43 shows that
they make more money in the second Figure 42: The month 1 revenue broken down into costs and
month, because they’ve sold more copies, profits
but they also forfeit money, because
they’ve had to reduce the price for everyone. But notice that the purple zone is larger than the
orange zone. So, it was a good idea to have reduced the price. Put differently, the size of the
monopoly profits in the second month is larger than the amount that CDF enjoyed in the first
month Figure 44. Suppose that, encouraged by this beneficial price reduction, the managers
lower the price more dramatically in the third month. An even larger number of people buy it.
Again, the result is a revenue gain that exceeds the revenue lost (Figure 45). Once again, the
profits enjoyed are larger than in the previous month. So, the managers try this strategy once
more. They reduce the price of the DVD from r to z. An even larger number of people buy it. This
time, the price reduction turns out to have been a mistake. The revenue gained through
increased quantity is smaller than the revenue lost because of diminishing the price (Figure 46
and Figure 47).

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 What I’ve just outlined is a
possible experimental way of discovering
the profit-maximizing price for copies of
the film. Notice that the profit-
maximizing price, when it finally emerges
from this experimental process, is still
well above marginal cost, but not as high
as the managers might initially have been
inclined to charge.
Now, let’s change the assumptions
once more. Suppose that the CDF
managers have no practical way of Figure 43: Price experimentation in month 2 and the resultant
revenue gain and loss

Figure 44: The total profit for month 2 Figure 45: Price experimentation in month 3 and the
resultant revenue gain and loss

Figure 46: Price experimentation in month 4 and the Figure 47: The total profit in month 4
resultant revenue gain and loss

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differentiating among individual consumers,
but on the basis of their experience making
and selling other documentaries in the past,
they are able to estimate the overall shape
of the demand curve for Defending Our
Lives. If they knew that, then they can
determine the profit-maximizing price in a
less haphazard, less trial-and-error fashion.
They would do so by plotting the marginal
revenue curve. What’s that? It’s a
representation of the impact on their total
revenues caused by each change in the Figure 48: The marginal revnue curve
price. Figure 48 shows what it looks like. The
reason why this curve drops more steeply
than the demand curve is that, as we’ve
seen, each price decrease benefits CDF by
expanding the set of people who purchase,
but also injures CDF by forfeiting some of
the profit that CDF could’ve enjoyed by
targeting a smaller set of customers.
So, on the highly-simplified
assumptions embodied in this graph, the
marginal revenue curve will bisect the angle
between the demand curve and the vertical
y-axis. By plotting this line, the CDF
managers are able to locate the place where
the marginal revenue and marginal cost Figure 49: Using the marginal curve to find the profit-
curves cross. They should t hen select the maximizing price and output, which yield monopoly profits
price for their DVDs that will reach a set of
consumers that, in turn, will cause those curves to intersect. If they drop the price any further,
the marginal revenue they gain through additional purchases will be less than the marginal cost
of producing the additional DVDs. If they increase the price, they will forfeit in potential revenue
more money than they save in costs. So, they should settle at this point. If they do, the number
of consumers who purchase the DVD each month will be Q (Figure 49). P on the graph is the
corresponding profit-maximizing price, and Q is the profit-maximizing output. This strategy, to
repeat, will generate each month profits measured by the blue zone.
The strategy I’ve just outlined will have two crucial side effects – one of them good, the
other one bad. The good one is that, unlike perfect price discrimination, this more familiar and
feasible strategy will leave many consumers happy. Specifically, the people who buy the DVD at
price P feel better off. Specifically, they experience pleasure measured by the difference

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between what they paid – that’s price P –
and the maximum amount that they
would have been willing to pay. The sum
of all of the benefits enjoyed by all of the
consumers who bought the DVD – in
other words, the total consumer surplus –
is represented on the graph in Figure 50
by the green zone. The bad side effect is
that many of the people who would have
purchased the film, had it been priced at
the actual cost of making the copies,
won’t, because they can’t afford price P.
The result is what economists refer to as
deadweight, a somewhat grim term. In
Figure 50: Price experimentation in month 4 and the resultant
this case, it refers to consumer surplus revenue gain and loss
that could have been gained, but is
sacrificed or foregone as a result of the pricing strategy pursued by CDF. So, the green zone is
socially beneficial, while the red zone is unfortunate.
Why do we tolerate the red zone? The conventional justification is that films, like
Defending Our Lives, will only exist if potential creators, like CDF, are attracted by the
opportunity to enjoy profits, measured by the blue zone. In short, the red zone is regrettable,
but is necessary to enable us to reap the blue and green zones. That, in brief, is the core of the
justification and explanation of the copyright system seen from the standpoint of welfare
theory.
Now, those of you who are economists have undoubtedly recognized respects in which
this scheme is oversimplified. Some of those respects I’ll address in the remainder of this lecture.
Others I’ll examine in subsequent lectures in this series. And still others I won’t address at all.
But this is enough to get us started. It’s very important that you feel comfortable with the
primary features of this argument. To repeat one more time, the heart of welfare theory is the
proposition that, unless creators can recoup the costs of their creations, their so-called costs of
expression, they won’t produce those creations in the first instance. And the way that the law
enables them to recoup their costs of expression is to suppress competition in the creation and
distribution of their works. The absence of competition, in turn, enables the creators to price
copies of their creations well above the costs of making and distributing them, which enables
the creators to reap monopoly profits. That still leaves consumers who are able to purchase the
goods better off than before, but has the unfortunate side effect of pricing out of the market a
significant set of potential consumers. That’s regrettable, but we tolerate it in order to stimulate
creativity in the first instance.
Some confirmation for this approach can be g leaned from the fact that actual pricing
practices in the film industry align reasonably well with the predictions generated by this model.

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In Figure 51, for example, is the price on amazon.com of a DVD of Schindler’s List, which, like
Defending Our Lives, won an Academy Award in 1993. Like Defending Our Lives, Schindler’s List
remains popular, so there’s still considerable consumer demand for copies of it. So how was it
priced? Well, as you can see, the list price is $15. Amazon sells it for $10. As you’ll recall, the cost
of producing a DVD, including one containing Schindler’s List, is roughly $2.70. So, P, on the
graph in Figure 50, which, you’ll recall, emerged from our analysis as the profit-maximizing price,
is more or less in the zone of $10 to $15.
Now, interestingly, the film that we’ve been discussing thus far, Defending Our Lives, is
not priced at $15. You can purchase the copies of the DVD from the website for Cambridge
Documentary Films. On the website, you can see that CDF is selling it for $175 (Figure 52). That’s

Figure 51: Pricing on Amazon for the DVD of Schindler’s List

Figure 52: Purchase pricing for the short film Defending Our Lives.

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hard to explain on the basis of the
analysis we’ve conducted thus far. It
would seem that CDF has chosen to set
the price way up at P (Figure 53). A
price this high will earn CDF some
monopoly profits (the blue). But the
CDF managers seem to be forfeiting a
large potential market (the red). So why
do they do this? A clue is provided by
their website, which indicates, as you
can see, that the prices of their DVDs
Figure 53: At a high price, CDF will earn some monopoly profit,
include public performance rights. To but it will forfeit a large potential market
understand the significance of that
statement, I need to provide you a
preview of some material that we’ll
discuss in much more detail in lectures
number seven and number eight.
When you buy a DVD, you’re
permitted to do a lot of things with it,
including, of course, watch it at home in
your living room or den. But you’re not
permitted to use that DVD to display
the film on a screen in a public place.
The reason is that the owner of the
copyright in the film enjoys, among
Figure 54: The first steps in showing the demand curves for
other rights, the exclusive right to
regular consumers and instutions
perform it publicly. Your ownership of a
copy of the DVD does not authorize you
to encroach upon the copyright owner’s
public performance right. So, if you
want to show it to people other than
your family and friends, you have to get
a separate license to do so. So, what
CDF is doing here is selling a bundle of
two things – a physical DVD and a
separate public performance license.
The latter is worth much more than the
former. Another inference we can draw
from this somewhat unusual pricing
Figure 55: The instituional and consumer demand curves

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strategy is that the customers that CDF has primarily in mind are not ordinary consumers, people
who buy DVDs in order to play them on televisions in their dens. Rather, the CDF managers are
aiming primarily at teachers or institutions that want to educate people about domestic
violence. Put slightly differently, it seems that there are two quite different markets for
Defending Our Lives – regular consumers and institutions.
To represent the two markets, I have to adjust the graph that I’ve been using, first by
shrinking it and then by expanding the scales Figure 54. The institutional market for Defending
Our Lives and the market consisting of ordinary consumers would look as shown in Figure 55.
Why is the demand curve for the former so high and steep? Because the institutions anticipate
showing it to lots of people repeatedly in educational settings, and at least some of those
institutions are thus able and willing to spend quite a bit for that opportunity. Individual
consumers, by contrast, are able and willing to spend much less. If CDF’s customers are clumped
this way, then CDF’s pricing practice makes a lot more sense. The managers are setting the price
way up at P in Figure 55. They are, to be sure, forfeiting a significant number of potential
consumers, but this price is indeed profit-maximizing.
Now, there’s a nuance lurking here. Why don’t the managers separate the two markets
and charge the two sorts of customers different amounts? That would represent a form of price
discrimination – not the perfect price discrimination of the sort we considered before, but
imperfect discrimination. It would not be as lucrative as perfect discrimination, but it would
generate higher profits than flat pricing. Indeed, my brief discussion above of public
performance rights may alert you to one way in which the CDF managers could separate the two
markets. They could offer the DVDs with public performance rights for one price, $175, and then
DVDs without such public performance rights for much less, say $10. Not only would that
practice earn CDF more money, it would also be socially beneficial because more people would
have access to the film. So why don’t the CDF managers do this? The most likely explanation is
unenforceability. Even though copyright law, on its face, seems to give them the power to
differentiate prices in the two markets by granting to some buyers public performance rights
and denying those rights to others, in practice, CDF could not detect and punish violations of
their public performance rights by institutions that purchase the plain DVDs. Anticipating this,
some teachers would buy the inexpensive, plain copies and then unlawfully perform them for
their classes. And the result would be to corrode CDF’s high-end market. The result in loss of
revenue would exceed the gain that CDF gets for making the simple DVDs available to non-
teachers.
Several important themes lurk in this last example – the merits and demerits of price
discrimination, the marketing possibilities created by the various exclusive rights held by a
copyright owner, and the limitations on those options created by the difficulty in some settings
of enforcing copyrights. We’ll return to all of these themes later in the course. This concludes
our initial exploration of the welfare theory of copyright. In the third and final segment of this
lecture, I’ll discuss a few applications and refinements of the welfare approach and then step

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back from the details and ask you, through these lenses, what are the strengths and weaknesses
of copyright.

4.3. Applications and Assessment

In this third and last segment of the lecture, I’ll do two things. First, I will explore a few of the
many applications and refinements of the welfare theory that economists and legal scholars
have developed recently. And second, I will offer a preliminary survey of the strengths and
weaknesses of copyright assessed from the standpoint of utilitarianism.
The first and most general application of this theory begins with the observation that from
a utilitarian standpoint, copyright is not an unalloyed good but is rather a necessary evil. Social
welfare is advanced when ideas flow freely and when producers compete to satisfy consumers’
desires efficiently. Copyright impedes both of those ends. The reason that, nevertheless, the
copyright system is in the aggregate of socially beneficial is that it is necessary – so the argument
goes – to stimulate the creation of intellectual products from which we all benefit.
Notice that this orientation differs very sharply from the way in which copyright is seen
through the lenses of the fairness theory, or the personality theory – both considered in lecture
number two. Viewed through those glasses, copyright deserves our unqualified support,
because copyright law tracks and enforces the natural rights, or the fundamental human needs,
of artists and authors. The support provided to copyright by the welfare theory is more grudging.
The conception of copyright as a necessary evil has a crucial practical implication. Copyrights
should not be used in contexts in which they’re not necessary. In particular, copyright protection
should not be extended to kinds of innovations that would be produced in optimal numbers
without those protections.
So, what kinds of innovations might fall into this category? I mentioned a few in the first
segment of the lecture, when discussing circumstances that can mitigate the public goods
problem. Perhaps the most obvious candidate, already mentioned, would be advertisements.
You will recall Justice Harlan’s dissent in the 1903 Bleistein case, in which he contended that
advertisements should not enjoy copyright protection. A welfare theorist might agree with
Harlan, not on the grounds that ads are not art, but on the ground that companies have lots of
other incentives to produce and disseminate advertisements. So, if you eliminated copyright
protection for ads, you would not likely see any diminution in their output.
Much the same could be said for scholarly articles, also mentioned in the first segment.
Arguably, these are already produced in numbers that exceed the social optimum, but putting
that source of unease to one side, the various non-pecuniary motives that drive scholars – such
as tenure, reputation, fame, altruism, insecurity, boredom, and so forth – are more than
adequate to incentivize the creation of those articles. A possible objection: well, maybe so, but
social welfare requires more than inducing scholars to write articles; it also requires the
establishment of adequate incentives to publish them. Copyright protection may not be
necessary for the authors, but it is necessary for the publishers. This is a very important
refinement of the welfare theory. Indeed nowadays, economists who write in this vein tend to

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be as or more concerned with creating optimal incentives for the commercialization of
innovations as they are with creating optimal incentives for generating those innovations.
However, arguably, this legitimate concern has little grip in the context of scholarly articles, at
least nowadays, when the cost of publishing them has, courtesy of the internet, dropped so low.
So, here’s the general guideline suggested by these two examples. If you find the welfare
theory congenial, you should be watchful as we proceed through this course for circumstances
in which copyright entitlements are not necessary to stimulate creative activities or the
commercialization of their products. In such circumstances, the policy argument for the
elimination of the entitlements at issue is strong.
Here’s the second implication of the welfare theory. You’ll recall that in the previous
lecture I discussed the disaggregation of the copyright system – the ways in which the rules
applicable to specific types of innovations differ. The welfare theory offers potential justification
for this disaggregation. Why? Because as we’ve seen, the severity of the public goods problem
varies by type of work. In addition, the best way of offsetting the hazard of under production
varies by type of work. Thus, the scope of the set of entitlements enjoyed by different creators
should differ. Here’s an example: duration. Currently, both patents and copyrights last for the
same period of time, regardless of the type of work they’re applied to. Patents last for 20 years
from the date of the patent application, while – at least in the United States – most copyrights
last for the life of the author plus 70 years. Those terms don’t change when the type of work
changes. Arguably, from the standpoint of welfare theory, they should. To be sure, there are
welfare-based counter arguments for the impulse toward disaggregation. Most importantly,
subdividing the universe of copyrighted works into even more distinct varieties, each subject to
even more customized sets of rules, would increase administrative and litigation costs. Equally
serious, that the risk that the lobbying power of companies that stood to gain by tweaking the
increasingly specialized sets of rules would grow, which would be good for those companies but
bad for the public at large. These competing considerations are nicely explored by professors
Mark Lemley and Dan Burk.
A third application of the welfare theory consists of a guideline for comparing the relative
desirability of the various rights that we might give to copyright owners. Specifically, it suggests
that when choosing among possible rights, we should attend carefully to the ratio between the
incentives generated by each entitlement and the social welfare losses that come with it. Other
things being equal, we should strive to give copyright owners entitlements that have large
incentive-to-loss ratios and deny them entitlements that have low ratios. Here’s an example.
Should we permit copyright owners to prevent quotation of excerpts from their works in critical
reviews? Viewed from the standpoint of welfare theory, the answer is probably no. Why?
Because on one hand, giving copyright owners this power would not enhance their revenue,
much. On the other hand, it would lead to large social welfare losses by reducing the
informational value of critical reviews, thereby diminishing the ability of customers to decide
whether they want to go see a particular movie, to read a particular book, and so forth. In sum,
the incentive-to-loss ratio associated with this particular potential entitlement is low. Therefore,

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if we are faithful to the welfare theory of copyright, we should deny this right to copyright
owners. And in fact, most jurisdictions do deny it to
copyright owners by creating an exception or limitation Applications of welfare theory
on copyright for critical reviews.
▪ IP = “Necessary Evil”
As you can see from the list on the right, there are
(covered)
many more potentially illuminating applications of
▪ Scope of protection:
welfare theory. Some of them I’ll take up in subsequent
lectures. incentive/loss ratio
So now, armed with these various applications and (covered)
insights, let’s return to a general question I implicitly left ▪ Disaggregation (covered)
open in the first segment of this lecture. Copyright law, I ▪ Compulsory licenses
argued, is only one of five possible ways in which
▪ Bounded Rationality and IP
governments could and do seek to offset the risk that
▪ Product differentiation
public goods will be under-produced. Is it the best? Or
somewhat more subtly, what are the advantages and ▪ Price discrimination

disadvantages of copyright compared to the other four ▪ Patents and antitrust

strategies? ▪ Pharmaceutical products
One of the motivations for undertaking this survey
is that it’s far from obvious that copyright will always be the best way of stimulating every type
of intellectual product. As sectors of art and business evolve, it’s possible that one of the other
four strategies may surpass it in relative social desirability.

Advantages

1. Relies upon the market to drive research toward areas of high social value
2. Relies upon private parties’ knowledge of the costs of R&D, marketing, etc.
3. Imposes costs of innovation upon (initial) users of the innovations
4. Competition in the quest for the pot of gold fosters fast, focused research

So, the map sets forth an initial catalog. As a mechanism for inducing socially beneficial
creativity, copyright has four main advantages. First, it relies upon the market to drive
innovation toward areas of high social value. Potential creators, knowing that their revenues will
be increased by the number of people who will purchase their products, direct their creative
energies towards zones where there are lots of potential customers and that, usually,
corresponds roughly to high social value. Now, not always. Research on new drugs, which tends
to focus on ailments that afflict the rich and neglects ailments that afflict the poor, is perhaps
the sharpest counterexample, but roughly.
Second, the copyright system does not rely upon government administrators to determine
the best paths for research and innovation. Instead, it places control in the hands of private

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parties, who typically have better knowledge than the government administrators concerning
the costs and benefits of alternative potential lines of research, writing, artistry, and so forth.
Third, the copyright system, like the patent system, has the social welfare advantage of
imposing the costs of innovations upon the users of those innovations. The practice of recouping
costs through monopoly pricing – that we’ve explored in detail in this lecture – has a
commendable ancillary benefit. The people who benefit from a film or drug pay not just the
marginal costs of reproducing it but a share of the cost of creating it in the first instance. Not
only does that seem fair, it avoids the kinds of slippage and inefficiency that result from
misalignment of payers and beneficiaries.
Fourth and finally, copyright, and intellectual property in general, tends to foster fast,
focused research and innovation. Why? Because innovators know that only if they reach the
finish line first – produce the film, create and test the new drug – can they recover their costs of
expression by securing and then exercising – as we’ve seen – market power. In this respect,
copyrights and patents contrast sharply with government grants as a mechanism for stimulating
innovation. Grants are less likely to generate the same aggressive, fast, focused innovative
activity because the government grantees, once they have the money in hand, have no special
incentive to hurry.
So, those are the four primary advantages from the utilitarian standpoint of the copyright
system. They are substantial. Historically, they’ve been widely thought to be decisive with
respect to alternative ways of generating most forms of art and literature. There are, however,
some disadvantages to intellectual property as a response to the public goods problem and in
some contexts, those disadvantages may be increasing.

Disadvantages

1. Deadweight loss
2. Administrative and litigation costs
3. Impediments to cumulative innovation
4. Patent thickets
5. Rent dissipation
6. Ineffectiveness in digital environment

The first, we’ve already discussed in some detail. The pricing practices enabled by
copyright usually give rise to socially pernicious dead weight losses. To review, when the prices
of films or drugs rise, some people cannot afford them. At a minimum, that’s a cause for regret.
In some contexts, it can be tragic.
Next, copyright and patent systems have administrative and litigation costs. Significant
resources are devoted to lawyers and courts necessary to interpret and enforce authors’ rights.
From the standpoint of social welfare, that’s a waste.

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 Third, copyright and patent systems sometimes create impediments to cumulative
innovation. That phrase refers to the common phenomenon in which one innovator builds on
the work of another. It’s not inevitable that copyrights gum up cumulative innovation. As we saw
in lecture number three, licensing systems, for example, of the sort that are well-developed in
the film industry can enable, even catalyze, sequential innovation. But licensing systems work
well, in this respect, only when they can rely upon comprehensive registration of intellectual
property rights. If you can’t ascertain who owns the rights to a particular work, you can’t get a
license to build upon it. Copyright – as we’ll see in lecture number six – is notoriously bad from
this standpoint, because it has no comprehensive registration system.
The fourth disadvantage is known by economists as rent dissipation. What does that
mean? It’s shorthand for the unfortunate tendency of intellectual property rights, both patents
and copyrights, to draw excessive numbers of people into the competition for generating a
socially beneficial innovation. Sensitivity to this effect has recently been heightened by the work
of Chris Yu and Michael Abromovitz.
Last, but not least, as we saw in the final phase of the CDF case study, the copyright
system works optimally as an incentive for creativity only when there are reasonably effective
mechanisms for enforcing the copyrights. As you’re undoubtedly aware, the mechanisms for
enforcing copyrights with respect to digital recordings of entertainment products are
deteriorating. Consequently, the frequency of non-permissive, presumptively unlawful
redistribution of those recordings keeps going up, and the business models that depended upon
the suppression of that behavior are crumbling. There are many possible ways of responding to
this crisis in the entertainment industry. Some of them involve reinforcing the failing
enforcement mechanisms, but if that proves unfeasible, or to have excessive negative side
effects, we may have to consider one of the other four possible ways of ensuring that the music
and film we so much value continue to be produced.

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AUTHORSHIP

5.1. Sole Authorship

Our topic today is authorship. We’ll be examining the rules that determine what person or
organization owns the copyright in a particular copyrighted work, how those rules have evolved
over time, and whether they make sense. As usual, I’ll be concentrating on the law in the United
States, but will also mention some issues on which the law in other countries diverges from that
in the US.
The concept of authorship permeates copyright law. In general, and in the United States in
particular, at least rhetorically, the law celebrates and rewards authors, the creators of original
works. The clearest statutory manifestation of this orientation in the United States comes in
section 201 of the copyright statute, which provides simply, “Copyright in a work protected
under this statute vests initially in the author or authors of the work.” In most of the cases that
naturally come to mind when we think about the copyright system, the application of this
principle will be straightforward. Some examples, the author of a novel or a poem is the person
who writes it. The author of a musical composition is the composer. The author of a painting is
the person who paints it. The author of a sculpture is the sculptor, and so forth.
It’s very important to differentiate the author of a work from the owner of a particular
embodiment of it. Suppose, for example, I write a letter to a friend and then mail it to her. She
owns the piece of paper on which the letter is written. But I still own the copyright. As the owner
of the physical copy of the letter, she has important rights. She can, of course, read it. She can
also burn it. Or give it away. But she can’t copy it because that would violate my exclusive right
as the copyright owner to reproduce the work. Nor may she, or anyone else, publish without my
permission a compilation of the letters I’ve sent to her for the same reason. When applied to
letters, this rule may strike you as puzzling or misguided. Certainly, it’s hard to justify under the
dominant theory of copyright: the utilitarian argument that we discussed in the last lecture. That
theory contends, in brief, that the law should be crafted so as to stimulate the creation and
distribution of socially beneficial creative works. Copyright protection for letters, one might
argue, is not necessary to induce people to write them. So the law in this instance seems to
impede dissemination of works without any offsetting social benefit. Viewed from another

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theoretical angle, the rule may seem less odd. You’ll recall that one of the personhood interests
that figures in the personality theory of property in general and copyright in particular is a
fundamental human need for privacy. Perhaps the rule that accords the copyright in a letter to
its writer, rather than to its recipient, or to no one at all, works to shield the privacy interests of
the writer. If so, however, the rule does so only crudely. You’ll recall that the facts and ideas
contained in a letter that I write are not shielded by my copyright in it. Only the distinctive way
in which I’ve expressed those facts and ideas is protected. So if I’ve revealed in my letter some
intimate or embarrassing fact, the recipient is perfectly free – at least as a matter of copyright
law – to tweet about it or shout it from the rooftop. She just can’t use or mimic my language.
The upshot is that the rule doesn’t align at all well with privacy interests. The bottom line, the
copyrights enjoyed by the authors of letters is hard to justify on the basis of the author’s
personhood interests. And sometimes, arguably, has pernicious social consequences as when
that impedes the work of biographers.
Courts are sensitive to those troubling implications. And, as we’ll see later in this lecture
series, sometimes invoke the exceptions and limitations built into copyright law to override or
temper the author’s rights. But the starting point of the analysis is that an author gets a
copyright, and keeps it even when a physical embodiment, even a unique embodiment, is
transferred to someone else. That principle is certainly not limited to the context of letters. So,
for example, a painter hired to paint a portrait retains the copyright in the portrait. Even after
he’s been paid. And even after he’s delivered the painting to the person who commissioned it.
Same with a photographer. Copyrights, in short, are sticky. They stay attached to the author
unless they’re formally transferred in some way. This stickiness is important in practice. A
surprisingly large percentage of copyright disputes involve the following basic narrative. Person
or Company A does work for Person or Company B in relation to a particular project. The work is
satisfactory and B pays A. Neither of the parties notices that A’s work consists of or contains
copyrighted material, and so they don’t write a contractual provision that deals with copyright. B
later decides that A’s work could be deployed in a second unrelated project. A demands an
additional payment. B refuses. A brings a copyright infringement suit contending that A retain
the copyright in the original work product, and B’s use of it in the second project would abridge
one of A’s exclusive rights – typically, the exclusive right of reproduction, or public performance
or display. Now, if A is an employee of B, and the work that A does falls into the scope of A’s
job, then in the United States, the copyright in A’s work product will belong to B. We’ll examine
the rules governing such employment relations in detail in the third segment of this lecture. But
often, A’s not an employee of B, but rather an independent contractor. In that situation, the
copyright will initially attach to A and will stick there, giving A a potential copyright claim.
Here’s an example of a dispute of the sort. Toyota makes, among other things, Solera
brand cars (Figure 56). In 2003, Toyota and its advertising agency decided to launch a new ad
campaign. For this campaign, they needed to create digital models of their cars. Digital models,
as many of you know, are useful because they enable advertisers easily to alter the color and
accessories of a depicted car, enable consumers to manipulate those images on websites, and so

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forth. In this case, the ad agency working for Toyota hired a
company named G&W to prepare the digital models. And
G&W, in turn, hired another company called Meshwerks to
prepare so-called digital wire frames, some of which are
Figure 56: The Toyota Solera
shown in Figure 57.
These wireframes are images formed by a network of
lines that represent in great detail the external dimensions
of objects – in this case, cars. Wireframes are prepared
partly through an automated measurement system, and
partly through manual adjustment of those automated
measurements to make the resulting set of lines look
realistic. In this instance, G&W took Meshwerks’ wireframes,
draped over them images of the lights, body, tires, and so
forth of each car, and provided the net product (shown in
Figure 58) to the ad agency which used them in the
advertising campaign. Meshwerks and G&W were paid the
amount specified in their contracts and everyone, as best we
could tell, was happy. Things went awry, however, when
Toyota began using the images in another setting.
Specifically, in a variety of ads other than the television spot
for which Meshwerks thought its work was originally
intended. Meshwerks asked for more money. Toyota
refused. Meshwerks then brought a copyright infringement
suit contending that it owned the copyright in the Figure 57: Meshwerks' wireframes for the
wireframes and, therefore, that Toyota could not reproduce Toyota Solera
them or derivatives of them in unlicensed contexts.
The case was finally resolved in 2008, five years after
the original advertising campaign. Now, the plaintiff doesn’t
always win in lawsuits like this. Sometimes B is able to avoid
liability. For example, by showing that A’s work did not fall
within the zone of copyrightable subject matter. Or that the
later use of A’s material was expressly or impliedly
authorized by the terms of their original contract. Indeed,
Toyota, in the case I just summarized, eventually prevailed
on the first of those bases. But often, B loses and, therefore,
either has to pay A an extra fee or cease using the work in
question. Even when B prevails, resolving the dispute
typically takes years and costs both parties a lot of money,
as it did in this case. The frequency of lawsuits of this sort is
Figure 58: G&W's additions to
Meshwerks' wireframes

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attributable not just to the fact that such
situations are distressingly common, but also
to the fact that the moral intuitions of the
parties commonly diverge. Typically, the
attitude of B’s managers is that they’ve
already paid A an agreed upon and fair price.
For A to demand more money now, they see
as a form of extortion. By contrast, A feels like
he or they have created a valuable work and
thus deserves a share of the revenues that are
generated when that work is put to an
unexpected, but lucrative later use.
Underlying this attitude are some of the
beliefs associated with the Lockean theory Figure 59: The RMS Titanic
that we discussed in lecture number two.
Both parties, in other words, are convinced typically that the other is behaving immorally. That’s
a prescription for litigation.
Controversies of this sort can almost always be avoided by addressing the issue up front.
Companies in situations of this sort should be watchful for commercial relationships that will
generate potentially copyrightable works and clearly provide in advance who will own those
works. It’s a mistake to rely on trust, friendship, or a history of amicable dealings to prevent
disputes from arising down the road because, as I’ve suggested, moral intuitions commonly
diverge in such cases. This kind of anticipatory contractual resolution of copyright issues is like
the antenuptial contracts sometimes entered into by prospective spouses: sometimes awkward
and seemingly unnecessary when the relationship is fresh, but extremely helpful when the
relationship later unravels.
So, to review, the general point illustrated by this example is that the copyright in a work
vests automatically in the author of the work and it stays with the author unless expressly
transferred to someone else. Failure to be alert to this phenomenon can create big and
expensive problems.
Up to now, we’ve been dealing with situations in which the identity of the author of a
work is obvious. Sometimes it’s not. Here’s an example. As I’m sure you know, in 1912, the
steamship Titanic – shown in Figure 59, just before her first and final voyage – collided with an
iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. Most of the passengers died, including one Harry Elkins
Widener, a Harvard graduate. The Principal library here at Harvard was later funded by Harry’s
mother who survived the accident, and the library is named for and dedicated to Harry. The
ocean where the accident occurred is over 12,000 feet deep. As a result, for 60 years, no one
knew exactly where the wreck of the Titanic lay, and certainly no one saw it. Then in 1985, a
joint US and French expedition found the wreck. Subsequently, several other expeditions were
organized to photograph and film it. One of which produced the photo in Figure 60. One of those

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filming ventures was organized by a consortium
that included a company called RMS Titanic,
Incorporated, which technically was the salvor
in possession of the wreck. That consortium –
we’ll call it RMST for short – entered into an
arrangement with a filmmaker named
Alexander Lindsay. Lindsay had previously done
a British documentary on the Titanic. And he
now agreed to do another one for RMST.
Unfortunately, for all concerned, the parties Figure 60: A photo of the bow of the Titatnic wreck
failed adequately to capture the terms of their
deal in a contract, thus planting the seeds for a subsequent dispute. Lindsay spent a lot of time
and effort preparing for and overseeing the making of the film. He was pretty closely involved in
the filmmaking process, but here’s the crucial fact: Lindsay did not himself do the actual filming.
Instead, he scripted and supervised the filming of the underwater footage. More specifically,
Lindsay claimed that he created storyboards which identified specific camera angles and
shooting sequences; designed and personally constructed the underwater light towers that were
used to illuminate the wreck; provided the photographers who actually did the filming with
detailed instructions for positioning and utilizing those light towers; directed the filming from
onboard the salvage vessel, Ocean Voyager; screened the footage at the end of the day to
ensure that he had the images he wanted; and, in general, supervised all aspects of the
preparation of the footage. Lindsay contended that he was never paid for his work – or, at least,
not adequately paid. In an effort to secure appropriate compensation, he brought suit against
RMST asserting – and here’s the rub – that he was the author of the underwater footage, and
therefore, owned the copyright in it. The defendants, RMST, objected, pointing out that Lindsay
did not operate the cameras. As a result, RMST argued Lindsay could not claim the status of
author. In the end, the court sided with Lindsay. If the facts were as he had claimed, the court
ruled, Lindsay should be deemed the author. Here’s the language the court used.

All else being equal, where a plaintiff alleges that he exercised such a high degree of
control over a film operation, including the type and amount of lighting used, the
specific camera angles to be employed, and other detail-intensive artistic elements of a
film, such that the final product duplicates his conceptions and visions of what the film
should look like, the plaintiff may be said to be an author within the meaning of the
Copyright Act.

The principle that underlies this passage is important. To qualify as an author, it’s neither
necessary nor sufficient that you have your hands on the instruments that create the work. If
you direct the behavior of others sufficiently closely, that it’s your ideas that are being

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transposed into tangible form, then you, and not they, are the author. And thus, it is you, and
not they, that acquire the copyright.

5.2. Joint Authorship

The previous segment of this lecture examined the rules that determine which among
competing claimants is the author of a copyrighted work. But occasionally, more than one
person can claim to have contributed enough to a work to be called an author and thus, to share
in the copyright. The legal condition that arises under such circumstances is known as joint
authorship. It doesn’t happen very often, for reasons we’ll discuss in a minute. But when it
occurs, it has some important effects.
Each author in such cases is said to be an owner of the whole work, not just the part he or
she contributed. Each is free to use the work or to license others to use it. If one of the joint
authors licenses it unilaterally and collects license fees, he or she must give the other joint
author or authors appropriate shares. If he fails to do so, he’s subject to a suit for accounting.
How much of the revenue does he have to give the other joint authors? The presumption is that
each one is entitled to an equal share. This is true even if their contributions have clearly been
unequal in amount. However, this presumption of equality can be overridden by an agreement
among the joint authors. When a joint author dies, his or her interest passes to his or her heirs,
not to the other joint authors. In this respect, joint authorship, in copyright law, works like a
tenancy in common and real property law, not like a joint tenancy. The main difference between
those two legal forms is that the latter carries with it a right of survivorship while the former
doesn’t. In sum, joint authorship has many important legal implications.
So, when and how does this situation arise? The answer with respect to US law is that a
person claiming to be a joint author has to show both of two things. First, he must show that
each of the people, including himself, that he asserts
share in the copyright made a copyrightable contribution
to the final work at issue. Second, he must show that all
of these contributors intended that their various
contributions be merged into a unitary whole. These
requirements are usually construed quite strictly by the
courts. The net result is that most people who seek the
status of joint author fail.
Here’s a case that illustrates the impediments that
the law places in the path of those who would be joint
authors. Rent (Figure 61) is one of the most famous and
successful musicals of all time. It was set in and first
performed in New York City, but productions of the play
have since been staged throughout the world. Figure 61, Figure 61: Poster for the musical play
for example, is a poster from a production in Oregon and “Rent” – Oregon version
Figure 62 is one from Jakarta. My daughters used to sing

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most of the songs from the play when riding in the backseat of
my car. The plot of Rent is loosely based on Puccini’s opera La
Boheme, which has long been out of copyright. It’s based on
Puccini’s work in much the same rough way that West Side
Story is based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Set during
a period when AIDS was often fatal, Rent examines the
intertwined lives of a group of young, poor artists and
musicians, many of them living with the disease.
The genesis of the musical is complicated and those
complications are the source of the copyright dispute that
concerns us here. The narrative is traced in Figure 63. In 1989,
Billy Aronson and composer Jonathan Larson began to
collaborate on an adaptation of La Boheme. In 1991, Aronson
withdrew from the collaboration. They settled their respective Figure 62: Poster for the musical play
rights in the inchoate script amicably, and Larson carried on “Rent” – Jarkarta version
with the project by himself. In 1992 and 1993, James Nicola,
who was then artistic director of the New York Theater Workshop – a small, nonprofit theater in
the East Village – expressed enthusiasm about the script, but Nicola urged Larson to permit the
theater workshop to hire a playwright or a book writer who would help Larson improve the story
line and the narrative structure of the play. Larson refused, insisting that he wanted to do it
himself. In 1994, Larson got a grant to put on a short run of shows. Nicola agreed to produce
them at the theater workshop and Michael Greif directed them. The reviews of this initial trial
production of Rent were positive, but everyone agreed that the play still needed lots of work.
Nicola again pressed Larson to accept some help and finally, in May of 1995, Larson acquiesced.
The theater workshop, not Larson, hired Lynn Thomson – a professor of advanced play writing at

Figure 63: The facts of the Thomson case

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New York University – to serve as a dramaturg. A dramaturg is someone who assists in some way
in the production and development of plays. The contract between the theater workshop and
Thomson indicated that she would receive a fee of $2,000 in return for, “providing dramaturgical
assistance and research to the playwright and director.”
In the summer and fall of 1995, Thomson and Larson worked closely together. Thomson
came to Larson’s apartment where they worked feverishly to revise the script. Typically, Larson
sat at the computer typing revisions while Thomson made suggestions. Many of the adjustments
and particular lines that she came up with found their way into the final script. This collaboration
was highly successful, at least gauging by the final outcome. The new script was thought to entail
a “radical transformation of the show,” and was widely celebrated. The final dress rehearsal was
held on January 24, 1996. Tragically, Larson died that evening of an aortic aneurysm. The legal
effect of this catastrophe is that his property, including whatever copyright interests he had
acquired by that point, passed to his heirs. Thereafter, Nicola, Greif and Thomson worked
together to tune the script. The off-Broadway production was highly praised and it soon moved
to Broadway. And the rest is history.
As the play became ever more commercially successful, Thomson became ever more
unhappy with her paltry compensation and with the absence of any credit she received on the
title page of the production. The Broadway producers agreed to pay her an additional $10,000,
but she was still not satisfied. She asked Larson’s heirs for a share of the author’s royalties.
Those royalties were originally payable to Larson and were now flowing to the heirs. The heirs
offered her 1% as what they described as a gift – not enough for Thomson, and negotiations
collapsed. Finally, Thomson brought a copyright infringement suit against the heirs. Her principal
legal claim was that her contributions to the play were sufficient to render her a joint author. As
such, she was entitled to a share of the author’s royalties. She lost at trial and again on appeal.
Why? It would seem from this narrative that she had contributed nontrivial amounts of material
to the content of the play and thus deserved a fair amount of credit for its success. Nevertheless,
in the court’s judgment, she had failed to demonstrate the two conditions that are essential to
joint authorship.
As mentioned previously, those two conditions are first, that each of the putative co-
authors have made independently copyrightable contributions to the final work; and second,
that both intended that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts
of a unitary whole. The trial court and the Court of Appeals found, or were willing to assume,
that the first requirement had been satisfied. Specifically, the trial judge found that, “There are
lines in Rent that originated verbatim with Ms. Thomson. I don’t think they amount to 9%, and
certainly not 0%. There’s probably enough there that it is not de minimis.” It was the second
requirement the tripped Thomson up. The way that the Court of Appeals construed that second
requirement was critical. Two or more contributors constitute joint authors only if they all “fully
intended to be co-authors.” In other words, entertain in their minds the concept of the joint
authors. If any one of them did not have that intention when the work was created, a joint
authorship does not emerge. Applying this standard, the courts tried to ascertain what had been

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the intention of Larson and Thomson. Thomson’s intentions were clear enough – she wanted to
be a joint author – but she had to show that Larson also had that in mind. This created an
obvious problem. Larson was dead. So, ascertaining his state of mind would have been difficult.
More generally, letting the legal outcome in such cases turn on the entirely private subjective
intention of one of the parties seems at best an awkward way of resolving the disagreement,
because it would enable one contributor – by harboring a secret plan not to create a joint
authorship – to defeat the expectations of the others. To address both of these concerns, the
court looked for objective manifestations of Larson’s state of mind made before his death. Those
manifestations, it concluded, all suggested that Larson did not want to be a co-author. For
example, he exercised a veto. In other words, he had final authority over what lines went into
the script. Another indicator was that the playbill, over which Larson had control, described
Larson himself as the author/composer and referred to Thomson only as a dramaturg. When
Larson entered into contracts with the theater workshop, he referred to himself as the author,
and so forth. These objective manifestations of Larson’s state of mind were inconsistent, said
the courts, with an intention to share authorship and thus, fatal to Thomson’s claim.
The approach adopted by the Court of Appeals in the Rent case – which is now the
authoritative interpretation of joint authorship in the highly influential Second Circuit – makes it
very difficult for a contributor to a collective work to qualify as a joint author. The reason is that
no matter how much he contributed, his claims can be defeated if any one of the other
contributors did not want to share authorship and made that desire manifest in some way. To be
sure, if all of the contributors to a venture not only put independently copyrightable creations
into the pot, but also think about the legal status they want to assume, decide to become joint
authors and say as much, then they become joint authors. But if anyone opts out, joint
authorship does not ensue. Not all US courts handled this issue in exactly the same way. In
particular, the approach adopted by the equally influential Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
is somewhat different in emphasis, but the net effect of the Ninth Circuit’s approach is equally
unfavorable to persons who seek joint authorship.
Before considering possible explanations for this hostility, I need to finish the story of
Rent. In the end, Thomson was not left entirely in the cold. In a coda to its opinion, the Court of
Appeals suggested that even though she failed to qualify as a joint author, she might conceivably
be able to assert an independent copyright in the individual lines she had contributed to the
script. If so, the play could not be publicly performed without either securing her permission or
purging the script of those lines. Thomson had not raised this theory at trial, and so the Court of
Appeals could not resolve it, but the Court of Appeals implied that she might initiate a second
lawsuit on this entirely different basis. She of course did so, whereupon Larson’s heirs – weary of
this multi-year fight – settled the case. So in the end, Thomson got some money – how much
remained confidential. And perhaps equally important to her, she received credit, not as an
author, to be sure, but as a dramaturg on the title page of the playbill, which she had not had
previously.

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 The outcome of this particular story is not our main concern here. The key issue for our
purposes is the very high bar that the courts have set for parties interested in joint authorship.
So why is the law so hostile to the creation of joint authorship arrangements? One possible
explanation is that they are messy in the sense that they can give rise to a confusing pattern of
entitlements that are costly to unravel. For example, what if one joint author grants to a licensee
an exclusive right to exploit the work in a particular way or in a particular region? The example
that Melville Nimmer gives is an exclusive license to show a film in a particular city. Then another
joint author grants an inconsistent, also ostensibly exclusive, license to a different licensee to
show the same film in the same city. Who has what rights? In the 2008 Sybersound case, which
involved a more idiosyncratic set of facts, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that
the first licensee does not have standing to assert its supposed exclusivity because allowing it to
do so would, in effect, curtail the privilege of the second, third, and fourth joint authors. That
reasoning may have some logical appeal, but it creates a host of practical problems. The general
point is that joint authorship, by fragmenting ownership of a copyright, can create messy and
hard to predict patterns of legal rights. It’s better, many economists argue, to keep the legal
rights over any given resource – in this case, a copyright – consolidated in a single person or legal
entity. In real property law, this attitude underlies impediments to the creation of long-lasting
servitudes, meaning promises to use or not use land in a particular way – promises that will bind
not only the current possessor of the land at issue, but also his or her successors. In copyright
law, the same attitude might account for the impediments the law creates to the formation of
joint authorships.
A quite different explanation emphasizes not the imperative of economic efficiency, but
the history of the culture and ideology out of which copyright law has emerged. This is an
argument has been developed most richly by three historians and copyright scholars – Martha
Woodmansee, Jaime Boyle, and Peter Jaszi. Those scholars point out that copyright law emerged
at approximately the same time that the movement or ideology commonly known as
Romanticism took root first in European culture and then in the culture of many other countries,
including the United States. The scholars contend that there’s a causal connection between
these two developments – in other words, that copyright law was powered and shaped, at least
in part, by Romanticism. One of many ways in which copyright law bears the mark of
Romanticism is that the law, like Romanticism, celebrates individual artists and is skeptical of
collaboration.
This argument, if well-founded, has implications that reach far beyond the rules governing
joint authorship, so I’ll describe it in a bit more detail. Woodmansee, Boyle, and Jaszi contend
that until the late 18th century in Europe, writing was often, in practice, done collectively, and
neither popular nor elite culture placed a high value on the individual artist or author, nor was
innovation especially prized. Rather, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, “Writing
derived its value and authority from its affiliation with the text that preceded it – its derivation
rather than deviation from prior texts.” As an example of this Romantic orientation,
Woodmansee points to the career of Samuel Johnson. Johnson, she observes, often collaborated

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with other writers, spent much of his time preparing editions of other writers’ works, was not
much interested in claiming credit for the ideas he provided to other writers, and often took
material from other writers without attribution. Beginning in the mid-18th century in both
England and continental Europe, there was a broad cultural shift away from this set of attitudes
toward one that glorified individual artistic genius. A new Romantic ideal emerged – a person
who breaks free of the past and develops an entirely new idea, or at least reworks existing
material in an entirely new way. This new ideal could be found in and was popularized by the
work of Edward Young, Goethe, Coleridge and above all, Wordsworth. Here’s a passage from an
1815 essay by Wordsworth that distills this new notion.

Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what
was never done before. Of genius and the fine arts, the only infallible sign is the
widening of the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of
human nature. Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual
universe; or, if that be not allowed, it is the application of powers to objects on which
they had not before been exercised or the employment of them in such a manner as to
produce effects hitherto unknown.

This attitude was certainly not limited to writing. During this same period, individual
genius became the ideal in almost all fields of artistic endeavor. Closely connected to that ideal
was the image of an artist or author as aloof from the grubby business of commercial and
industrial life. The canonical image of the creative process became that of a solitary writer or
painter alone in the garret, pouring out his soul on paper or canvas. Another closely related idea
is that of art for art’s sake – disconnected from both utility and politics.
During the 19th century, this collection of attitudes – which together form the heart of
Romanticism – was reinforced by the broader ideological current known as classical liberalism.
We touched on this topic briefly in lecture number one. Among the features of 19th century
classical liberalism was a tendency to think of many aspects of individual and social life in terms
of dichotomies – sets of opposed polls. Such dichotomies included public versus private – in
other words, government versus civil society – self versus other, facts versus values, family
versus market, and – last but not least – art versus industry.
Copyright law was taking shape during this same historical period. It should not be
surprising that copyright bears the imprint of these ideas. At the most general level, the steady
expansion during the 19th century of the exclusive entitlements enjoyed by a copyright owner is
attributable, at least in part, to the glorification of artists and authors central to Romanticism.
But many more specific doctrines in copyright law also seem connected, these scholars argue, to
the attitudes associated with Romanticism. Here’s one. You’ll recall from lecture number three
that the 19th century witnessed an abstraction and extension of the concept of the work to
which copyright attaches. Take a novel, for example. As late as the 1850s, the protection

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enjoyed by a novel was limited to its text – the sequence of words in which was originally
captured. This attitude underlay a judicial ruling that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
did not infringe Harriet Beecher Stowe’s copyright because generated an entirely different text.
As Oren Bracha has shown, by the end of the 19th century, the thing to which copyright attached
was understood much more broadly. Here’s a quote from his work. “At the dawn of the 20th
century, copyright’s doctrinal terrain came much closer to the theoretical notion of protecting
an abstracted intellectual essence, irrespective of the many concrete forms that it could take.”
This shift echoes, at least loosely, the transition from the idea of writer as craftsman to the
Romantic idea of writer as genius.
A more intriguing possible manifestation of the attitudes associated with Romanticism
concerns the longstanding trouble that copyright law experienced when trying to make sense of
industrial design. As we saw – again, in lecture number three – at least in the United States, the
relevant rule is that a useful article enjoys copyright protection only if – and only to the extent
that – its aesthetic dimensions are separable from its functional dimensions. That doctrine of
conceptual separability is notoriously difficult to apply. Keith Aoki, a brilliant copyright scholar
who tragically died prematurely, suggested that the roots of that fraught doctrine lie in the
dichotomy between art and industry that is characteristic of Romanticism and was reinforced by
classical liberalism.
We return, finally, to the topic of this lecture segment. The possible connection between
the rules governing joint authorship and Romanticism is probably by now obvious. Romanticism
celebrates the individual artistic genius. It would not be surprising that the legislators and judges
who in the 19th and earliest 20th centuries shaped copyright law should seek to confer the status
and economic privileges of authorship upon a single person and should be reluctant to
acknowledge the degree to which authors frequently depend not just upon assistants who
execute their orders – as in the Titanic case – but more importantly, upon collaborators who
contribute meaningfully to the content of their works and thus, arguably, deserve some share of
the credit and the associated legal recognition.
This contention – as I say, pioneered by Woodmansee, Boyle, and Jazsi – that copyright
laws in Europe and the United States have been influenced in part by Romanticism is lent
credence by the contrasts between the cultural and legal traditions in those countries and the
cultural and legal tradition in China. This contrast has been explored most provocatively by my
colleague Bill Alford – an expert on China and its intellectual property laws, in particular. Alford’s
great book – entitled, ironically, To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense – contends, among other
things, that China’s resistance to the adoption of Western copyright law is attributable in part to
the absence of a Romantic tradition in Chinese culture. While culture in Europe and the United
States was being reshaped by Romanticism, China, Alford argues, remains steeped in the
Confucian tradition. Confucianism included, among many other things, a radically different
conception of art and creativity. Here’s a passage from Alford’s book, summarizing this
Confucian conception.

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 The power of the past and its consequences for possession of the fruits of intellectual
endeavor are well captured in the passage in the Analects in which Confucius indicates,
“The master [i.e., Confucius himself] said: ‘I transmit rather than create. I believe in and
love the Ancients.’” The essence of human understanding had long since been discerned
by those had gone before and, in particular, by the sage rulers collectively referred to as
the Ancients, who lived in a distant, idealized “golden age.” To avail themselves of that
understanding, in order to guide their own behavior, subsequent generations had to
interact with the past in a sufficiently thorough manner so as to be able to transmit it.
Yet, as Confucius demonstrated in undertaking to edit the classics and to comment on
them in the Analects, transmission, far from being a passive endeavor, entailed
selection and adaptation if it was to be meaningful to oneself, one’s contemporaries,
and one’s successors.

This sense of the past’s compelling pertinence, and of intellectual endeavor as the
medium through which interaction with and transmission of it was possible, permeated
virtually all facets of Chinese civilization. As the noted scholar of Chinese literature
Stephen Owen has observed, in the Chinese literary tradition “the experience of the
past roughly corresponds to and carries the same force as the attention to meaning or
truth in the Western tradition.” Thus, in classical Chinese literature, the past survives
and warrants consideration not merely as an obvious foil for contemporary activity,
but, more important, because “the Confucian imperative insists that in encountering
the ancients, we ourselves must be changed [for] we discover in the ancients not mere
means, but the embodiment of values.”

It should not be surprising that a country influenced heavily by this vision should have
been reluctant to adopt a copyright system centered on the image of an individual artistic
genius. And indeed, vestiges of that resistance continue in China today.
The line of scholarship I’ve been discussing has an important critical dimension. Thus far,
I’ve been emphasizing its explanatory side. If these scholars are correct, the impact of
Romanticism helps us understand how and why copyright law has assumed its current form. But
these scholars also contend that the law as currently configured is misguided – even perverse.
The image of author or artist as individual creative genius was rarely accurate, they argue, even
during its heyday. Since the 19th century, these scholars contend, it’s become ever less realistic
as an account of how most copyrighted works are in fact generated. The way in which software
is commonly produced, for example, bears little resemblance to the image of the painter alone
in the attic. The law, these scholars argue, clings stubbornly to an increasingly outmoded vision
of creativity whose inaccuracy causes both unfairness and misaligned incentives.
Not all intellectual property scholars are persuaded by this thesis. For example, Mark
Lemley – a leading intellectual property scholar now teaching at Stanford – argues that many
important features of modern copyright law cannot plausibly be traced to Romanticism and

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instead are best understood as efforts to advance the kind of utilitarian objectives I discussed in
the previous lecture. One such feature is the work for hire doctrine to which we’ll return our
attention shortly. Providing an optimal pattern of incentives for the creation and dissemination
of innovations – that, Lemley argues, is what copyright law is and should be primarily about, not
celebrating individual artistic genius. This is an important debate. It will arise in various other
doctrinal contexts we’ll examine later in this lecture series. By the end of the course, I hope
you’re in a position to make your own judgments concerning the nature and strength of the
relationship between the Romantic cultural movement and copyright.

5.3. Works for Hire

In this last segment of the lecture, we’ll examine the copyright implications of employment
relationships broadly defined. The United States is more likely than most countries to confer
copyrights on the people who hire or commission artists and authors instead of on the artists
and authors themselves. The main legal tool that enables employers and hirers to obtain
copyrights is known in the United States as the work for hire doctrine. This is a very important
doctrine. Roughly half of the registered copyrights in the
United States, which is a rough proxy for commercially Implications of designating a
valuable works, are works for hire. The designation of a copyrighted work as work for hire
particular copyrighted work as a work for hire has several
1. Ownership of the copyright
implications.
2. Moral rights not applicable to
First and foremost, the employer or other person
works for hire
for whom the work for hire was prepared, is consider the
author for copyright purposes. Not the assignee of the 3. Duration of work for hire: 95
true author’s copyright, but the author himself or itself. years from first publication or
Next, the modest set of moral rights that, in the United 120 years from creation
States, are provided by the Visual Artists Rights Act do not 4. Renewal rights for old
apply to works for hire. We’ve discussed moral rights in
copyrights
rough terms a couple of times already. In the eighth week
5. Termination provisions not
of this course, we’ll consider the Visual Artists Rights Act,
which implements some of those rights in the United applicable to works for hire

States. For the time being, you need to know only that
works for hire are entirely exempt from that portion of the copyright statute. So, to repeat,
roughly half of the registered copyrights in the United States do not give rise to any moral rights.
The rules that we’ll discuss in detail next week concerning the termination of assignments
of copyrights are likewise inapplicable to works for hire. In addition, works for hire are governed
by different rules pertaining to duration. Regular copyrights, as you now know, last for the life of
the author plus 70 years. By contrast, works for hire last for 95 years from the date they are first
published, or 120 years from the date they are created, whichever is shorter. Sometimes this will
result in a longer term, sometimes a shorter term than a regular copyright, but it’s certainly

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different. So, that’s enough for now. The main point is that it makes a big difference whether a
copyrighted work falls into this special category.
So, how does a copyright end up in this special zone? Two routes by which a work can
There are two routes. First, work can become a work for hire if become a “work for hire”
it’s prepared by an employee within the scope of his 1. Prepared by the employee
employment. In such cases, as we’ve seen, the employer – not
within scope of
the employee – owns the copyright from its inception. Second,
employment
a work can become a work for hire if it falls into one of these
nine categories and if the creators of the work and the person 2. Nine types of commission
commissioning it agree in writing that it shall be considered a works by independent
work for hire. Here’s a key point – these two paths are contractors, when parties
exclusive. There’s no other way that a work can become a work agree in writing.
for hire. So, if a work is not created by an employee within the
a. Contribution to a
scope of his employment and does not fall into one of these
collective work
nine categories, it cannot become a work for hire even if the
parties expressly provide as much in a contract. That exclusivity b. Part of a motion

probably strikes you as odd. Why should the law deny access picture or other
to this particular legal form to some sets of parties? We’ll audiovisual work
come back to that question after we’ve examined these two c. Translation
paths in more detail.
d. Supplementary work
The first of the two paths likely strikes you as the more
(foreword, illustration,
intuitively plausible. Suppose you run a company, you hire
etc.)
someone, part of that person’s job is to create copyrightable
works. It’s not shocking, at least to most US residents, that you e. Compilation
the employer would own the copyright in those works. Millions f. Instructional text
of copyrighted works are born as works for hire in this way. g. Test
Their legal status rarely gives rise to litigation both because it’s h. Answer to a test
clear and to most observers it seems both fair and efficient.
i. Atlas
When litigation concerning this first path does arise, it’s usually
b. not really an employee. If
because the person who created the work can plausibly claim that he’s
he’s a traditional salaried employee, he has no chance of prevailing. But if his relationship with
the putative employer is more attenuated, he might. Until 1989, the legal standards used to
determine whether a creator was truly an employee for these purposes were murky. Different
courts adopted different rules. Finally, the Supreme Court attempted to settle the matter. The
case the Supreme Court chose to clarify the law involved interesting facts.
A nonprofit company called CCNV commissioned a sculptor, named James Earl Reid, to
prepare a sculpture commemorating homelessness. CCNV wanted to display the sculpture on
the mall in the center of Washington DC during the holiday season to sensitize visitors to the
plight of the homeless. CCNV gave Reid a fair amount of instruction concerning what it wanted.
For example, the sculpture should be a modern nativity scene in which the Holy Family is

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replaced by three homeless people,
they should be African American,
they should be depicted lying down,
not sitting up or standing, and so
forth. But CCNV left most of the
artistic decisions in Reid’s hands.
CCNV paid Reid $15,000 for his
services, but provided him no other
compensation, employment benefits,
or so forth. Things went well for a
Figure 64: James Earl Reid's sculpture commemorating
while. Reid created the sculpture
homelesness
shown in Figure 64. It was indeed
displayed on the mall and seems to have been well received by critics and the public. But the
relationship between CCNV and Reid frayed when CCNV planned to take the sculpture on tour in
other US cities in an effort to raise more money for the homeless. Reid objected on the grounds
that to save CCNV money, he had fabricated the sculpture in a material that could not hold up to
such a travel schedule and thus the sculpture would deteriorate which would be offensive to
him. This sentiment should remind you of the stances of Von Gerkan and Snow who sought to
protect their creations from desecration. At the time the dispute arose, the sculpture was back
in Reid’s workshop for some minor repairs. Reid refused to turn it over to CCNV. In response,
CCNV brought a copyright infringement suit. Now at the threshold you should notice that this is
an odd lawsuit. There’s no question that CCNV owns the sculpture itself, the physical object.
CCNV commissioned it and paid for it. CCNV now owns it just as the person who commissions a
portrait owns the portrait once it’s delivered. So why didn’t CCNV simply demand that Reid to
CCNV the sculpture itself? Why did it seek to establish that in addition it owned the copyright in
the sculpture? It’s not entirely clear but probably because CCNV wanted to do things with the
sculpture other than show it to people, perhaps make additional copies of it. As you know by
now, only the copyright owner is permitted to make copies of the copyrighted work. In any
event, CCNV initiated litigation and carried it all the way to the Supreme Court. Because Reid
actually made the sculpture, he was in a strong position in this lawsuit. He would seem to be the
author and thus, as we’ve seen, the copyright owner.
CCNV might have overcome Reid’s presumptive claim to the copyright in any of three
ways. First, CCNV could have argued that one of its trustees, a man named Mitch Snyder,
supervised Reid’s work sufficiently closely that – like Mr. Lindsey in the Titanic case – Snyder,
acting on behalf of CCNV, should be deemed the author. But as you now know, to win on this
theory, you need to exercise very tight control over the activities of your assistants, and Snyder’s
level of supervision of Reid didn’t come close. So, this wouldn’t work.
Second, CCNV might have admitted that Reid was an independent contractor but asserted
that the sculpture was a work for hire because it had been commissioned by CCNV. But this
strategy wouldn’t work for two independent reasons. First, you’ll notice that sculpture is not

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 Table 3: Test for determining when a person should be considered an employee, applied to the CCNV case

Hiring party’s right to control CCNV controls

Skill required * Reid is sculptor
Source of the tools * Reid has own tools
Location of the labor * Reid uses own workshop
Duration of the relationship * 2 months
Right to assign additional projects * No right to assign more work
Control over hours of work * No control
Method of payment * Flat sum
Right to hire assistants * Reid had total discretion
Business of the hiring party * CCNV is not in sculpture
Employee benefits * Business
Tax treatment * No payroll or SS taxes

* Tilted in Reid’s favor

among the nine types of works that can become works for hire through this path. Second, in any
event, the parties had not agreed in writing that the sculpture would be a work for hire, thus
CCNV was doubly blocked. The upshot was that CCNV’s only plausible theory was that Reid had
been an employee, not an independent contractor. If CCNV could classify Reid as an employee, it
could win under path one because the sculpture was surely within the scope of his employment.
The hard part was to show that he had been an employee. The trial court agreed with CCNV on
this crucial point, but the Court of Appeals and eventually the Supreme Court did not. In the
course of rejecting CCNV’s position, Justice Marshall writing for the Supreme Court announced a
new, or at least a clarified, test for determining when a person should be considered an
employee. It’s distilled in Table 3. Here is the key passage in the court’s opinion:

In determining whether a hired party is an employee under the general common law of
agency, we consider the hiring party’s right to control the manner and means by which
the product is accomplished. Among the other factors relevant to this inquiry are the
skill required, the source of the instrumentalities and tools, the location of the work, the
duration of the relationship between the parties, whether the hiring party has the right
to assign additional projects to the hired party, the extent of the hired party’s discretion
over when and how long to work, the method of payment, the hired party’s role in
hiring and paying assistants, whether the work is part of the regular business of the
hiring party, whether the hiring party is in business, the provision of employee benefits,
and the tax treatment of the hired party. No one of these factors is determinative.

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 The Supreme Court then applied this multi-factor test to the facts of the case. All but one
of these variables they concluded tilted in favor of Reid. Here again is Justice Marshall’s
language.

True CCNV members directed enough of Reid’s work to ensure that he produced a
sculpture that met their specifications, but the extent of control the hiring party
exercises over the details of the product is not dispositive. Indeed, all the other
circumstances weigh heavily against finding an employment relationship. Reid is a
sculptor, a skilled occupation. Reid supplied his own tools. He worked in his own studio
in Baltimore, making daily supervision of his activities from Washington practically
impossible. Reid was retained for less than two months, a relatively short period of
time. During and after this time, CCNV had no right to assign additional projects to
Reid. Apart from the deadline for completing the sculpture, Reid had absolute freedom
to decide when and how long to work. CCNV paid Reid $15,000, a sum dependent upon
completion of a specific job, a method by which independent contractors are often
compensated. Reid had total discretion in hiring and paying assistants. Creating
sculpture was hardly regular business for CCNV. Indeed, CCNV is not a business at all.
Finally, CCNV did not pay payroll or Social Security taxes, provide any employee
benefits, or contribute to unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation funds.

Since 1989, courts confronted with analogous disputes have relied on this list of factors to
determine whether an artist in an ambiguous position should be considered an employee. A few
lower courts have tinkered with the test. For example, in one case the Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit announced that a subset of the factors – specifically those highlighted by an
asterisk in Table 3 – are especially important and should be given extra weight. But most courts
just apply the CCNV list as the Supreme Court formulated it.
Disputes of this sort have not arisen terribly often in the past, but they’re likely to become
more common in the future. The reason is that in many modern economies, certainly including
that of the US, companies are decreasing their reliance on formal salaried employees and
increasing their reliance on people whose relationship to the company is more attenuated.
People hired for short periods of time not given traditional employment benefits and so forth. In
most respects, this trend is bad for the workers. But in one respect it’s potentially good for the
workers and dangerous for the companies – namely, it increases the chances that copyrighted
works created by these workers will not be classified as works for hire. Indeed, copyrights in
these works will belong to the workers. Unless and until tell the workers assign those copyrights
to the companies, their legal position will be stronger. Companies, for their part, should look out
for this legal hazard.
The second path to work for hire status seems more clearly marked. As I’ve already
mentioned, if a work falls into one of the nine categories and if the commissioning party secures

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a signed written agreement acknowledging that it shall be deemed a work for hire, that’s the
end of the matter. One industry that relies heavily and effectively on this mechanism in the
United States is the film industry. You’ll recall the chart showing the legal relationships among
the principal participants in the making and distribution of a typical film (Figure 22). As I
discussed in lecture number three, the creative contributions of many people – screenwriters,
actors, directors, and so forth – are pooled into a single copyrighted work, namely the audio-
visual work corresponding to the finished film. Ordinarily that copyright is held by a producer
which then enters into a distribution agreement with a studio, which then issues licenses to the
various players listed at the bottom of this diagram. There’s a risk lurking in this structure which
is probably apparent to you now that we’ve seen how the Rent case ended up. The risk is that
some of the contributors to the film listed at the top of the diagram might argue, plausibly, that
they own the copyrights in the separate things they contributed to the final product, and thus
that the theaters, TV stations, and so forth shown at the bottom of the diagram can’t publicly
perform the film, in other words, the film containing their copyrighted works, without getting
separate licenses from them. To avoid this outcome, the producer almost always obtains a
contract from each of the contributors designating his or her contribution as a work for hire. The
result, the producer owns the copyrights in those contributions from their inception. The legal
provision that makes all this possible and now indeed routine is shown on the chart in Figure 22.
Notice that one of the nine categories of works for which signed work for hire agreements
are effective consists of “a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.” Another industry
that purports to rely on work for hire agreements is the recording industry. You’ll also recall
Figure 21, I hope. It outlines the legal relationships among the principal participants in the
making and marketing of a musical composition and an associated sound recording. You’ll recall
from lecture number three that the composer acquires the copyright in the composition,
typically assigns that copyright to a music publisher, who then issues licenses to many licensees
collecting fees from all of them, which the publisher then shares with the composer. The place in
this complex industry where work for hire agreements become relevant is the relationship
between the performer, who makes a recording of the composition, and the record company.
This relationship appears in the bottom right of the diagram. You’ll recall that since 1972 the
recording has given rise to a second, separate copyright in the sound recording. Who does that
second copyright belong to? If the performer were an employee of the record company, the
copyright would, of course, belong to the record company for the reasons we’ve just reviewed.
But that’s rare. Nowadays record companies rarely employ performers. Rather the performers
are independent contractors. That means that presumptively the performer acquires the
copyright. The record company though doesn’t want to leave the copyright in the hands of the
performer. Typically, the record company wants to control all aspects of the marketing of the
recording and wants to collect all the fees. The cleanest way for the record company to achieve
that is to hold the copyright. As a result, as the chart indicates, virtually all recording contracts
provide that the performer assigns his or her copyright to the record company. From the
standpoint of the record companies, that’s pretty good, but not ideal. The reason it’s not ideal is

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that in the United States an assignment of a copyright is not permanent. As we’ll see in lecture
number six, the assignor holds a non-waivable right to terminate the assignment after a
prescribed interval of time. How exactly that termination right works we’ll discuss next week.
For the time being, the key fact is that, as I say, it’s non-waivable. The result is that even if in the
recording contract the performer purports to surrender his or her right to terminate the
assignment at a future date, that surrender is ineffective. The record companies, for obvious
reasons, don’t want the performers to hold this power of termination. The record companies
want to hold the copyrights in the recordings permanently. How could they do so? By ensuring
that the recordings are classified as works for hire.
The large majority of record contracts purport to do just that. In addition to the provisions
assigning the performance copyrights to the record companies, those contracts contain
provisions indicating that the recordings generated pursuant to the contract constitute works for
hire and thus that the copyrights in them belong to the record company from their inception. If
effective, these provisions would trump the performer’s termination rights. The problem from
the standpoint of the record companies is that it’s far from clear that these provisions, these
contractual provisions, are indeed effective. Recall that signed work for hire agreements entered
into by independent contractors are valid only if the works to which they pertain fall into this
list. Sound recordings, as you’ll notice, don’t appear in this list. Now the lawyers for the record
companies contend that the game is not up. Specifically, they argue that the individual songs
recorded as parts of the albums or CDs generated under these contracts constitute
“contributions to collective works,” and thus qualify under the first item in the list. But even the
record company lawyers realize that that argument is shaky. Some copyright scholars have
testified on their behalf when the issue has been presented to Congress while others equally
strongly disagree.
Aware of the precariousness of their position on this issue, the record companies sought
to strengthen it. Through shrewd lobbying, they were able to slip into a seemingly unrelated
1999 statute what was called a “technical amendment,” that added sound recordings to the list
on your prospectively. Representatives of the musicians were not consulted when this change
was made. When they learned of the change, there was, as you might expect, an explosion. The
furor resulted in congressional hearings, a report from the Copyright Office, angry letters from
musicians, and so forth. In response, Congress removed the “technical amendment,” thus
restoring the original list. The record company lobbyists were able to secure only one
concession: an agreement that the repeal should not be construed as a rejection of their original
shaky characterization of sound recordings as works for hire because they might be considered
contributions to a collective work. The net result of this elaborate maneuvering is the very odd
language shown below.

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 17 USC § 101

In determining whether any work is eligible to be considered a work made for hire
under paragraph (2), neither the amendment contained in section 1011(d) of the
Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999, as enacted by
section 1000(a)(9) of Public Law 106-113, nor the deletion of the words added by that
amendment–

(1) shall be considered or otherwise given any legal significance, or

(B) shall be interpreted to indicate congressional approval or disapproval of, or

acquiescence in, any judicial determination, by the courts or the Copyright Office.
Paragraph (2) shall be interpreted as if both section 2(a)(1) of the Work Made For Hire
and Copyright Corrections Act of 2000 and section 1011(d) of the Intellectual Property
and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999, as enacted by section 1000(a)(9) of
Public Law 106–113, were never enacted, and without regard to any inaction or
awareness by the Congress at any time of any judicial determinations.

As you can see, the current state of affairs is as if the technical amendment – the 1999
technical amendment – never happened.
So, are sound recordings works for hire or not? We don’t know yet and won’t until the
first of the termination rights start to take hold. For the reasons I’ll discuss next week, that, as it
turns out, will begin this year – 2013. If in the inevitable litigation sound recordings are not
deemed works for hire, then older musicians, like Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton, will soon
begin to reclaim their copyrights in their early albums and will probably be able to make more
money off them. Conversely, if sound recordings are deemed works for hire, then Springsteen
and Clapton will remain bound by their original recording contracts. So a great deal hinges on
this highly technical and still unresolved issue.
Two general lessons can be distilled from this story. The first is that adjustments in
copyright law are often achieved through lobbying by the representatives of the affected
interest groups. When two or more powerful groups are opposed, the usual result is stalemate.
Only when the relevant groups are aligned does the law move. The technical amendment, so-
called, secured by the recording industry in 1999 is a rare exception to that generalization. But
note that it was very short lived. Once the representatives of the musicians were alerted, the
amendment was rolled back restoring the statutory stalemate. As Jessica Litman has shown, this
dynamic in which copyright law changes if and only if the relevant interest groups want it to is
common in the United States and not quite so common but still frequently seen in other
countries. The second of the general lessons is that in some industries artists are vulnerable.
Their bargaining power is, in most instances, inferior to that of the intermediaries with whom
they have to deal. As a result, if they’re allowed to sign away their rights, they will. Occasionally
the law seeks to mitigate their vulnerability ironically by restricting their contractual freedom. In

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other words, by preventing them from signing away their rights. The limitations on the set of
works that can constitute works for hire when prepared by independent contractors is an
example of that approach. We’ll see some other examples next week. Whether these efforts to
protect artists or their families from exploitation are effective is far from clear. We’ll see.

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THE MECHANICS OF COPYRIGHT

6.1. The Decline of Formalities

I’ll be examining today the mechanics of copyright, in other words, the way in which the
machinery of the copyright system works in practice. As usual, I’ll devote most of my attention
to how the US Copyright system works. Indeed, of the 12 lectures in this series, this is the one
that pays especially close attention to the idiosyncrasies of the law in the United States.
However, I will identify along the way some respects in which the copyright systems of other
countries differ. And more importantly, I will emphasize the broad policy questions implicated by
the US rules, policy questions that are pertinent to all countries.
The machinery of the copyright system is intricate, surprisingly so. I will not attempt today
to catalog all its details. Instead, I will concentrate on three important dimensions of this
machine – first, the roles played by formalities; second, the rules governing how long copyrights
last, and third, the aspects of the system that attempt to protect vulnerable artists and their
families from exploitation. We’ll begin with formalities.
Until quite recently, the United States, unlike most countries in the world, extended
copyright protection only to authors who had complied with some administrative requirements
known as formalities. These administrative requirements were not especially burdensome, but
they were important. Indeed, failure to observe them could result in permanent forfeiture of
one’s copyright. In the late 20th century, most of these formal requirements were eliminated,
not all at once, but in stages. The result is that since 1989, the copyright system of the United
States has been, in this respect, very similar to the copyright systems in most other countries.
During this segment of the lecture, I will describe how those formal requirements once worked
and the process by which they were largely, although – as we’ll see – not completely abandoned.
A threshold question – if these formalities have been more or less eliminated, why do we need
to discuss them? There are two answers to that question. First, as you’ll soon see, many of the
copyrights that remain commercially valuable in the United States were born during eras in
which the formalities were still in force, and the abolition of the formalities was not retroactive.
As a result, the legal status today of many copyrighted works depends upon the capacity of the
putative owner to demonstrate that the formal requirements were once upon a time

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appropriately observed. In short, the formalities still matter in practice. The second reason is
that, as you will also see, many scholars today believe that the abolition of formalities was a
mistake and that the copyright system did function and would function much better if at least
some formalities were reinstated. Indeed, these scholars argue, all countries should revive some
variant of the model that once existed in the United States. Examining the history of formalities
in the United States will help us to assess that important policy argument. With those two
considerations in mind, let’s turn to the law.

Table 4: Copright formalities for US works over time

Published 1909 – 1977 Published 1978 – 1989 Published 1989 –

Notice Mandatory upon Mandatory within 5 Optional, but may affect
publication years of publication statutory damages
Registration Prerequisite for Application Application prerequisite
infringement suit; prerequisite for for infringement suit
mandatory for infringement suit; involving US works;
renewal necessary for necessary for statutory
statutory damages damages and attorney
and attorney fees fees
Deposit With LOC; failure With LOC; failure With LOC; failure
punished with punished with fines punished with fines
forfeiture & fines

The table above summarizes the changing status in US law of the three most important
formalities. I hasten to add that this chart is not comprehensive. It focuses on, as I say, the most
important requirements. If you’re hungry for more information on the subject, follow the branch
of the map that summarizes the history of formalities. You’ll find they are linked to an excellent
article by Professor Jane Ginsburg. On pages 13 and 14 of her article, you’ll find a chart that
contains much more detail than the one on your screen. So, with that cautionary note, let’s
focus on the main themes.
To make sense of this field, you need to differentiate three eras in the legal history of
copyright in the United States – the period between 1909 and the end of 1977; the period
between January 1, 1978 and February 28, 1989; and the period between March 1, 1989 and the
present.
The first of these eras was governed by the 1909 version of the Federal Copyright Statute.
The event that separated the first from the second era was a comprehensive reform of that
statute, which was adopted in 1976 but only became effective at the start of 1978. The event
that separated the second from the third era was the effective date of the statute, that as we
have seen earlier, altered US law enough to enable the United States to join the Berne
Convention. We could, of course, look farther back in time than 1909, but no copyrights
governed by pre-1909 statutes are still alive today, so we won’t.

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 During the first of these eras, there were three main formalities. Most important, and for
authors the most dangerous, was the notice requirement. When you first published your work,
you had to notify the world that you were claiming copyright in it, or you forfeited your rights.
The statute was quite precise concerning the content and placement of that notice. For example,
if you published a novel, you had to place the notice on the title page or the following page. You
had to use the word copyright or any abbreviation thereof, such as the now famous c within a
circle. And you had to indicate the date of the publication. Figure 65, for example, is the second
page of an edition of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, a very popular novel that we will
discuss later in this course. The crucial material is indicated here. You might wonder, why is the
copyright asserted by McMillan rather than by Mitchell? And what’s the purpose of the language
marked with a red line next to it?
We’ll address those issues shortly.
Now back to the chart – as I say, if
you published your work without
appropriate notice, you no longer
enjoyed copyright protection. This
requirement corresponded to and
reinforced the distinction, during
the era governed by the 1909
statute, between state and federal
copyright protection. Here’s how
that distinction worked in practice
Figure 65: The second page of Gone with the Wind, showing
(refer to Figure 66). the book’s copyright information
When you first created your
work – let’s assume it’s a novel – you acquired a copyright but not a copyright recognized and
enforced by federal statutory law. Rather, you enjoyed a copyright recognized and enforced by
state common law. If you never published your novel, that common law protection would last
indefinitely. But if you published your novel, your common law protection evaporated. From
that point forward, you got copyright protection under federal law, if at all. This is the moment
when the notice requirement took hold. If you published the novel without the requisite notice,
you forfeited federal protection permanently. As a result, the novel fell into the public domain,
the set of materials that anyone can use freely. The metaphor of falling is interesting. Why didn’t
the novel rise into the public domain? There are various possible explanations for this
terminology – perhaps because the public domain was thought of as debased, perhaps because
it was analogized to the Lockian untilled field, perhaps because it was thought of as a reservoir,
like water, of raw materials. Not clear, but almost certainly, the metaphor of falling had, and still
has, power. Back to our story – if by contrast, you or your publisher attached to all copies of the
published book the requisite notice, then you did acquire federal copyright protection, but it did
not last forever. Rather, it lasted for an initial term of 28 years. When that term ended, the novel
again fell into the public domain, unless you, or as we’ll see, a member of your family renewed

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 Figure 66: The timeline of copyright protection under the 1909 regime

the copyright, in which case, it would enjoy protection for a second 28-year term, whereupon it
would finally and permanently fall to the public domain. Thereafter, anyone could use it, copy it,
publish it, read it aloud in a public park, and so forth.
For the most part, the system worked just fine for sophisticated novelists, like Margaret
Mitchell, and publishers, like McMillan. They were aware of the statutory requirements, and
complying with them was not hard. But less sophisticated players or the creators of less-
conventional works sometimes neglected the notice requirement, and as a result, lost copyright
protection permanently. The courts, sympathetic to the plight of these unsophisticated players,
begin to tinker with this legal regime, in order to reduce the frequency of forfeitures. They
couldn’t, of course, ignore the statutory requirement altogether. Instead, they began to
construe the term, “publication,” in a way that helped 90% of authors. They were able to do so
because the statute itself did not to find the term publication, but left that up to the courts.
Seizing that opportunity, the courts differentiated two kinds of publication – so-called limited
publication, which would not trigger the notice requirement, and so-called general publication,
which did. The courts then defined general publication narrowly, to exclude lots of things we
would actually associate with the term publication. For example, they held that making and
distributing a sound recording of a musical composition did not result in publication of the
composition and that giving a public lecture did not result in publication of the lecture, unless
you passed out unrestricted copies of the text to your audience.
Here’s an important and illustrative case, the outcome of which hinged on this
counterintuitive definition of publication. On August 28, 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference organized a march in Washington, DC in support of the civil rights movement.
Roughly 200,000 people gathered on the mall at the center of the city. The march culminated
with a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the founder and president of the Leadership
Conference. The latter portions of his speech contained some of the most moving and justly
famous lines in US political history. Here are a few.

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 I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream
that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with
the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where
little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and
white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

As I say, roughly 200,000 people heard this speech live, and millions more saw it on
television. Roughly a month afterward, it apparently occurred to King, or his advisers, that he
ought to enjoy a copyright in the speech and that other people should have to pay him, if they
wished to sell copies the speech. So, on September 30, 1963, King filed for copyright registration
and duly received a certificate of registration on October 2. He then initiated an infringement
suit against unauthorized seller and prevailed.
It’s probably occurred to you that there’s an important policy issue lurking here. Should
political speeches be subject to copyright protection? In the United States, so long as their
authors are not officials of the federal government, they are protected by copyright. And Dr.
King and his estate have enforced their copyrights in his speeches and letters fiercely. I leave to
you the question of whether giving King and his estate this power makes sense on the basis of
any of the theories of copyright we’ve considered thus far in this lecture series, but our primary
concern today is not with that important policy issue, but with of question of formalities.
For decades, no one seems to have challenged King’s copyright in the “I Have a Dream”
speech. Then, in 1994, CBS produced a documentary series on 20th century US history. One
segment of one episode in that series focused on the March on Washington. In it, CBS showed
roughly 60% of King’s speech. CBS did not, before making the film, ask permission and did not
pay the customary license fee. King’s estate predictably brought suit against CBS. CBS’s main line
of defense was that King, and subsequently his estate, lacked copyright protection, because King
had published the speech in August of 1963 without the statutorily required notice. There’s no
question that King had not given any kind of copyright notice when he delivered the speech on
the mall. So, the only issue, at least during the preliminary round of litigation, was whether
making the speech before a nationwide audience constituted publication. The trial court
concluded, yes, and thus that King had forfeited copyright protection. But the Court of Appeals
for the 11th Circuit concluded, no. A general publication, the court ruled, occurs only in two
situations – first, when tangible copies of a work are distributed to the general public in such a
manner as to allow the public to exercise dominion and control over those copies; and second,
when the work is exhibited and displayed in a way that invites unrestricted copying by the
general public, for example, by publicly displaying a sculpture without any restrictions on the
freedom of viewers to photograph it. At the stage of the litigation in which this issue arose, CBS
had not yet established that King had done either of those things when he delivered the speech.
So, he did not forfeit his copyright in it. So, CBS, as a result, had to obtain a license from King’s

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estate, if CBS wished to broadcast it. This case illustrates a couple things – on one hand, the
crucial importance during this first year of the notice requirement; and on the other hand, the
willingness of some courts in borderline cases to construe the term publication in a way that
avoided forfeiture.
So, that’s the first of the three main formalities that governed US copyright law until 1978.
After that date, the requirement was softened considerably. Between 1978 and 1989, failure to
attach notices to copies at the time of registration was not fatal, so long as you made an effort
to cure the problem within five years. In 1989, the notice requirement was eliminated as a
precondition for copyright protection. Although, as we’ll see in the twelfth lecture, a failure to
attach appropriate notices may limit the amount of statutory damages you can collect from
infringers. Remember, however, that these changes were not retroactive. So, in the King case,
the fact that the CBS documentary was not made until the 1990s did not mean that the notice
requirement was irrelevant. Because the speech was made and published in 1963, the 1909
statutory requirements still applied and continue to apply today to pre-1978 works. The second
of the three formalities is also illustrated by the King case. Registering your work with the
Copyright Office was not a prerequisite to copyright protection, but you could not bring an
infringement suit prior to registration, nor could you renew the copyright. That’s the reason King
sought and obtained registration before filing his initial suit. In 1978, the renewal system, as
we’ll see, disappeared, but registration remained necessary if you wanted to bring a lawsuit. An
additional incentive for registration was added, namely that you couldn’t recover statutory
damages or attorney’s fees for infringements that began prior to registration. In 1989,
registration ceased to be a precondition for initiating a lawsuit with respect to works first
published outside the United States, but it’s still remained so for so-called US works.
The softest and least important of the formalities was the requirement that authors
deposit two copies of their works with the Library of Congress within three months of
publication, basically, in order to help the library build its collection. Failure to comply exposed
you to escalating fines. If after being notified by the Copyright Office you still refuse to comply,
you could forfeit your copyright, although this seems to have been rare. Forfeiture was
eliminated as a sanction in 1978, and that regime continues to the present. So that, in brief, was
how the US system of formalities worked and how it has been radically cut back. As we’ve seen,
the system had two unfortunate effects. First, it sometimes resulted in inattentive authors losing
their copyright protection altogether. Second, it tended to benefit sophisticated parties and
institutions and to disadvantage authors and others less aware of the rules of the game.
However, in its heyday, the system of formalities also had two important beneficial social
functions. First, the registration requirement facilitated socially beneficial licenses and
assignments. Suppose you encountered a copyrighted work and wanted to use it for some
purpose – for example, you came upon a sound recording you wanted to include in a film or an
article you wanted to include in an anthology. If the copyright in the recording or article has
been properly registered, you were more likely to be able to locate the copyright owner and
thus obtain a license than if had not been registered. Viewed from this angle, however, the

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system was far from perfect, because as we’ve seen, lots of work still in their first term had not
been the subject of litigation and thus were still unregistered. And yet, the copyrights in them
were valid. The second of the two beneficial social functions was advanced more effectively by
this regime. The notice requirement had the effect that many works, specifically all works
published without the proper notice, fell into the public domain. Arguably, this was desirable,
both by increasing the set of materials from which future authors could draw freely and by
giving all authors an easy way of dedicating their works to the public. If you didn’t want to assert
a copyright, all you had to do was publish your work without a copyright notice.
Some evidence that these functions were indeed being advanced can be gleaned from
data compiled by Chris Sprigman in his pioneering article on copyright formalities. Figure 67,
taken from Sprigman’s article, shows the number of copyright registrations each year, from 1909
through the end of the century. As you can see, it begins at about 100,000 per year and peaks at
around 600,000. That might seem like a large number. But it’s a tiny percentage of the set of
potentially copyrightable works. Another
feature of the system reinforced this effect. As
you’ll recall, the original 1909 regime did not
give authors a copyright lasting 56 years, but
rather gave them an initial term of 28 years plus
an option to renew for another 28 years. If they
failed to exercise that option, their works fell
into the public domain. And most authors did
indeed fail, as Figure 68, also from Sprigman,
demonstrates. It shows the fraction of works
originally registered that were renewed when
Figure 67: Copyright registrations (excluding renewals),
the time came for renewal arrived. As you can
1910 – 2000
see, that percentage begins around 5% and
rises to only around 20%. In other words, the
large majority of registered works were not
renewed and thus went out of copyright after
only 28 years, thus contributing to the public
domain reservoir.
The general principle underlying the
system is that copyright was an opt-in regime. If
you wanted a copyright, you had to
affirmatively acquire and keep it. If you didn’t,
you lost it. By contrast, the current US regime,
and the copyright regimes in virtually all other
countries, is an opt-out system. Copyright Figure 68: Rate of copyright renewals, 1910 – 2000
protection, as we’ve seen, arises automatically.

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If you don’t want a copyright in one of your works, you have to act affirmatively to give it up,
and it’s not easy to do so. Graphically, this difference can be characterized as follows (Figure 69).
As soon as you create a work – more specifically, as soon as you fix it in a tangible medium of
expression – federal copyright protection automatically arises. You don’t need to wait until
publication. And protection lasts not for 20 years or even 56 years, but for your lifetime plus an
additional 70 years. Somewhere along this timeline, you or your heirs or devisees may publish
the work. And as we’ll see, publication has some important legal effects, particularly if it’s a work
for hire. But publication does not alter the existence of the copyright. When the term expires,
the work will, as usual, fall into the public domain. But that won’t be until long after you’re dead.
Before then, it’s possible to give up your copyright by dedicating it to the public domain, but
that, as I say, is hard and rare. The result, as I’ve indicated previously, is that billions of creative
works throughout the world are now subject to copyright protection. But the absence of an
effective registration system often makes it difficult to locate the owners of those copyrights and
thus to obtain permission to make otherwise proscribed uses of those works. The result is

Figure 69: The timeline of copyright protection under the current regime

needless impediments to cumulative or derivative artistic progress.

What might be done to alleviate this problem, without, of course, corroding the rights of
the artists and authors who do want and depend upon copyright? There at least three
possibilities.
First, and most radically, we might repudiate the provision of the Berne Convention that
forbids making compliance with formalities a condition of acquiring or exercising copyrights and
then, country by country, reinstate systems of formalities. That might well be socially desirable,
but it’s very unlikely.
Second, we might increase the incentives for voluntarily complying with formalities, in
particular for registering one’s copyrights. As I’ve said, there already exists some incentives for
registration. For example, registered copyrights enjoy a modest presumption of validity, and as
we’ve seen in the United States, statutory damages are not available when unregistered
copyrights are infringed. But we might amplify the benefits of registration, perhaps by further
increasing the remedies available to the owners of registered works. Alternatively, we might
make a failure to register more costly, perhaps by expanding the set of exceptions and
limitations applicable to unregistered works. But in so doing, we’d need to be mindful of the

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constraints imposed by the so-called three-step test contained in the Berne Convention and the
TRIPS Agreement, which I discussed in the first lecture.
The third of the three possible responses would be to provide a mechanism that makes it
easier for authors and artists to donate some or all of their entitlements to the public – to make,
in other words, a credible and enforceable announcement to the world that they will retain and
exercise only some of the rights that the copyright system automatically confers upon them.
That’s basically the idea behind Creative Commons, the brainchild of Larry Lessig. Creative
Commons makes available to copyright owners a set of standardized licenses that they can grant
to the public at large by attaching appropriate notices to copies of their creations. As we saw in
the King case, attaching a copyright notice to copies of one’s work was once essential, if one
wanted copyright protection. The Creative Commons notices do the opposite. They signal to the
world that the copyright owner wishes to give up some or all of the rights he or she acquires
automatically. The following short video from Creative Commons itself shows how these notices
work.

Wanna Work Together?

When you share your creativity, you’re enabling people anywhere to use it, learn from
it, and be inspired by it. Take the teacher, who shapes young minds with work and
wisdom from around the globe; and the artist, who breeds beauty out of bits and pieces
she finds online; and the writer, whose stories use ideas and images crafted by people
he’s never even met. These people know that when you share your creative wealth, you
can accomplish great things. They and millions of other people all around the planet
are working together to build a richer, better, more vibrant culture, using Creative
Commons. To understand Creative Commons, you need to know a little bit about how
copyright works. Did you know that when you create something, anything from a
photograph to a song to a drawing to a film to a story, you automatically own and all
rights reserved copyright to that creativity. It’s true. Copyright protects your creativity
against uses you don’t consent to. But sometimes full copyright is too restrictive. What
about when you want all those millions and millions of people out there to use your
work without the hassle of coming to you for permission? What if you want your work
to be freely shared, reused, and built upon by the rest of the world? Luckily, there’s an
answer – Creative Commons. We provide free copyright licenses you can use to tell
people exactly which parts of your copyright you’re happy to give to the public. It’s
easy. It only takes a minute. And it’s totally free. Just come on our website and answer
a few quick questions like – will you allow commercial uses of your work? And will you
allow your work to be modified? Based on your answers, we’ll give you a license that
clearly communicates what people can and can’t do with your creativity. You don’t give
up your copyright. You refine it, so it works better for you. Welcome to a new world
where collaboration rules. It didn’t even exist just a few years ago. But now there are

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 millions and millions of songs, pictures, videos, and written works available to share,
reuse, and remix, all for free. Want to work together? Then join the commons –
Creative Commons.

If you’re persuaded by this video and follow the narrator’s instructions to go to the
Creative Commons website, you will find there six main licensing options which give you and
other authors of a variety of sets of rights that you and they may decide to retain or surrender.
In addition to the six licenses listed on your screen, Creative Commons makes available to
copyright owners a standardized notice known as CC0, that they can employ to give up all of
their rights – in other words, as I’ve said, to donate their works to the public domain. An
important footnote – as you know by now, in some countries, authors enjoy some non-waivable
moral rights, in other words, entitlements that they cannot give up. In those countries, use of
the CC0 label may not be fully effective or at least not permanent. That troubling possibility has
not yet been tested. But this label, CC0, provides authors an easy way to give up as many rights
as they can. In terms of our schematic characterization of the copyright system, here’s what CC0
enables. The current regime, as you’ll recall, works like this. CC makes it easier for copyright
owners to opt out of some more or all of their rights, in other words, to as shown in Figure 70.

Figure 70: The effect of Creative Commons

The advantage of Creative Commons, as compared to the other two ways of tempering
the unfortunate side effects of our current lack of formalities, is that it in no way undermines the
right of copyright owners who want to retain all of their rights. It is this optional feature that
prompted Jack Valenti, the former head of the Motion Picture Association of America and a
staunch defender of copyright, to endorse Creative Commons.

Jack Valenti, Motion Picture Association of America

I’m glad to be here via this video. I wish I could be there in person. But I wanted to say
just few words about Larry Lessig’s concept of Creative Commons. I’m attracted to it for
the following reasons. First, Larry makes it clear that he is respectful of and supports
copyright – copyrighted material that artists create – and he believes it ought to be

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 protected. But he also says, and I agree, that there are those people who have
copyrighted material who may want to give up part of their copyright or all of it, to put
on the Creative Commons and let other people view it or hear it or whatever, and I have
no problem with that. I think that’s part of the free and society in this country, that if
you want other people to have your material you have created free of charge with your
permission, wonderful. And I find that to be a salutary kind of thing. But I think it’s also
important, as Larry staunchly believes, that those people who have copyrighted
material – whether it be in a book or a television program or home video or music or
movie or computer software – and who want it protected, so that they can make sure
that it can move through the various venues where that material is brought to the
public and given to consumers at fair and reasonable prices.

The disadvantage of Creative Commons is that the majority of copyright owners do not
and will not use it, either because they were unaware of it, don’t understand it, or simply don’t
want to give up any rights. Creative Commons thus mitigates the troubling impact of our lack of
formalities, but certainly doesn’t eliminate them. What else might we do without sacrificing the
clear benefits of our current regime? I’ll leave that to your imagination and deliberation.

6.2. Duration
In this segment of the lecture, we’ll examine the rules that determine how long US copyrights
last. You’re probably thinking, well, this will be a short segment. How complicated can it be? The
answer, unfortunately, is quite complicated. The reason for the complexity is that the relevant
rules in the United States have been amended several times, but the amendments have been
only partially retroactive. The result is that there are several subsets of copyrighted works that
are governed by different sets of duration rules. Here’s how I’ll try to untangle this knot. I’ll
begin by reviewing the history of the pertinent laws. I’ll then start over and consider the impact
of that history on the duration of different groups of works.
Figure 71 shows the way things worked under the original version of the 1909 copyright
statute. As we’ve seen, the first term of federal protection lasted for 28 years after the date of
publication. If the copyright was properly renewed, it lasted for another 28-year term,
commonly known, for obvious reasons, as the renewal term. Here are a few more details we
have not yet discussed. The application for renewal could be filed any time during the year
preceding the expiration of the initial term. If the author was still alive at that time, he or she
was the person presumptively entitled to apply for and receive the renewed copyright. If the
author had died, his or her surviving spouse or children could do so. If there were no surviving
spouse or kids, the author’s executor had the right, if the author had left a will. If he or she had
not left a will, then his or her next of kin had the renewal right. A technical point that, as we’ll
see later had some important practical effects, the renewal term was not thought of as a

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continuation of the initial term. It was said to be a new term – a new estate – that belonged to
the person who applied for and received it.

Figure 71: Durations under the 1909 copyright regime

With respect to works first published under the auspices of the 1909 statute, this basic
structure has remained intact, but the length and mechanics of the renewal term have been
adjusted several times. In 1976, the renewal term was extended from 28 to 47 years. In 1998, as
part of the Copyright Term Extension Act, it was extended from 47 to 67 years. In 1992, the
renewals of works that at the time were still in their first term was made automatic rather than
voluntary. The result is that copyrighted works ceased falling into the public domain at the end
of their initial 28-year terms. The 1976 general reform of the copyright statute, which became
effective as we’ve seen at the start of 1978, instituted a radically new regime. As we’ve seen,
works created thereafter acquired federal copyright protection immediately, which lasted for
the life of the author plus 50 years. The Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 extended that
term to its current duration – the life of the author plus 70 years. Measuring duration by the life
of the author would not work for anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and works for hire,
so these were given terms of years that were meant
to approximate the duration of regular copyrights – How long a US copyright lasts depends
a century from the date of creation or 75 years from on when and how it was created
first publication, whichever happened first. The
1. Works published before 1923
Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 also extended
2. Works published 1923 – 1963
those terms by 20 years.
3. Works published 1964 – 1977
Lurking in these details are two general
themes. The first, I’ve already mentioned – the 4. Works created but not published
gradual transition from an opt-in to an opt-out before 1978
system. The second, probably obvious, is that 5. Works created in 1978 or later

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copyrights keep getting longer. They never, even prospectively, get shorter.
OK, now let’s adopt a precedents stance. It’s 2013, how long do US copyrights last? The
answer depends upon when and how they were born. More specifically, you need to
differentiate five different categories of copyrighted works.

Figure 72: Copyright duration of works published before 1923

The simplest group consists of works published before 1923 (Figure 72). Some of these got
the benefit of the extension of the renewal term from 28 to 47 years, but all of them fell into the
public domain before the Copyright Term Extension Act could rescue them and the Act did not
lift them back up. The upshot is that the copyrights on these works have expired.

Figure 73: Copyright duration of works published 1923 – 1963

The second category consists of works published between 1923 and 1963 (Figure 73).
These were rescued before their expiration by the Copyright Term Extension Act. The most
famous and influential member of this group is Mickey Mouse – a copyrighted character, who
first appeared publicly in the 1928 cartoon, Steamboat Willie. Copyrights in these works will
begin to expire in 2018, 95 years after their first publication. Mickey Mouse, himself, will fall into

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the public domain on or about 2023, unless yet another amendment of the statute rescues him
again. Not all works published during this interval are still alive, however. Only those who were
properly renewed, by people eligible to renew them, survived. As we’ve seen, the large majority
of works registered during this interval were not renewed. The net effect is that most of the
work copyrights in this category of works have expired.
Not so with respect to works first published between 1964 and 1977 (Figure 74). These get
the benefit of the change from voluntary renewal to automatic renewal. Who owns these
copyrights? Presumptively, the same person or persons who are eligible to apply for renewal

Figure 74: Copyright duration of works published 1964 – 1977

onto the previous regime. Another important footnote: just because these copyrights are
subject to automatic renewal doesn’t mean that they cannot be voluntarily renewed, and the
system contains some important incentives for people who voluntarily renew. The upshot, as
you might imagine, is that voluntary renewal remained common after 1992. The key point for
our present purposes is that works in this third category have not yet fallen into the public
domain. They will begin to do so in 2018, like their surviving older cousins.
Works in the fourth category overlap the fundamental change in the copyright system
caused by the general reform of the statute in 1976. These were created but not published
before 1978 (Figure 75). Federal copyright protection for these last for the lives of their authors
plus 70 years or the end of 2002, whichever is later. In addition, if they were published by the
end of 2002, they got an extra lease on life until, at a minimum, the end of 2047. The purpose
and effect of this provision was to nudge the heirs of the authors of such things to publish them.

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 Figure 75: Copyright duration of works created but not published before 1978

Figure 76: Duration of works created in 1978 or later

Figure 77: Duration of works created in 1978 or later, for anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and
works for hire

We come, finally, to the newest set of works, those created in 1978 or later. These, as you
now know, last for the life of the author plus 70 years. That means that they will start expiring in

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2048 at the earliest (Figure 76). As we’ve seen, anonymous works, pseudonymous works, and
works for hire get treated differently. They will begin to expire in 2073 at the earliest (Figure 77).
So, that’s where things stand. The bottom line: if you need to know the status of a
particular US work, first ascertain which of these five categories it falls into. Works in the first
box are in the public domain. Works in the second box probably are in the public domain, but
you need to check whether the copyrights were timely renewed. Works in the third box are
most likely not in the public domain, unless of course they were published without the required
copyright notice, but their copyrights will begin to expire in 2018. Works in the fourth box could
be in the public domain, unless they were published before 2002 – you need to check. And
finally, works in the fifth box are probably not in the public domain. The exceptions to this last
proposition are those published between 1978 and 1989, without the required statutory notice
and that defect was not cured within five years, and works published recently subject to CC0
proclamations. Otherwise, these works will not begin to fall until 2048 at the earliest. Messy,
very messy.

6.3. Protective Provisions

In the 1940s, in the case of Fred Fisher versus Witmark, US courts confronted for the first time
the question of whether an author may assign his so-called expectancy interest in the renewal
term for his copyright. Here’s the context in which that question arose (see Figure 78).

Figure 78: Copyright under the 1909 regime, showing the ability to assign renewal rights

You’ll recall that the 1909 copyright system worked like this: so long as he complied with
the rest requisite formalities, the author of a work received a 28-year initial term of federal
copyright protection. During the 28th year, he could apply for a second 28-year term. If he had
died, his widow or children could apply, and so forth. As I’ve indicated, the renewal term was

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said to be a new estate, not just a continuation of the earlier term. It was common during this
period, like today, for authors to assign their copyrights. This was especially common in the
music industry. As we saw in the third lecture in this series, composers very commonly assigned
the copyrights in their compositions to music publishers. The effect of such an assignment was
that the assignee – the publisher – acquired the initial 28-year term. If the composer was still
alive at the end of the term, he would often renew the copyright, and then assign the renewal
term to a publisher, often but not always the same publisher. If he died, his widow could do so.
From the publisher’s standpoint, this was not ideal. The publisher couldn’t be sure of getting the
second term and in any event, during the 28th year, the publisher would have to negotiate with
the composer, or his widow, or executor, concerning the terms of the new assignment. If the
song in question had proven popular, the publisher might be obliged to pay considerably more
to get the renewal term than it had paid to get the initial term. So, publishers, and analogous
assignees in other industries, frequently asked authors during the first negotiation to assign to
them not only the first copyright term, but also the author’s contingent rights to the renewal
term, known as an expectancy interest. The reason for this terminology – the reason that they
were called contingent – is that the author only had a right to renew if he was still alive in the
28th year. If he had died by then, his widow or executor had the right to renew, and the author
lacked the power to assign his widow’s contingent rights. The net effect is that the assignee
obtained the first term for sure, and the renewal term if and only if the author survived until the
28th year. For obvious reasons that too is not ideal from the standpoint of the assignee, because
it meant that sometimes the assignee would have to renegotiate with a widow or executor, but
it was a lot better than always having to renegotiate.
Let’s pause for a technical point. How exactly was this assignment of the expectancy
interest achieved? The answer is usually by the author conveying to the assignee an irrevocable
power of attorney – in other words, legal authority to do what otherwise the author himself had
the right to do, namely, to file the renewal application, and to get the resultant renewal term.
This prevented the author from changing his mind in the 28th year, and filing for renewal himself
and refusing to transfer the renewal term. As I say, these arrangements were common, but it
wasn’t obvious that they were valid. In other words, it wasn’t obvious that the purported
assignment of the expectancy interests were enforceable. The 1909 statute did not address the
issue explicitly, but the House and Senate reports explaining the basis of that statute contained a
passage that seemed to cast doubt on the validity of these assignments. Here it is. The crucial
language is underlined.

House Report

It was urged before the committee that it would be better to have a single term
without any right of renewal, and a term of life and fifty years was suggested. Your
committee, after full consideration, decided that it was distinctly to the advantage of
the author to preserve the renewal period. It not infrequently happens that the author

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 sells his copyright outright to a publisher for a comparatively small sum. If the work
proves to be a great success and lives beyond the term of twenty-eight years, your
committee [meaning: your congressional committee] felt that it should be the exclusive
right of the author to take the renewal term, and the law should be framed as is the
existing law, so that he could not be deprived of that right.

This passage suggests that the purpose of not giving an author from the outset a single
term of life plus 50 years, or something shorter, like 56 years, but instead requiring him to renew
the copyright in the 28th year, was precisely to give him an opportunity to renegotiate the terms
of any assignment. And the reason why that’s important is that, as the committee explains,
authors tend to be either vulnerable or naive, and therefore, to assign their initial terms for too
little money. In other words, the law was designed to protect authors from their own foolishness
or vulnerability. Permitting them to assign their expectancy interests, along with the first term,
arguably would defeat that goal. The upshot is that there was a plausible argument that these
assignments of expectancy interests were invalid; but for many years, they were used without
being challenged in court. Finally, one composer did so. His name was George Graff. In 1912, Mr.
Graff helped compose the song, “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.” Here’s a brief excerpt of a 1913
recording of the song.

[Music: “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”.]

(Lyrics) There’s a tear in your eye. And I’m wondering why, for it never should be there
at all. With such power in your smile, sure a stone you’d beguile, and there’s never a
teardrop should fall. When your sweet lilting laughter like some fairy song, and your
eyes sparkling bright as can be you should laugh all the while, and all other times smile.
And now smile a while for me.

When he first wrote this song, Graff assigned the copyright, in the initial 28-year term, to
a music publisher, Witmark and Sons, in return for some royalties. Five years later, he
encountered financial difficulties. To raise some cash, Graff gave up his royalties for “Irish Eyes,”
and for 68 other songs, and in addition, assigned his expectancy interest in the renewal term for
all of those 69 songs, to Witmark in return for a lump sum payment of $1,600. Subsequently,
“Irish Eyes” became very popular, and earned Witmark lots of royalties, none of which, of
course, went to Graff. In 1939, on the first day of the 28th year of the copyright, Witmark, the
publisher, exercised its right to renew the copyright for an additional 28-year term. Graff,
unhappy, insisted that his 1917 assignment of the expectancy interest to Witmark had been
invalid, and purported to renew the copyright in “Irish Eyes” himself, and then assign it for more
money to a different publisher, Fred Fisher Music. The two publishers then fought it out. The
timeline of the various actions and the parties involved is shown in Figure 79.

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 Figure 79: The parties involved in and the timeline of Fred Fisher Music v. M. Witmark & Sons

Although, as you can see, the case that grew out of this complicated narrative involved
two publishers, it had big implications for all other composers and artists in analogous positions.
If Witmark prevailed, then many authors would not get a second bite at the apple. They could,
and would, assign their expectancy interests, along with the first term of their copyrights,
sometimes for very little money. Then, when the time for renewal arose, they would have no
rights. By contrast, if Fred Fisher Music prevailed, authors in the future would be unable to
assign their expectancies, but on the other hand, would be in a much better bargaining position
at renewal time.
So, the stakes were high. The case proceeded through three levels of courts. The trial
judge ruled in favor of Witmark. The Court of Appeals affirmed, by a vote of two judges to one,
and the Supreme Court affirmed, by a vote of five to three, one justice not participating. The law
was thus settled. Expectancy interests of this sort are indeed assignable. For our purposes, even
more important than this outcome is the language used by the opposing groups of parties and
judges. Two radically different conceptions of authors, their characteristics, and their needs
figured in this case. The first was well expressed by Judge Jerome Frank, who dissented in the
Court of Appeals.

In considering those facts, we should take judicial notice of the economic capacities and
business acumen of most authors. We need only take judicial notice of that which every
schoolboy knows – that, usually, with a few notable exceptions, such as Shakespeare
and George Bernard Shaw, authors are hopelessly inept in business transactions and
that lyricists, like the defendant Graff, often sell their songs “for a song.”

Appreciation of these facts, Frank contended, should prompt us to treat lyricists, and
authors in general, as especially vulnerable, perhaps even a “necessitus class,” and to curtail
their contractual freedom for their own good. Specifically, we should disable them from

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assigning their expectancy interests, which Frank argued the statute, properly construed did. The
opposing narrative and vision was equally well stated by Justice Felix Frankfurter, who wrote the
majority opinion for the Supreme Court.

It is not for courts to judge whether the interests of authors clearly lie upon one side of
this question rather than the other. We cannot draw a principle of law from the familiar
stories of garret-poverty of some men of literary genius. Even if we could do so, we
cannot say that such men would regard with favor a rule of law preventing them from
realizing on their assets when they are most in need of funds. Nor can we be unmindful
of the fact that authors have themselves devised means of safeguarding their interests.
We do not have such assured knowledge about authorship, and particularly about song
writing, or the psychology of gifted writers and composers, as to justify us as judges in
importing into Congressional legislation a denial to authors of the freedom to dispose
of their property possessed by others. While authors may have habits making for
intermittent want [in other words, they don’t manage their money well] they may have
no less a spirit of independence which would resent treatment of them as wards under
guardianship of the law.

Frankfurter’s vision, his insistence that authors were responsible adults, autonomous
individuals, and should not be treated as wards of the state, prevailed in this particular case. But
Judge Frank’s competing vision, that the law should be crafted to nurture and protect
improvident authors, to shield them from their habitual folly, also had a significant following.
Three of the Supreme Court justices dissented. Instead of writing a dissent themselves, they
merely indicated that they agreed with the analysis of the language and history of the copyright
law in the dissenting opinion of Judge Frank, in the court below.
These competing visions are outgrowths of deeper and broader themes in copyright law,
and in US law in general. Indeed, both of these opposed visions can be found in the legal
systems of most countries, at least in Europe and North America. The broader theme that
underlies the Frankfurter argument is sometimes called individualism. Here’s how Duncan
Kennedy, the scholar who has done the most to identify and explore these ideological currents,
describes it.

The essence of individualism is the making of a sharp distinction between one’s

interests and those of others, combined with the belief that a preference in conduct for
one’s own interests is legitimate, but that one should be willing to respect the rules that
make it possible to coexist with others similarly self-interested. The form of conduct
associated with individualism is self-reliance. This means an insistence on defining and
achieving objectives without help from others (i.e., without being dependent on them

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 or asking sacrifices of them). It means accepting that they will neither share their gains
nor one’s own losses. And it means a firm conviction that I am entitled to enjoy the
benefits of my efforts without an obligation to share or sacrifice them to the interests
of others.

An attitude strongly associated with this outlook is a hostility to paternalism, legal rules
that restrict people’s freedom for their own good, such as a rule preventing authors from
assigning their expectancy interest on the grounds that they will be better off if they’re forced to
wait until the end of their initial copyright terms.
Opposed to individualism is altruism. Here’s how Kennedy described it.

The essence of altruism is the belief that one ought not to indulge a sharp preference
for one’s own interest over those of others. Altruism enjoins us to make sacrifices, to
share, and to be merciful. It has roots in culture, in religion, ethics and art, that are as
deep as those of individualism. (Love thy neighbor as thyself.)

The simplest of the practices that represent altruism are sharing and sacrifice. Sharing
is a static concept, suggesting an existing distribution of goods which the sharers
rearrange. It means giving up to another gains or wealth that one has produced oneself
or that have come to one through some good fortune. It is motivated by a sense of duty
or by a sense that the other’s satisfaction is a reward at least comparable to the
satisfaction one might have derived from consuming the thing oneself. Sharing may
also involve participation in another’s losses: a spontaneous decision to shift to oneself
a part of the ill fortune, deserved or fortuitous, that has befallen someone else. Sacrifice
is the dynamic notion of taking action that will change an ongoing course of events, at
some expense to oneself, to minimize another’s loss or maximize his gain.

This orientation tends to sustain a much more favorable posture toward paternalism.
People, viewed this way, should not be left to their own devices. The law should, at least
sometimes, intervene to save them from themselves.
Kennedy’s great essay, from which these passages are drawn, explores in depth the
relationship between these competing attitudes concerning the substance of human relations,
and analogously competing attitudes toward the proper form of legal rules. If you’re curious, I
strongly encourage you to explore that essay (available online†). But our concern here is with the
narrower question of how the attitudes I’ve just summarized find expression in copyright law.
Legislators, when adjusting the copyright statute, and judges, when construing and applying the
statute, are frequently pulled in different directions by these warring impulses. Sometimes, as in

†
Duncan Kennedy, "Form and Substance in Private-Law Adjudication," 89 Harv. L. Rev. 1685 (1976).
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Form%20and%20Substance%20in%20Private%20Law%20Adjudication.pdf

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the Witmark case, the individualist impulse prevails. But sometimes the protective impulse
prevails. One manifestation of the protective impulse was left intact by the controversial
decision in Witmark. As we’ve seen, if an author had died by the time the renewal window
opened, his widow or children could renew and keep the copyright. They could do so, even if the
author had assigned his contingent expectancy interest. The reason, to repeat, is that all the
author had, and thus all he could assign, was the right to renew the copyright if he was alive at
the start of 28th year. If he didn’t make it, he had nothing, and thus his assignee acquired
nothing. The purpose and effect of this rule, of course, was to shield authors’ widows, widowers,
and children, from foolish assignments, by giving them separate rights. Now those rights were
far from perfect. Most importantly, they only have value if the author died less than 28 years
after publication. But they were better than nothing, and sometimes quite valuable.
Another very important manifestation of what I’m calling it the protective impulse in US
copyright law is the set of so-called termination rights. These were first introduced in the
comprehensive 1976 reform of the copyright statute, and subsequently modified by the 1998
Copyright Term Extension Act. I mentioned these termination rights at the end of the preceding
lecture. I now want to outline them in a bit more detail. Here’s how they work.

Figure 80: Termination rights for works created in 1978 or later

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 Figure 81: Termination rules that apply if rights were assigned after 1978

There are two groups of these rights. The first apply to works created in 1978 or later (see
Figure 80). You’ll recall that federal copyrights in such works arise when they are first fixed in a
tangible medium, and last for the life of the author plus 70 years. The authors of such works, of
course, initially acquire those copyrights, but frequently assign them, or portions of them, to
other parties. For example, as we’ve seen, musicians commonly assign the copyrights in their
sound recordings to record companies. These are known as inter vivos transfers, because they
occur during the author’s lifetime. Typically, such assignments are permanent. In other words,
the assignee gets the full copyright term. And notice, this effect is a bit odd. The assignee’s rights
last for a period of time tied to the lifespan of the author. The longer the author lives, the more
valuable are the assignee’s rights. For those of you familiar with the language of common law
real property law, the effect is analogous to a life estate pur autre vie, plus 70 years. Curious, but
that’s how it works.
Suppose that a particular author assigns her rights for a pittance, and then later comes to
regret her decision. Can she ever get the copyright back? The answer is yes. Section 203 of the
statute gives her the right to terminate the assignment during a five-year window that opens 35
years after the date of the original assignment (refer to Figure 81). If she wishes to exercise that
right, she must notify the assignee between two and five years before the termination itself. If
she has died, her spouse or descendants get the right to terminate, and to recover the copyright.
A crucial difference between this system and the renewal system we examined a minute ago is
that the termination rights are non-waivable. In other words, the author may not, when she
assigns her copyright, agree to waive her rights later to terminate the assignment. If she
purports to do so, that waiver will not be enforced. In other words, Congress, when it created

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 Figure 82: Termination rules that apply if rights were assigned before 1978

this system, adopted Judge Frank’s view of the legitimacy and importance of protecting authors
from their own ill-advised decisions, rather than Justice Frankfurter’s hostility to making authors
wards of the state. Who enjoys the copyrights after the original assignments are terminated?
The person or persons who, according to the list in the upper right hand corner of this slide, are
entitled to terminate on the date the notice to terminate is given.
What about older works, specifically those published between 1964 and 1977? Copyrights
in these, you’ll recall, function very differently. Federal copyright protection is attached to them
only upon publication, with appropriate notice, and now lasts for an initial term of 28 years, and
an automatic renewal term of 67 years, for a total of 95 years from the date of publication (see
Figure 82). Suppose that, sometime after 1978, the author, having renewed assigns the
remainder of the renewal term. The assignee will keep it for the balance of the term, unless the
author can terminate the assignment. Again, Section 203 the statute gives her the right to do so
during a five-year window that opens 35 years after the date of the original assignment. These
rights work the same way as the set we just considered.
If the assignment was made before 1978, a different set of termination rules apply.
Section 304 of the statute gives the author – or if she has died, the members of her family – the
right to terminate at any time during a five-year window that opens 56 years after the date of
the original publication. In other words, when federal copyright protection started.
Mechanically, these termination rights work essentially the same way as the set we just
considered, and can be exercised by the same parties. They, too, cannot be waived. If the author
or her family members miss that window, another one opens 75 years after the original
publication.

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 Finally, what about works first published between 1923 and 1963? As we’ve seen, the
subset of these works that were properly renewed during the 28th year of the original term are
still alive today. If they were assigned by the author to someone else, may the author or her
family terminate those assignments? Again, the answer is yes. If the assignment was made in
1978 or later, the Section 203 rules apply (Figure 81). If the assignment was made before 1978,
the double windows of Section 304 apply (Figure 82). As I trust you can see, these rules are
Byzantine in their complexity, and their intricacy often defeats authors or their families, who lack
the money or knowledge to hire lawyers who can guide them through these reefs. But at least
well advised authors or their families can use these procedures to recover the copyrights they
once purported to alienate permanently. In this way, the law attempts to protect them from
their own lack of foresight.
These termination rights represent perhaps the clearest expression in copyright law of the
vision expressed by Judge Frank. A final manifestation of that vision we discussed at the end of
the previous lecture. Here’s a reminder. You’ll recall that the law limits the set of types of works
that can become works for hire, through signed written contracts. Sound recordings don’t
appear on this list. They were briefly added, and then withdrawn. That means that record
companies may be prevented, for the reasons we discussed last week, from treating the sets of
sound recordings they commission from recording artists as works for hire. To be sure, the
record companies can, and typically do, obtain from recording artists assignments of their
copyrights, but they may not be able to enforce the provisions of the typical recording contracts
that purport, in addition, to render those sound recordings works for hire. The reason why this
highly technical difference is so important should by now be clear. Works for hire are not subject
to the termination rules. So, if the recordings are works for hire, the recording artists and their
families will never get the copyrights back. Springsteen and Clapton will have to make do with
their current revenue streams. If they are not works for hire, but are merely assigned copyrights,
then the artists and their families can begin terminating them, 35 years after those assignments
were initially executed. Suppose that a particular assignment was made immediately after this
set of rules became effective, namely on January 1, 1978. When can the assignments be
terminated? Right now, in 2013. Thus, the courts will soon be obliged to determine the status of
these recordings.
The general point lurking in these details is that this legal doctrine arguably represents yet
another manifestation of the protective impulse exemplified by Judge Frank’s opinion. One
possible explanation for the fact that this list of potential works for hire is exclusive, and does
not contain sound recordings, is that Congress wished to prevent recording artists from entering
into deals by which they permanently surrender their rights for too little money. In other words,
Congress wanted to ensure that they, or their families, get a second bite at the apple, and so
deprived them of the legal power to give up the chance in the future to take that bite.
To summarize, I have discussed today three dimensions of the copyright system in the
United States. First, the vestigial but important role played by formalities, and the associated
policy debates concerning whether formalities should be reinstated. Second, the intricate rules

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governing the duration of copyrights. And third, the equally intricate rules that attempt to shield
artists and their families from exploitation.
These three features surely do not exhaust the set of important aspects of the copyright
machine. Other gears and levers are identified in the map. They include the rules that determine
how one makes an effective assignment, or license of a copyright, or one of its component
exclusive rights, and the effect of such licenses and assignments. The rules governing the relative
rights of the contributors to a collective work, such as the authors of freelance articles published
in a newspaper, and the owner of the copyright in the collective work itself. The recording
system that plays a limited role in resolving disputes that arise when a copyright owner make
successive and consistent transfers of his or her rights. The messy issues generated when the
United States sought to restore the copyrights of some non-residents, and so forth. You’re
welcome, of course, to explore the relevant branches of the map on your own. In addition, some
of these issues will be discussed in the classes and discussions that will follow this lecture. But
the three themes we have examined today should suffice to give you at least a general sense of
how the copyright system works in practice, and the broad policy issues implicated by that
machinery.

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THE RIGHTS TO REPRODUCE AND MODIFY

7.1. Reproduction
We arrive, finally, at the heart of copyright law. In the next three lectures, we’ll examine the
principal rights that a copyright owner enjoys and the corresponding limitations upon those
rights, designed to accommodate the interests of the public at large. Here’s how my
presentation will be organized.
In this lecture and the next one, I’ll be examining the economic rights enjoyed by a
copyright owner. As you’ll see, there are four clusters of such rights – first, the copyright owner’s
exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work; second, the exclusive right to make
modifications of the copyrighted work, commonly known as the right to make derivative works;
third, the right to control the distribution, exportation, and importation of copies of the work;
and fourth, the right to control public performances or public displays of the work.
Today, I’ll be examining the first two of those rights – the right of reproduction and the
right of modification. Next week, I’ll take up the third and fourth of the rights. And the week
after that, I’ll discuss the major exceptions and limitations that copyright law imposes upon
these exclusive rights. During this tour, I will focus, as I did during the first half of the course,
primarily on the law in the United States, but I will also identify some respects in which the law
in other countries parallels or differs from US law.
Section 106 of the US Copyright Statute confers on copyright owners a broad and
seemingly unqualified set of rights. Here they are:

17 USC § 106

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the
exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

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 (3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or
other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work
publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion
picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means
of a digital audio transmission.

Sections 107 through 122 then carve out of those rights a long list of exceptions. Some of
those exceptions are very specific and narrow; others are broader. The broadest of all is the fair
use doctrine, embodied in Section 107, which we’ll discuss in two weeks. As you can see, the
introductory clause of Section 106 makes the rights it creates “subject to” – in other words,
qualified by – Sections 107 through 122. The result of this structure is that, to get an accurate
sense of the scope of a copyright owner’s exclusive rights, you must oscillate between the
generous grants contained in Section 106 and the myriad exceptions contained in the following
provisions. And that’s what we’ll be doing.
The first and simplest of the rights conferred on a copyright owner by Section 106 is the
right to reproduce – in other words, to copy – the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords.
This entitlement is commonly considered the core of copyright. The name of this entire field
suggests as much. The heart of copyright is the exclusive right to copy. As it’s used in the law,
the term “reproduction” has three independent dimensions. To prevail, a plaintiff must satisfy
all three.
The first pertains to the way in which the defendant To prove unauthorised
generated the allegedly infringing things. Only if he did so by reproduction the plaintiff must
copying is the defendant liable. The second pertains to the show:
character of the allegedly infringing things. Only if they 1. Copying
constitute “copies” is the defendant liable. And the third
2. What the defendant
pertains to the nature and amount of the material the defendant
created is a “copy”
took from the plaintiff. Only if it rises to the level of “improper
appropriation” is the defendant liable. We’ll consider them in 3. Improper appropriation
that order.
In patent law, as some of you know, independent invention is no excuse. A defendant
cannot escape liability by showing that he dreamed up, on his own, an invention that happens to
match the plaintiff’s patent. Not so in copyright law. There, independent creation is an excuse.
Suppose, for example, I write a poem. Later, you, never having seen mine, write and publish

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exactly the same poem. I have no claim against you. You infringe my copyright in my poem only
if you copy mine. So, what exactly does that mean? The clearest type of copying is mechanical
reproduction. If you make a photocopy of the piece of paper upon which my poem is written,
you have copied it. If you rip a CD containing a sound recording, which, in turn, embodies a
musical composition, you have copied, specifically in a phonorecord, both the composition and
the sound recording. If you replicate a CD-ROM containing a software program, you infringe the
copyright in the program. None of this should be surprising. But as used in the law, the term
“copying” is not limited to mechanical reproduction. It also includes having the copyright work in
mind when making a substantially similar embodiment. So, if you read and memorize my poem
and then write it down, you have copied it. If you listen to a performance of my musical
composition and then record your own rendition of my composition, you have copied it. If you
watch a movie and then write a short story containing an identical plot, you have copied the
audiovisual work embodied in the film, and so forth.
The most intriguing cases in this area involve situations in which the defendant is exposed
to the plaintiff’s work and then, sometime later, creates a very similar work without being aware
that it mimics the plaintiff’s work. In other words, the defendant believes he is being original,
but he’s not. The law governing such situations is harsh. In the 1924 case of Fred Fisher versus
Dillingham, Judge Learned Hand summarized the relevant rule as follows.

Everything registers somewhere in our memories, and no one can tell what may evoke
it. Once it appears that another has, in fact, used the copyright as the source of this
production, he has invaded the author’s right. It is no excuse that, in so doing, his
memory has played him a trick.

The most famous case of this general sort involved the following facts. In 1963, The
Chiffons, a popular quartet in the United States, released a recording of “He’s So Fine,” a song
that had been composed by Ronald Mack. Here’s a brief excerpt.
[Music: The Chiffons, “He’s So Fine”.]
The Chiffons’ recording was a hit in both the United States and in England. George
Harrison heard the song, but forgot it. Six years later, he composed and performed “My Sweet
Lord.” Here’s an excerpt.
[Music: George Harrison, “My Sweet Lord”.]
Bright Tunes Music, the assignee of Mack’s copyright, brought an infringement suit
against Harrison and prevailed. Both the trial court and the Court of Appeals credited Harrison’s
testimony that he was unaware of The Chiffons’ recording when he made his own song.
However, they ruled, Harrison could not escape on this basis. Here’s the key passage in the
appellate court’s opinion.

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 It’s not new law in this circuit that, when a defendant’s work is copied from the
plaintiff’s, but the defendant, in good faith, has forgotten that the plaintiff’s work was
the source of his own, such innocent copying can nevertheless constitute an
infringement. It’s settled that intention to infringe is not essential under the Copyright
Act.

The court then went on to suggest a possible policy basis for this seemingly unforgiving
rule.

As a practical matter, the problems of proof inherent in a rule that would permit
innocent intent as a defense to copyright infringement could substantially undermine
the protections Congress intended to afford copyright owners. We therefore see no
reason to retreat from this Circuit’s prior position that copyright infringement can be
subconscious.

The rule announced and applied by the court in this case bears emphasis. Innocent
copying is still infringement. In this special sense, copyright infringement is a strict liability
offense.
The final, perhaps non-obvious, aspect of the scope of copying is that it encompasses
translation of the plaintiff’s work into a different medium. So, for example, an unauthorized
motion picture version of a novel, a doll that mimics a cartoon character, a still photograph of a
ballet are all covered. So, to summarize, a plaintiff, to establish that a defendant has violated the
plaintiff’s exclusive right of reproduction, first must show that the defendant “copied” the
plaintiff’s work, which means either that the defendant mechanically reproduced it or had the
plaintiff’s work in mind, even subconsciously, when making his own product.
How, then, does a plaintiff prove copying in this sense?
There are four. Techniques to use to prove
First, the plaintiff can introduce direct evidence of copying
copying. Surprisingly often, evidence survives of a defendant’s 1. Direct evidence
conscious intentional use of the plaintiff’s work during the
2. Access and similarity
course of his own creative processes, and that evidence turns
3. Striking similarity
up in discovery. Second, the plaintiff can show that the
defendant had access to his work and that the defendant’s 4. Common errors
work and the plaintiff’s work are sufficiently similar to raise an
inference of copying. For example, the plaintiff may be able to show that the defendant had the
plaintiff’s book on his bookshelf or received the plaintiff’s screenplay in the mail. More
commonly, the plaintiff may be able to show that his work – say, a song or a movie – was widely
performed in areas and at times that would make it highly likely that the defendant heard or

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watched it. So, for example, few people, at least in the Western hemisphere, can plausibly
contend that they’ve never heard a Beatles song or watched a James Bond movie. When the
plaintiff can demonstrate access of this sort, all he then needs to demonstrate is sufficient
similarity between the defendant’s and the plaintiff’s work to make plagiarism more likely than
independent creation. The character and amount of similarity that’s necessary for this purpose is
sometimes called probative similarity. It’s different from the kind of similarity that we will
discuss in a minute, under the heading of “Improper Appropriation,” because its function is
different. Its role, to repeat, is to support an inference that the way the defendant created his
work was wrong, not that the amount he took was too much. The courts, unfortunately,
sometimes conflate these two types of similarity, but you should not.
What if the plaintiff has no evidence that the defendant had access to his work, but can
show that the defendant’s work is extremely similar to his? Is that enough to show copying? US
courts used to disagree on this point. Some Courts of Appeals said yes; others said no. All of the
Courts of Appeals now seem to agree that sufficiently “striking” similarity between unusual
aspects of the two works can suffice. However, the inference of copying that arises in such
circumstances can be overcome if the defendant demonstrates that he did not have access to
the plaintiff’s work or that both the plaintiff’s work and the defendant’s work could have been
copied from something in the public domain.
Finally, an especially powerful way of showing copying is to demonstrate that the same
errors can be found in both the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s works. Sometimes, such errors
are deliberate. The writers of travel guides, for example, often insert fictitious entries in their
lists of hotels and restaurants precisely in order to enable them to detect copying of their
material by the publishers of other guides to the same cities or countries. This is a very effective
way of ferreting out copying, although it can be inconvenient for the readers who visit the non-
existent sites. At other times, the errors are inadvertent. Paul Goldstein, for example, points to
one case in which a legal publisher, as part of an infringement suit against another publisher,
admitted that, in 50 pages of the plaintiff’s treatise, there were 138 inaccurate citations, and the
same mis-citations appeared in the defendant’s text – embarrassing, but convincing, evidence of
copying.
Assuming that the plaintiff can surmount this first hurdle, the second of the three things
the plaintiff must show is that the thing the defendant made through copying is sufficiently
concrete and stable to be called a copy. In the overwhelming majority of cases, this is easy. But
occasionally, a plaintiff falters here. The statutory definition the plaintiff must satisfy is shown
below (17 USC § 101). From this language, the courts have extracted the requirements that the
thing produced by the defendant be tangible – in other words, a material object – fixed, and
intelligible. The most slippery of these requirements is fixation. You’ll recall that fixation is a
precondition of copyright protection under US law, although not under the law of most
countries. Here, we encounter a second, closely related manifestation of the laws concerned
with fixation. Not only must the plaintiff’s work be fixed in order to enjoy copyright protection;

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the defendant’s work must also be fixed in order to violate the plaintiff’s copyright, at least
under Section 106(1).

17 USC § 101

“Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any
method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived,
reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or
device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in
which the work is first fixed.

“Phonorecords” are material objects in which sounds, other than those accompanying a
motion picture or other audiovisual work, are fixed by any method now known or later
developed, and from which the sounds can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise
communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term
“phonorecords” includes the material object in which the sounds are first fixed.

Recently, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided a complicated and important case
in which this fixation requirement proved critical. Because the case implicated several other
legal rules, as well, I’m going to describe the facts in some detail. Then, I’ll discuss one of the
issues raised by those facts today and come back to other dimensions of the case next week.
Cablevision is a small cable TV system based in New York City. Like all cable companies, it
aggregates audiovisual programming from several sources. For example, Warner Brothers may
produce a movie, license it to NBC, and then Cablevision picks up NBC’s signal. Cartoon Network
and HBO provide programming directly to Cablevision, and so forth. As you might expect,
Cablevision pays for the right to broadcast this material either according to the terms of
voluntary licenses or through a compulsory license. Those licenses are important and complex.
We’ll touch on them briefly at the end of the next lecture. For present purposes, all you need to
know is that these licenses do not give Cablevision the right to make copies of the TV shows or
movies in question, only to publicly perform them. So, to return to the narrative, Cablevision
combines these various streams of programs into a single, composite, encoded signal, which it
sends via cable, of course, to its customers. Each customer receives the composite signal
through a set-top box, which decodes it, relays it to a television, which, in turn, displays it to the
subscriber sitting on his couch.
If, as is likely, the subscriber doesn’t want to watch all shows at the times they are
broadcast, he’s likely to employ a device to record them. Once upon a time, the device would
have been a VCR. Today, it’s likely to be a digital video recorder, commonly known as a DVR.
Then, when the subscriber wants to watch a given show, he plays the copy stored on the DVR.
So, this pattern should be entirely familiar to most of you, but if you’ve been following this
course of lectures from the beginning, it should make you uneasy. There’s no question that the

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 Figure 83: The operations of Cablevision

DVR recording, represented by the blue dot in Figure 83, is a copy of the television shows in
question. The subscriber who makes those copies does not have a license from Warner Brothers
or Cartoon Networks to do so. Is the subscriber then violating section 106(1) of the copyright
statute? The answer is yes, but that violation, as we’ll see, is excused under the fair use doctrine.
When and how that crucial principle was established we’ll discuss in a few weeks. For now, it’s
enough to recognize that the subscriber can slip the noose by pleading fair use.
Now, back to our story. In 2006, Cablevision had an idea. What if, instead of relying on
individual subscribers to make copies of shows on their home DVRs, it offered to make copies for
them using a cloud-based technology? This would be more efficient and convenient than the
home devices, sufficiently so, that the subscribers would be willing to pay a premium for it. So,
Cablevision created, though it did not immediately implement, what it called a remote storage
DVR, or RS-DVR system. Its main features, in the language of the court eventually called upon to
review the system, looked like this.

Under the new RS-DVR, this single stream of data is split into two streams. The first is
routed immediately to customers, as before. The second stream flows into a device,
called the broadband media router (BMR), which buffers the data stream, reformats it,
and sends it to the Arroyo server, which consists, in relevant part, of two data buffers
and a number of high-capacity hard disks. The entire stream of data moves to the first

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 buffer, the primary ingest buffer, at which point the server automatically inquires as to
whether any customers might want to record any of that programming. If a customer
has requested a particular program, the data for that program move from the primary
buffer into a secondary buffer and then into a portion of one of the hard disks allocated
to that customer. As new data flow into the primary buffer, they overwrite a
corresponding quantity of data already on the buffer. The primary ingest buffer holds
no more than 0.1 seconds of each channel’s programming at any moment. Thus, every
tenth of a second, the data residing on this buffer are automatically erased and
replaced. The data buffer in the BMR holds no more than 1.2 seconds of programming
at any time. While buffering occurs at other points in the operation of the RS-DVR, only
the BMR buffer and the primary ingest buffers are utilized absent any request from the
individual subscriber. To the customer, however, the processes of recording and
playback on the RS-DVR are similar to that of a standard set-top DVR. Using a remote
control, the customer can record programming by selecting a program in advance or by
pressing the Record button while playing a given program. To begin playback, the
customer selects the show from an on-screen menu of previously recorded programs.
The principal difference in operation is that, instead of sending signals from the remote
to an on-set box, the viewer sends signals from the remote through the cable to the
Arroyo server at Cablevision’s central facility, which then delivers the program to the
subscriber’s home. In this respect, RS-DVR more closely resembles a video-on-demand
service, whereby a cable subscriber uses his remote and cable box to request
transmission of content, such as a movie, stored on computers at the cable company’s
facility. But unlike a video-on-demand service, RS-DVR users can only play content that
they previously requested to be recorded.

So, those are the facts. You can guess what happened next. Cartoon Network and the
owners of the copyrights in the other shows that would be delivered to subscribers through the
system initiated a lawsuit against Cablevision, not because they thought this was a bad idea, but
because they wanted Cablevision to pay them additional license fees to deploy this new feature,
which Cablevision was unwilling to do. The plaintiffs contended that the RS-DVR system would
violate their copyrights in not just one, but three, separate ways.
First, they argued that buffering an audiovisual work, specifically for 1.2 seconds in the
BMR and for a tenth of a second in the primary ingest buffer of the Arroyo server, creates a
series of replicated pieces of the work, which, although each one is stored only briefly, gives rise
in the aggregate to a copy of that work and thus violates Section 106(1) of the Copyright Act.
Second, they argued that making the much more durable copies of their shows on the Arroyo
server hard drives gives rise to a second violation of Section 106(1). Third, they argued that the
delivery of the programming from the Arroyo server to the subscriber at the subscriber’s request
would constitute an unauthorized “public performance” in violation of Section 106(4). We’ll

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discuss the second and third of those claims in future lectures. For present purposes, we’re
concerned only with the first one.
The district court agreed with the plaintiffs that the buffer triggered a violation of section
106(1). But the Court of Appeals reversed. Here’s the crucial language in the appellate court’s
opinion.

Copies, as defined in the Copyright Act, are material objects in which a work is fixed by
any method and from which the work can be reproduced. The act also provides that a
work is fixed in a tangible medium and expression when its embodiment is sufficiently
permanent or stable to permit it to be reproduced for a period of more than transitory
duration. We believe that this language plainly imposes two distinct, but related,
requirements – the work must be embodied in a medium, i.e., placed in a medium such
that it can be perceived, reproduced, et cetera, from that medium; and it must remain
thus embodied for a period of more than transitory duration. Unless both requirements
are met, the work is not fixed in the buffer. And as a result, the buffer data is not a copy
of the original work whose data is buffered.

Because the data being channeled toward the Arroyo server reside in no buffer for more
than 1.2 seconds before being automatically overwritten, the court concluded that the duration
requirement had not been satisfied and thus that the defendant’s technology did not result in
the creation of any copies.
For reasons we’ll explore later, the Court of Appeals also rejected the second and third of
the plaintiff’s claims. As we’ll see, the bases of those rulings were also highly technical, and thus
arguably a bit counterintuitive. The net result was that Cablevision was permitted to deploy its
new service. This decision, which the Supreme Court declined to review, has facilitated the
emergence of many analogous cloud-based services, which, in turn, have had huge economic
implications. As Josh Lerner discovered, “VC investment in cloud computing firms increased
significantly in the United States relative to the EU after the Cablevision decision.” The decision,
it appears, led to additional incremental investment in US cloud computing firms that ranged
from $728 million to approximately $1.3 billion over the two and a half years after the decision.
When paired with the findings of enhanced effects of VC investment relative to corporate
investment, this may be the equivalent of $2 billion to $5 billion in traditional R&D investment.
An essential step in the ruling that catalyzed this investment was, as we’ve seen, the court’s
judgment that the fixation requirement had not been satisfied by the buffer copies.

7.2. Improper Appropriation

Cases like Cablevision, in which the parties struggle over whether what the defendant has
produced constitutes a copy, are rare. Much more common are cases in which the parties
struggle over whether the character and amount of material copied by the defendant from the

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plaintiff’s work rise to the level necessary to constitute infringement. Once again, the burden is
on the plaintiff. The plaintiff must show not only, as we’ve seen, that the defendant copied from
the plaintiff’s copyrighted work, but also that the copying, assuming it to be proved, went so far
as to constitute improper appropriation.
There are three more or less discreet ways in which Methods to use to show improper
the plaintiff can do so. First, he could show that the appropriation
defendant made a verbatim copy of his entire work. This is 1. Comprehensive copying
what Melville Nimmer helpfully refers to as
2. Fragmented literal
comprehensive copying. This happens more often than
similarity
you might think. Examples include peer to peer sharing of
sound recordings and the comprehensive replication of 3. Comprehensive nonliteral
digital copies of films that were at issue in the Cablevision similarity (“substantial
case, which we just discussed. So long as the plaintiff’s similarity” test)
work qualifies for copyright protection, applying the
standards we discussed in the first lecture, comprehensive copying of this sort easily gives rise to
a violation of section 106(1).
Things get a bit more complicated when what the defendant has copied verbatim is not
the entire work but a piece or slice of the plaintiff’s work. Nimmer refers to this as “fragmented
literal similarity.” An example can be found in this lecture. You’ll recall that I illustrated the
principle of subconscious copying by playing for you a segment of the Chiffons recording of
Donald Mack’s composition “He’s So Fine.” In order to enable you to hear that recording, I had
to create a copy of that segment in the recording of this lecture, which you are now watching
and listening to. I did not copy the entire song. So, I’ve not engaged in comprehensive copying.
Instead, I copied a piece of it, specifically a piece long enough for you to assess the plausibility of
the court’s conclusion that George Harrison had innocently copied Mack’s composition. Thus, I
have engaged in “fragmented literal copying,” both of Mack’s composition and of the Chiffons
sound recording of that composition.
To prevail in a fragmented literal similarity case, the plaintiff must show two things in
addition, as we’ve seen, to the fact of copying. First, he must show that the slice the defendant
took includes some copyrightable expression, not merely ideas or facts. All the factors we
discussed in lecture number one concerning the idea-expression distinction become relevant
here. For example, if the slice the defendant took consists of a sentence that is the only effective
way of conveying a particular idea, then pursuant to the merger doctrine, the taking of that
sentence does not constitute a copyright infringement. Can I escape liability on this basis for
copying a slice of “He’s So Fine”? No, there’s plenty of copyrightable expression in the 30 second
slice that I appropriated. Second, the plaintiff must show that the slice that the defendant took is
big enough. How big is that? The adjective most often used by the courts is substantial. The
portion taken must be a substantial part of the plaintiff’s work measured both qualitatively and
quantitatively. Relatively small slices have been deemed sufficient to pass this test provided that
they’re sufficiently important to the plaintiff’s creation.

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 For example, in the 1980 Iowa State research case, the defendant, ABC, broadcast as part
of its coverage of the Olympics two brief excerpts from the plaintiff’s documentary film
examining the life of a wrestler. One excerpt was 2 and 1/2 minutes long, the other 12 seconds.
In the judgment of the Second Circuit, that was plenty. A willingness to find liability upon the
taking of relatively small excerpts is not limited to the United States. For example, the courts in
Australia have proven to be similarly protective of plaintiffs. In a recent high profile case, the
plaintiff owned the copyright of “Kookaburra,” a nursery rhyme originally written by Marion
Sinclair in 1932. It was popular in Australia for decades. And indeed, I can remember my mother
singing it to me in the United States. The key segment of the song goes like this. I’m going to do
my best here.
[Music: “Kookaburra”, sung by Terry Fisher.]
My apologies to Ms. Sinclair. In the late 1970s, the Australian rock group Men at Work
composed and recorded an equally famous, perhaps more famous, song called “Down Under.”
I’m going to play a short passage of that song. Listen carefully for the flute riff that comes near
the end.
[Music: Men At Work, “Down Under”.]
The same riff appears several other times in “Down Under,” and each time is equally
short. George Ham, one of the members of Men at Work, added this riff to the song in order to
inject some “Australian flavor” into it. In the ensuing copyright litigation, Ham testified that, like
George Harrison, he was not aware that he was lifting this segment from “Kookaburra.”
Somewhat more specifically, here’s how Judge Jacobson, who oversaw this case, summarized
Ham’s affidavit.

He said that the flute section, which he added, fitted rhythmically to “Down Under” and
the percussion drum section at the start of the song, which is in fact played on beer
bottles with different amounts of water in them. Mr. Ham pointed out that the lyrics,
vocal melody, chords, and bass lines were already established when he heard “Down
Under.” He looked for a complimentary part for his instruments, and especially one
which fell into the “tongue in cheek” nature of the song. He described the flute line as
an Aussie cliché melody, or what he thought was an Irish Australian style melody.

Now, Judge Jacobson did not definitively resolve the question of whether Ham had been
aware when he inserted the riff that had been taken from “Kookaburra,” apparently assuming
that, as we saw in the George Harrison case, subconscious copying is actionable. The decisive
issue in Judge Jacobson’s judgment was the amount taken. Here’s how the court expressed the
relevant standard. Copyright infringement arises when a defendant “has copied a substantial
part of the copyrighted work. The question whether he has copied a substantial part depends
much more on the quality than on the quantity of what he has taken.” That standard, the judge
ruled, had been met in this case. The remedy? The defendants had to pay the plaintiffs 5% of the

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royalties they had earned on the song since 2002 and into the future. In 2011, the highest court
in Australia refused to hear an appeal from the ruling, leaving Jacobson’s decision intact.
This case had a tragic coda. In April of 2012, George Ham died at age 58 of an apparent
drug overdose. It seems that one factor in his decline was his dismay that his legacy had been
permanently tarnished by the judgment that he had copied another musical work, suggesting
that, more important for him than the financial liability arising out of this case was the
reputational harm it generated.
So, to summarize, in a case involving fragmented literal similarity, the plaintiff must prove
that the defendant took a substantial portion of the plaintiff’s work measured qualitatively and
quantitatively. In practice, that requirement is forgiving, permitting plaintiffs to recover for the
taking of quite small pieces. There’s a limit, however. That limit is sometimes referred to as the
“de minimis doctrine.” An excellent description and illustration of this doctrine to be found in
Judge Leval’s 2001 opinion in the case of Davis versus The Gap.

The de minimis doctrine is rarely discussed in copyright opinions because suits are
rarely brought over trivial instances of copying. Nonetheless, it is an important aspect
of the law of copyright. Trivial copying is a significant part of modern life. Most honest
citizens in the modern world frequently engage, without hesitation, in trivial copying
that, but for the de minimis doctrine, would technically constitute a violation of law.
We do not hesitate to make a photocopy of a letter from a friend to show to another
friend, or of a favorite cartoon to post on the refrigerator. Parents in Central Park
photograph their children perched on José de Creeft’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture.
We record television programs aired while we are out, so as to watch them at a more
convenient hour. Waiters at a restaurant sing “Happy Birthday” at a patron’s table.
When we do such things, it is not that we are breaking the law but unlikely to be sued
given the high cost of litigation. Because of the de minimis doctrine, in trivial instances
of copying, we are in fact not breaking the law. If a copyright owner were to sue the
makers of trivial copies, judgment would be for the defendants. The case would be
dismissed because trivial copying is not an infringement.

Now, one warning about this otherwise illuminating passage. Judge Leval’s example in the
middle of this paragraph about recording television programs while we are out is not, strictly
speaking, an example de minimis copying. Rather, as I mentioned in connection with the
Cablevision case, that’s an example of fair use, a doctrine that Judge Leval himself has done
more to reshape and invigorate than any other judge. But if you exclude that one instance, the
passage in front of you nicely illustrates the general and unsurprising principle. The law will not
penalize the taking of trivial amounts.
There’s one important exception to the de minimis doctrine. It’s illustrated by the facts of
the 2005 case of Bridgeport Music. The plaintiff in that case owned the copyright in a sound

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recording of the song “Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” which was originally made by George Clinton
Jr. and the Funkadelics. The Funkadelics’ recording of “Get Off” opens with a solo guitar riff that
contains three notes and lasts a total of four seconds. Here it is.
[Music: Funkadelics, “Get Off Your Ass and Jam”.]
Gangsta rap group NWA subsequently recorded a song entitled “100 Miles and Runnin’,”
which contained a sample from the Funkadelics recording. Specifically, NWA copied two seconds
of the four second riff, lowered the pitch, looped that slice, and extended it to 16 beats. The
loop, created by NWA, lasts a total of seven seconds. That seven second segment derived from
the original recording appears in five places in “100 Miles.” I’m going to play one of those five
appearances. Listen carefully, because the segment appears in the background. And it’s hard to
hear. A word of warning, in the foreground of this excerpt are some explicit lyrics that may
offend some listeners. If you don’t wish to hear them, you should skip over the next 20 seconds
of this lecture.
[Music: NWA, “100 Miles and Runnin’”.]
Despite the brevity of the sample taken from the Funkadelics recording, the copyright
owner brought an infringement suit. Really, you may think. To be sure, as the district court that
heard the case observed, the segment taken by the defendants, though tiny, was arguably
important to the defendant’s work. In the court’s words “The portion of the song at issue here is
an arpeggiated chord, that is three notes that, if struck together, comprise a chord, but are
instead played one at a time in very quick succession, that is repeated several times at the
opening of ‘Get Off.” The arpeggiated chord is played on an unaccompanied electric guitar. The
rapidity of the notes and the way they are played produce a high-pitched whirling sound that
captures the listener’s attention and creates anticipation of what is to follow”. Well, maybe, but
the fact remains that the excerpt taken is very short – to repeat, two seconds long, much shorter
than the excerpt in the Kookaburra case, and much less distinctive. Indeed, if I hadn’t pointed it
out, almost surely you would not have noticed it. This would thus seem to be an easy case of de
minimis copying, taking an amount too small to warrant the attention of the law. And the district
court so ruled. Surprisingly, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding broadly that the
de minimis defense is not available to a defendant who samples sound recordings. Taking even a
tiny piece of someone’s sound recording will trigger a violation of section 106(1).
The rule, announced in Bridgeport Music, was widely denounced. And it may well be a bad
rule. But it’s somewhat less shocking than it first appears. The reason is that in US law, sound
recordings get narrower protection than other sorts of copyrights. Here’s the relevant provision.

17 USC § 114(b)

The exclusive right of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under clause (1) of
section 106 is limited to the right to duplicate the sound recording in the form of
phonorecords or copies that directly or indirectly recapture the actual sounds fixed in
the recording. The exclusive right of the owner of copyright in a sound recording under

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 clause (2) of section 106 is limited to the right to prepare a derivative work in which the
actual sounds fixed in the sound recording are rearranged, remixed, or otherwise
altered in sequence or quality. The exclusive rights of the owner of copyright in a sound
recording under clauses (1) and (2) of section 106 do not extend to the making or
duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation
of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted
sound recording….

As you can see, imitating a sound recording does not constitute infringement. With
respect to all other types of copyrighted works, including musical compositions, imitation does
constitute infringement, but not for sound recordings. Only capturing the actual sounds fixed in
the recording gives rise to liability. Dubbing is actionable, but not imitation. This provision
explains why, as we discussed in lecture number three, musicians are free to make covers of
commercially released songs. As we saw there, musicians have to pay the composers of those
songs or their assignees a modest compulsory fee, but they don’t have to get the composer’s
permission. Even more strikingly, they don’t have to pay anything to the owners of the
copyrights in the sound recordings embodying the original rendition of the song, because they’re
not capturing its actual sounds.
Now, the reason why this rule is relevant to digital sampling is that, as the Sixth Circuit
observes, it creates an inexpensive alternative to sampling. As the court explained, “It must be
remembered that if an artist wants to incorporate a riff from another work in his or her
recording, he’s free to duplicate the sound of that riff in the studio. The market will control the
license price and keep it within bounds. The sound recording copyright owner cannot exact a
license fee greater than what it would cost the person seeking the license to just duplicate the
sample in the course of making the new recording.” In other words, the court argues, a blanket
rule that all digital sampling, no matter how small, gives rise to liability would not “stifle
creativity.” Because rap artists and others can either imitate the sounds they want or can obtain
a license, the fee for which will be low, because the licensor is aware that imitation is lawful.
The court’s last argument in support of its ruling is different. Not only would a blanket
prohibition on sampling not stifle creativity, said the court, it’s fair. Why? Because “Sampling is
never accidental. It’s not like the case of a composer who has a melody in his head, perhaps not
even realizing that the reason he hears the melody is that it’s the work of another which he had
heard before. When you sample a sound recording, you know you are taking another’s work
product.” Notice here the echoes of the fairness theory of copyright in general. Intentionally
taking someone else’s “work product,” the court suggests, is wrong, morally wrong, and
deserves to be punished. I leave to you the question of whether these arguments in combination
are convincing.
I hasten to add that the elimination of the de minimis defense for sound recordings does
not necessarily mean that all digital sampling is unlawful. It’s still in principle possible for

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samplers to avoid liability on the basis of fair use. We’ll take up that option in two weeks.
Incidentally, the fair use doctrine as you’ll see also provides the best line of defense for me if the
Funkadelics or NWA or the Chiffons object to my use in this lecture of pieces of their recordings.
The seemingly absolute position, taken by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the
Bridgeport case, is not limited to the United States. In the 2008 Metall auf Metall case, the
Federal Supreme Court of Germany similarly ruled that the sampling of any part of a digital
recording gives rise to infringement of the neighboring right in the recording. So, the Bridgeport
Music doctrine, for better or worse, seems to be spreading.
The third path to a demonstration of improper appropriation is the most interesting and
complicated. It involves situations in which the defendant has not copied any portion of the
plaintiff’s work verbatim, but has instead created a different but similar work. Such cases of, to
use Nimmer’s phrase, comprehensive nonliteral similarity, are governed in the United States by
the so-called “substantial similarity” test. As you might expect, the defendant is liable under this
approach if and only if his work is substantially similar to the plaintiff’s
Before considering what that phrase might mean, we need to confront two threshold
questions. First, are additions relevant? In other words, can a defendant escape liability by
showing that he added sufficient things to the plaintiff’s work to make the two works different?
The canonical answer is no. As Judge Hand once put it, “No plagiarist can excuse the wrong by
showing how much of his work he did not pirate.” However, as we’ll see, courts don’t always
adhere strictly to that guideline. Second, what happens when the plaintiff’s work contains some
material protected by copyright law and some material that’s not protected, for example that
consists of facts or scenes a faire? Cases of this sort present courts with an analytical challenge.
Similarity that arises because the defendant has mimicked unprotected material should of
course not give rise to liability. On the other hand, if the courts or juries ignore the unprotected
material altogether, they may fail to give the plaintiff appropriate protection for the original way
in which he has arranged the unprotected pieces.
No single way of handling this problem governs all cases. Instead, one can find in the case
law a spectrum of approaches. At one extreme is what is sometimes called the totality approach.
As that label suggests, it urges the trier of fact, whether a judge or a jury, to compare the two
works in their totality and decide if they are, viewed in this way, substantially similar. At the
opposite extreme is the so-called filtration approach. The essence of this strategy is that the trier
of fact is instructed to remove all unprotected material from the plaintiff’s work before
comparing it to the defendant’s. The context in which the filtration approach is most
consistently applied is computer software. I’ll spend a bit of time exploring how filtration works
in that setting.
You’ll recall from lecture three that some, not all, software firms seek to control four sorts
of behavior – reproduction by consumers of the object code embodying their works,
reproduction by commercial enterprises of the object code of their works, incorporation of parts
of their source code into new programs, and finally, nonliteral copying, namely the production
and distribution of programs that have the same structure, sequence, or organization, even

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though they have none of the original source or object code. The first two of these activities, I
hope you now see, are forms of comprehensive literal similarity. The third is an example of
fragmented literal similarity. And the fourth is an example of comprehensive nonliteral
similarity. It’s in this fourth and last setting that the question of filtration arises. When does a
program that resembles another program in structure and function, but contains none of the
same source code, give rise to infringement? The courts that first addressed this issue analyzed
it using essentially the same tools that they employed when analyzing nonliteral similarity
between two films or photographs. As a result, the plaintiffs, with some frequency, won.
Then, in 1992, the influential Second Circuit Court of Appeals adopted a sharply new
approach. In the Altai case, the Second Circuit adopted what has come to be called the
abstraction filtration comparison test for cases involving nonliteral similarity of software. As its
name suggests, this test has three parts. Part one, abstraction, is adapted from the test
formulated by Judge Learned Hand long ago for determining when the plot of one literary work
is too close to the plot of another. Here’s how Judge Hand described that test in the 1930
Nichols case.

Upon any work, and especially upon a play, a great number of patterns of increasing
generality will fit equally well as more and more of the incident is left out. The last may
perhaps be no more than the most general statement of what the play’s about, and at
times might consist only of its title. But there’s a point in this series of abstractions
where they are no longer protected since otherwise the playwright could prevent the
use of his ideas, to which, apart from their expression, his property is never extended.
Nobody has been able to fix that boundary. And nobody ever can. In some cases, the
question has been treated as though it were analogous to lifting a portion out of the
copyrighted work. But the analogy is not a good one. Because though the skeleton is a
part of the body, it pervades and supports the whole. In such cases, we are rather
concerned with the line between expression and what is expressed.

Graphically, this approach might be represented as shown in Figure 84. At the lowest
level of abstraction, in other words the level with the most detail, the plot of a play might be
depicted as shown at level of the diagram. Long lines represent major events, shorter lines
minor events. Abstracted one level, in other words removing some of the minor incidents, the
plot would look like level 2. Abstracted another level, it would look like level 3, and so forth. At
the highest level of abstraction (level 6), the plot is extremely general, something like boy meets
girl, they quarrel and separate, they make up, and live happily ever after. Somewhere in this
sequence of nested patterns lies a line, hard to discern but nevertheless present. Formulations
of the plot sufficiently abstract to fall above the line constitute, within the language of copyright
law, mere ideas. Formulation sufficiently detailed to fall below the line consist of protected

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expression. Only if the defendant’s plot parallels the plaintiff’s at a level of detail below the line
has the defendant infringed the plaintiff’s work.
In the Altai case, the Second Circuit adapted the so-called pattern test, originally develop

Figure 84: The Nichols "pattern" test

to deal with plots, to software. A software program, the court held, can be arranged into levels
of abstraction just like a plot. The highest level consists of a general description of the function
of the program. At the next level down are major modules or subroutines. At the next level are
finer divisions among parts of modules, until one reaches at the lowest level the source code.
Once the various levels of the program have been separated in this fashion, the Altai test
requires the trier of fact to remove, in other words to filter out, features that do not enjoy
copyright protection. With respect to software, the court ruled, there are many reasons for
disqualifying features. First, the court should identify and then filter out elements of the
plaintiff’s program that are necessary for the program to operate efficiently (Figure 85). For
example, anything necessary to enable the program to sort and search efficiently should be
removed. Next to go are features that are dictated by external factors (Figure 86). These include
features necessary to meet mechanical specifications of the computer, the compatibility
requirements of other programs, the design standards of the computer manufacturers, demands
of the industry being served – in other words, the demands of customers – and widely accepted
programming practices. Finally, and least surprisingly, it should identify and eliminate features
that the original programmer had taken from the public domain (Figure 87). The net result is an
abridged pattern of features, like a comb missing many teeth. The third and last step in the Altai
test is comparison (Figure 88). The features of the defendant’s program are laid alongside the

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now filtered version of the plaintiff’s
program and the two are compared. If and
only if they appear substantially similar is
the defendant liable.
Since 1992, most courts confronted
with cases of this general sort have
employed the Altai test. It’s not quite
universal and the Supreme Court has never
lent Altai its imprimatur, but it is surely
dominant. As you might surmise, the Altai Figure 85: Pattern test for software, step 1 – remove
approach favors defendants. Its adoption elements dictated by efficiency
made it significantly more difficult for
software developers to recover against
competitors who deployed structurally
similar programs. The Altai approach has
many critics. Executives in major software
firms sometimes point to this decision as
one of the reasons why they’ve turned
increasingly to patent law to protect their
innovations. And some scholars, like Dennis
Karjala, point out that the relationship Figure 86: Pattern test for software, step 2 – remove
between the idea-expression distinction elements dictated by external factors

that underlies the abstraction portion of the

test and the filtration portion of the test is
far from clear. But for better or worse, the
test seems here to stay.
Now, let’s return to the main road.
The fundamental problem I’ve noted is how
to separate protected from unprotected
material when applying the substantial
similarity test. The approach most generous
Figure 87: Pattern test for software, step 3 – remove
to copyright owners is totality analysis. The
elements taken from public domain
least generous approach is the abstraction
filtration comparison test now applied by
most US courts in the context of software.
In between these two is the “more
discerning observer test.” The way in which Figure 88: Pattern test for software, step 4 – compare
that approach works is best explained after elements of defendant’s program vs protected parts of
we’ve explored the meaning of substantial plaintiff’s program

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similarity. So, to that troublesome concept we now turn. The most important descriptions of
The courts have had great difficulty defining exactly how the level of similarity required to
much similarity between a defendant’s work and a plaintiff’s trigger liability, as taken from case
work is necessary to trigger liability. They’re agreed that it’s not law
a mathematical question. The percentage of overlap is not ▪ "Same aesthetic appeal"
decisive. The standard is much more impressionistic than that.
▪ Apparent appropriation
But the courts have trouble capturing in words the level
▪ "Total concept and feel"
required. Various formulations can be found in the case law.
Listed below are the most important. You should not think of ▪ Extrinsic/intrinsic test (CA9)

these formulations as distinct tests analogous to the avowedly distinct tests that are used to
determine conceptual separability with respect to useful articles. Rather, they at least purport to
be different ways of describing the same standard.
Often, courts say that two works are substantially similar if they have “the same aesthetic
appeal.” For example, in the 2001 Boisson case, the Second Circuit said “Generally, an allegedly
infringing work is considered substantially similar to a copyrighted work if the ordinary observer,
unless he set out to detect the disparities, would be disposed to overlook them and regard their
aesthetic appeal as the same.” In the 2005 Mannion case, the district court relied on this test to
rule that a jury could find substantial similarity between a magazine photo of Kevin Garnett and
a photo prepared for a billboard advertising Coors beer (shown in Figure 89).
Another slightly different formulation – in the Ideal Toy case, the same court defined the
relevant test as “whether an average lay observer would recognize the alleged copy as having
been appropriated from the copyrighted work.” Applying this language, a lower court in the

Figure 89: Comparing a magazine photo of Kevin Garnett and a photo prepared
for a billboard advertising Coors beer

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 Figure 90: A cover of The New Yorker magazine compared to a poster advertising
the movie Moscow on the Hudson

1987 Steinberg case concluded that a famous cover of The New Yorker magazine, suggesting the
myopia of residents of New York City, was infringed by a poster publicizing the movie Moscow
on the Hudson (both shown in Figure 90).
Yet another variation – sometimes courts contend that attention should be focused on
“the overall concept and feel of the two works.” For example, in the Krofft case, the Ninth Circuit
relied on that phrase in ruling that the characters, flora, fauna, and layout of an imaginary land
depicted in an advertisement for McDonald’s restaurants resembled sufficiently the
corresponding features of the imaginary land depicted in the Fun Stuff children’s show,
sufficiently closely to give rise to liability (see Figure 91). Individual features, the court noted,
were very similar. For example, “both lands are governed by mayors who have
disproportionately large round heads dominated by long, wide mouths.” But the real basis of
liability was the overall judgment that McDonaldland “captured the total concept and feel of the
Fun Stuff show.” In a similar vein, a district court in the Kisch case concluded that a rational jury
might find substantial similarity in the “underlying tone or mood,” of the two photos depicted in
Figure 92. From what perspective should these judgments be made? In other words, through
whose eyes should the trier of fact view the two works when determining whether they’re
substantially similar? The dominant answer to that question is the average lay observer – in
other words, not an expert in the field of art or literature at issue, but an ordinary lay person.
That answer is subject to two qualifications, however. First, on occasion, courts will adopt the
perspective of the members of the intended audience for the two works. For example, in the
Krofft case, which I just mentioned, the Ninth Circuit at one point sought to assess the degree to
which the Fun Stuff show and McDonaldland would have looked similar to the children at which

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 Figure 91: The mayor character in the TV show “Fun Stuff” contrasted with the mayor of McDonaldland

Figure 92: Comparing the photos in the Kisch case

both works were primarily aimed. For those of you familiar with trademark law, this maneuver
should remind you of the ways in which courts sometimes assess the likelihood of consumer
confusion that arises when two trademarks are similar.
The second qualification is that courts will occasionally adjust their glasses when the
plaintiff’s work contains some unprotected material, as well as some protected material. As
you’ll recall, I described the two polar positions taken by courts when dealing with such cases –
the so-called totality analysis and the filtration approach exemplified by the Altai case. In

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between those two positions is the so-called “more discerning observer” test. The Second Circuit
in the Boisson case explained this approach as follows.

In the Folio Impressions case, part of the plaintiff’s fabric was not original, and
therefore not protectable. We articulated the need for an ordinary observer to be
“more discerning in such circumstances.”

“[T]he ordinary observer would compare the finished product that the fabric designs
were intended to grace (women’s dresses), and would be inclined to view the entire
dress – consisting of protectable and unpredictable elements – as one whole. Here,
since only some of the design enjoys copyright protection, the observer’s inspection
must be more discerning.”

Shortly after Folio Impressions was decided, we reiterated that a “more refined
analysis” is required where a plaintiff’s work is not “wholly original,” but rather
incorporates elements from the public domain. In these instances, “[w]hat must be
shown is substantial similarity between those elements and only those elements that
provide copyrightability to the allegedly infringed compilation.” In contrast, where the
plaintiff’s work contains no material imported from the public domain, the “more
discerning” test is unnecessary.

In applying this test, a court is not to dissect the works at issue, and to separate
components and compare only the copyrightable elements. To do so would be to take
the “more discerning” test to an extreme, which would result in almost nothing being
copyrightable. Because original works broken down to their composite parts would
usually be little more than basic unprotectable elements, like letters, colors, and
symbols. This outcome – affording no copyright protection to an original compilation of
unpredictable elements – would be contrary to the Supreme Court’s holding in Feist
Publications.”

OK, that’s a lot of language. And after all that, it’s still not entirely clear what the court has
in mind. The bottom line seems to be when comparing the two works, don’t filter out the
unprotected material as the court did with software in Altai, but instead adopt a more skeptical
stance than the hypothetical ordinary observer.
As we’ve seen, the emphasis in all of these cases is on some variant of an ordinary lay
observer. Does that mean that expert witnesses have no role in substantial similarity
determinations? Not quite. Although the ultimate judgment must always be made from the
standpoint of an ordinary observer, experts can help in framing the ultimate judgment. The
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has developed the most elaborate – some scholars say,
convoluted – system for combining expert and lay analysis. In the Ninth Circuit, there are now

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two steps to a determination of substantial similarity – an extrinsic test and an intrinsic test.
With respect to the first, expert opinion is relevant, but not with respect to the second. To win,
the plaintiff has to satisfy both. So what do these two terms, extrinsic and intrinsic, mean? It’s
not entirely clear, in part because the Ninth Circuit’s usage has changed over time. In the Krofft
case, where this approach was first deployed, the extrinsic test was defined as “similarity in
ideas.” Intrinsic was defined as “similarity in expression.” This formulation, you probably
noticed, is hard to reconcile with the fundamental principle that copyright law doesn’t protect
ideas at all. Perhaps sensing that problem, in subsequent cases the Ninth Circuit has formulated
the approach differently. For example, in the Cavalier case, extrinsic is treated as “an objective
comparison of specific expressive elements,” while intrinsic is “a subjective comparison of the
total concept and feel” of the two works. In the Swirsky case, the court backed up a bit, defining
the issue addressed by the extrinsic test as “whether the two works share a similarity of ideas
and expression as measured by external objective criteria,” while the intrinsic test again focused
on total concept and feel. Even the Ninth Circuit acknowledges the clumsiness of these
maneuvers. In Swirsky, for example, the judges admitted, “The extrinsic test provides an
awkward framework to apply to copyrighted works like music or art objects, which lack distinct
elements of idea and expression. Nevertheless, the test is our law, and we must apply it.” So too
must litigants when they appear in the courts of the Ninth Circuit.
This concludes our review of the doctrine of substantial similarity. In closing, I would urge
you not to put too much stock in the language the courts employ when setting forth these
various formulations. At least as good a guide to the law in this area is the pattern of results
reached in the cases. That’s the main reason, aside from simple entertainment, that during our
tour I’ve been telling you the central facts of several of these cases and how they were resolved.
This is not to say, of course, that the results in these cases are entirely consistent. They surely
are not. But from them, you can distill an impression of the degree or kind of similarity that will
likely get you in trouble, and the degree or kind that will not. More guidance than that may be
impossible.

7.3. Derivative Works

Unauthorized modifications of copyrighted works implicate two distinct interests on the part of
copyright owners. The first of those interests we considered in lecture number two.
Modifications of copyrighted works can threaten the owner’s moral rights, specifically their
rights for integrity. Recall in this connection von Gerkan’s “Berlin Train Station” or Snow’s
“Canadian Geese.” When those works were modified, the authors experienced pain and anger,
and sued successfully to stop the modifications. The legal rules underlying their lawsuits, we’ve
already discussed. The second of the interests is economic, rather than moral and character.
Making or licensing modifications of their works is one of the ways that copyright owners earn
money. If they could not prevent unauthorized modifications, they would earn less. The
economic rights related to modifications will be the focus of this last segment of today’s lecture.
To many copyright owners, this source of revenue is very important.

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 Here’s an example. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of stories, of course
earns royalties when her books are reproduced and sold. But she also collects license fees from
people who translate her books into other languages, and more importantly, in studios that wish
to make motion picture adaptations of her stories. The studios, in turn, not only earn money by
distributing copies of the films through the myriad channels I described in lecture number three,
but also when subtitled versions are released, and when various paraphernalia based upon the
stories is manufactured and sold – dolls, glasses, Quidditch pads, and so forth. The expectation
of those ancillary revenue streams increases the license fees the studios are able and willing to
pay to Rowling. These and other sources of income growing out of the novels made Rowling, at
least at one point, a billionaire. Rowling’s capacity to control these various offshoots of her
novels finds apparent support in Section 106(2) of the Copyright Statute. That section provides
that a copyright owner has the exclusive right “to prepare derivative works based upon the
copyrighted work.” So, what’s a derivative work? Section 101 tells us “A derivative work is a
work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement,
dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction,
abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or
adapted.”
In view of the growing importance of the revenue streams associated with such
adaptations, you might expect that there would be a great deal of case law interpreting and
applying Section 106(2). Interestingly, there’s not. The main reason is that the reproduction right
– which, as we’ve seen, is shielded by Section 106(1) – is now construed so broadly that it
encompasses almost all of the territory that you would expect to be covered by 106(2). Indeed,
the scope of 106(2) is most often defined by 106(1). If a defendant’s work does not incorporate
enough of the plaintiff’s work to violate the rules that we considered in the previous segment of
this lecture, it does not constitute a derivative work and, thus, does not violate 106(2).
A good illustration of the way in which the derivative work right is now overshadowed by
the reproduction right can be found in the case of Castle Rock Entertainment versus Carol
Publishing. The plaintiff owned the copyright in the well-known Seinfeld television series. The
defendant prepared what it called a “trivia book,” which posed questions of varying levels of
difficulty concerning what happened in the television show. For example, one question asked
readers to match the names on the left with the characteristics listed on the right. When the
defendant first released the trivia book, the Seinfeld copyright owners appeared to have been
amused, rather than angry. Indeed, NBC, which broadcast the show, initially asked the
defendants for free copies of the book, which it then distributed with promotions of the show.
Note how sharply this casual response contrasts with the anger expressed by von Gerkan and
Snow when their works were adapted. In any event, it eventually occurred to the copyright
owners in Seinfeld that the trivia book encroached on their rights. They brought a copyright
infringement suit and prevailed. It’s not at all obvious that the plaintiff should have won. Is it
really the case that the creator of a work of fiction can prevent others from writing a separate
work that asked questions concerning the plot? If a high school English teacher assigns a novel

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and then creates a multiple-choice quiz that requires students to answer questions concerning
what happened in the book, is she engaged in copyright infringement? What if she sells
compilations of her quizzes to other teachers? I leave that to you. For the moment, we’re
concerned only with the statutory basis of the court’s ruling. At the very beginning of the Court
of Appeal’s analysis in the Castle Rock case, it seems that the key issue will be whether the trivia
book constitutes a “derivative work,” an adaptation that will bring it within the statutory
definition of derivative work. So, the first sentence of the pertinent section in the court’s opinion
is “The Copyright Act of 1976 grants copyright owners a bundle of exclusive rights, including the
rights to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies and to prepare derivative works based upon
a copyrighted work.” But in the second sentence of the opinion, the court shifts to the now
familiar language of reproduction. “Copyright infringement is established when the owner of a
valid copyright demonstrates unauthorized copying.” Section 106(2) then plays no further role in
the court’s opinion.
In this respect, the Castle Rock opinion is typical. Rarely does a copyright owner’s right
under Section 106(2) – to control derivative works – give him power greater than he already
enjoys under 106(1). But every once in a while, the difference between the two provisions
matters. First, a defendant will sometimes purchase an authorized copy of a copyrighted work
and then physically alter it or integrate it with another work. In such a case, the defendant has
not violated 106(1) because he’s not made a copy; he’s bought one. Thus, he can be liable, if at
all, only for preparing a derivative work. Two cases of this sort involving very similar facts are
notorious. In each one, the defendant purchased books containing copies of the plaintiff’s
copyrighted artwork, cut out individual images from those books, glued the pictures onto tiles,
and then sold the tiles. In one of the cases, the Ninth Circuit concluded that section 106(2) had
been violated. “By borrowing and mounting the pre-existing copyrighted individual art images
without the consent of the copyright proprietors, appellant has prepared a derivative work and
infringed the subject copyrights.” In the other case, the Seventh Circuit, dismayed by the
implications of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling concerning the status of many common and innocuous
habits, like marking up copies of case books, took the opposite position. As you might expect,
such disputes don’t arise often.
The second context in which 106(1) and 106(2) might diverge concerns the requirement of
fixation. As we discussed in the previous section of this lecture, to establish a violation of the
right of reproduction the plaintiff must show, among other things, the defendant made a copy of
the plaintiff’s work. And that, in turn, requires that the thing the defendant produced be fixed
for more than a transitory duration. Notice that the language of 106(2) is different. It makes no
mention of copies or phonorecords. Instead, it refers to “preparing” derivative works. That
seems to leave open the possibility that 106(2) could be violated without making anything firm.
One passage in the pertinent legislative history lends support to that possibility. The House of
Representatives report that companies the 1976 statutory reform contained this sentence.
“Preparation of a derivative work, such as a ballet, pantomime, or improvised performance, may
be an infringement even though nothing is ever fixed in tangible form.” Despite the apparent

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clarity of this statement, the courts have been very reluctant to accept violations of 106(2) in the
absence of some kind of fixation. For example, the Ninth Circuit has ruled that “To narrow the
statute to a manageable level, we have developed certain criteria the work must satisfy in order
to qualify as a derivative work, one of which is that it must exist in a concrete or permanent
form.”
Finally, a few odd statutory provisions treat parties who make derivative works more
favorably than those who merely make copies. One such provision is Section 104A(d)(3), which
governed the rights and obligations of a person who has prepared a derivative work based upon
an underlying work that used to be in the public domain in the United States because of a failure
to comply with US formalities, but has now been restored to copyright protection because of the
TRIPS Agreement. The statute permits such a person to keep on exploiting his derivative work,
provided that he pays the owner of the restored copyright a reasonable compensation. To avail
himself of this option, he must show that his product is a derivative work, not just a copy of the
original. How much must he have changed the original work to qualify? In the judgment of the
Third Circuit, not much. Changes that embody “some minimal degree of creativity” suffice.
One last aspect of Section 106(2) merits reiteration. What happens when you prepare a
derivative work without permission? Well, you expose yourself to the various remedies for
copyright infringement that we’ll consider in detail in the last lecture in this series. But
something else happens that’s perhaps less obvious. You forfeit whatever copyrights you might
otherwise have enjoyed in your derivative work. The relevant statutory provision is Section
103(a), which provides the subject matter of copyright, as specified by Section 102, includes
compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing pre-existing material in
which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has
been used unlawfully.
A nuance lurks in this language. Some courts have held that a person who, without
permission, makes a derivative work forfeits protection only in the portion of the derivative
work that is “pervaded” by the underlying work. In other words, you may still claim a copyright
in a portion of the derivative work that is entirely untainted. Putting that nuance to one side, the
main point is that, in this context, an infringer doesn’t get copyright protection, even for his own
creative material.
In lecture three, I discussed this principle briefly in connection with the Sylvester Stallone
Rocky case. Here’s another, even more odd illustration. At one point in his career, the artist
sometimes known as Prince adopted as his name the image shown in Figure 93. During this
period, a guitar maker and Prince fan by the name of Ferdinand Pickett made a guitar that
incorporated most of this shape and allegedly showed the guitar to Prince. Pickett apparently
hoped that Prince would buy the guitar, and thus enhance Pickett’s reputation. Prince did not do
so, but instead commissioned another guitar maker to fabricate guitars incorporating his symbol
and played them in concerts. Enraged, Pickett brought a pro se copyright infringement suit
against Prince. Pickett acknowledged that Prince held a valid copyright in the image he had
selected as his name, and that Pickett’s guitar was a derivative work based upon that

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copyrighted image. Nevertheless, he contended that Prince could not make a copy of Pickett’s
guitar without Pickett’s permission. Seven years later, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit finally resolved the dispute in Prince’s favor. Judge Posner, writing for the court,
expressed doubt that Pickett’s guitar embodied sufficient originality to warrant a copyright in
the first place. But in any event, Posner ruled, its status as an unauthorized derivative work
meant that Pickett had no copyright protection for it. Thus, even if Prince had seen and copied
Pickett’s guitar, he would not be liable. The trial judge’s comment on the case seems apt.
“Defendant may as well have had in mind this
protracted litigation when he asked, ‘Why do we
scream at each other? This is what it sounds like
when doves cry.’” As Mark Lemley has observed,
patent law works quite differently. A person
who, without permission, makes an
improvement on a patented invention may
obtain a patent for his improvement. This creates
a situation of so-called blocking patents. Neither
the holder of the patent on the original invention
nor the holder of the patent on the improvement
may practice the improvement without the Figure 93: Prince’s “Love Symbol #2”
permission of the other. So, is the net result that
the improvement never gets manufactured and
used? Sometimes. But what usually occurs is that
the two parties negotiate a deal by which they
divide in some way the benefits of the now
improved invention. In Lemley’s view, this setup
creates a more efficient pattern of incentives for
both primary and secondary innovators than the
copyright system. You might ask yourself, what
would have happened in the Stallone and Prince
cases if a system of blocking copyrights,
analogous to the system of blocking patents, had
been in place?
This concludes our analysis of the rights of
reproduction and modification. Figure 94: Pickett's guitar design

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DISTRIBUTION & PERFORMANCE RIGHTS

8.1. Distribution
In the preceding lecture, I examined two of the four major economic rights associated with a
copyright, specifically the right to control reproduction and the right to control modifications of
a copyrighted work. In this lecture, I’ll examine the other two major economic rights – the right
to control distribution, and the right to control public performances and displays. As usual, I’ll
spend most of the time discussing the law in the United States, but will also indicate various
issues on which the law in other countries differs.
We’ll begin with the right of distribution. This aspect of copyright law is characterized by a
clash between two powerful sets of impulses. On one side are strong economic interests of
copyright owners. On the other side is an equally powerful set of attitudes, hostile to the
copyright owners’ yearning for continuing control over embodiments of their works. The tension
between these forces has generated and will continue to generate strife and periodic doctrinal
eruptions. The interests of the copyright owners are strong for three reasons. They want to be
able to control what purchasers and possessor of copies of their works do with those copies.
The first, and least important, of those reasons is that such control supplements the
copyright owner’s right of reproduction. Specifically, by enabling the owners to attack
intermediaries who do not themselves make unauthorized copies, but who traffic in
unauthorized copies. In this sense, the distribution right is analogous to the rules in criminal law
penalizing the receipt of stolen property. The second, and more important reason is that
copyright owners would like to suppress, if possible, resales and lending of copies of their works.
In other words, they would like to prevent the first purchaser of a copy from passing it on to
others. Why? Because the result would be to increase demand for copies, and thus to enhance
the copyright owner’s income. For example, novelists would like to be able to prevent sales of
used copies of their books. Movie studios would like to prevent, or to charge for resales or
rentals of DVDs embodying their works, and so forth. Third, copyright owners would like to
prevent arbitrage, which corrodes their ability to engage in lucrative, differential pricing. This
last point is both complicated and important. I touched on it very briefly at the end of lecture
number four. I now want to discuss it in more detail. The following analysis consists of a

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 Figure 95: Pricing on the American Airlines website for a flight 143 on 1 June 2014

Figure 96: Seating configuration of the Boeing 757-200 aircraft

condensed version of an argument deployed in much more fine grain in an article I wrote some
years ago on this topic. If you’re curious about this phenomenon, you might wish to follow the
links on my home page.
Differential pricing, otherwise known as price discrimination, consists in the core case of
charging different consumers different prices for access to the same good or service. A subtler
form of differential pricing involves charging different consumers different prices for different
versions of the same good or service when the variation cannot be explained by differences in
the costs of the versions. A familiar example of the core case of differential pricing is when a bus
company or museum charges lower entrance fees to students or senior citizens than it does to
middle aged, non-students. A familiar example of the subtler form is the practice of airlines to
charge vastly more for a business class seat than for a coach class seat for a given trip. Suppose,
for example, that I want to fly from Boston to Los Angeles in the afternoon of June 1, 2014,
roughly three months from right now. I prefer American Airlines, so I visit the website of the
company, and check for available flights and prices. Flight 143, which departs at 4:30 in the
afternoon, suits my schedule well. I now have to choose a class. As you can see in Figure 95,
there are various options. But the major choice involves where in the plane I will sit. Flight 143
uses the Boeing 757-200 aircraft, which is configured as shown in Figure 96. So, if I want to sit in
what’s known as the main cabin, I will pay $400 or $500. If I want to sit up front, in first class, I’ll
pay more than three times as much. The difference between these prices cannot be explained
on the basis of the extra costs associated with a wide seat, better food, and more attentive
service. Rather, it reflects primarily the airline’s shrewd effort to capitalize on differences in the
price sensitivity of the two types of passengers. If I’m wealthy, or I’m able to rely on the
generous business expense account, I’ll choose first class. If neither, I’ll choose the main cabin.
Price discrimination usually increases the profits of the firm that engages in it. Why, then,
is it relatively uncommon? Because, with rare exceptions, the practice of price discrimination is

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feasible only when three conditions coincide. First, the firm ordinarily must have market power.
In other words, there must exist no readily available, equally satisfactory substitutes for the
good or service the firm is selling. Otherwise, customers from whom the firm seeks to extract a
high price, will defect to competitors. Next, the firm must be able to differentiate among its
customers on the basis of the values they place on the firm’s product or service. There are
several ways in which this could be achieved. In what economists refer to as first degree price
discrimination, the firm gathers information about individual buyers, and attempts to charge
each one the most that he or she is able and willing to pay for the good or service in question. In
so-called second degree price discrimination, the seller does not know how much buyers are
able willing to pay, but induces them to reveal their resources or their preferences through their
purchasing decisions. Among the techniques of this sort are volume discounts and versioning,
such as the practice I mentioned a minute ago, of differentiating business class and coach
tickets, and then charging radically different prices for them. In so-called third degree price
discrimination, the seller does not know the purchasing power of individual buyers, but is able to
separate them into groups that correspond roughly to their wealth or eagerness. The student
discounts and senior discounts I mentioned previously are examples.
Opportunities to engage in first degree price discrimination have traditionally been rare,
but opportunities for second and third degree discrimination abound. One area in which they’re
proliferating especially rapidly are the kinds of the informational products to which copyright
law applies. Take software, for example. One of the ways in which software firms seek to
enhance their revenues is by selling identical or versioned copies of their products to students
for vastly different prices than the prices they charge professionals. Here’s an illustration. As of
today, February 23, 2014, Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 is ordinarily priced at $1,700, but is available
to students and teachers – groups that tend to be poorer than average – for $590, a huge
markdown. As I hope you recognize, this is an example of third degree price discrimination in
which the copyright owner uses a criterion to separate set of potential customers for its product
into two or more subgroups, which differ roughly in their price sensitivity, and then charges the
members of the two groups very different prices. An example of second degree price
discrimination is the way in which book publishers typically package and release their products.
In the usual case, a hardcover edition is sold at a substantial price. And then a few months later,
or a few years later, a much cheaper paperback version is released. For example, right now I’m
reading Scott Turow’s novel “Identical”, the newest in a series of excellent legal thrillers. I
bought a hard cover copy of this book about a month ago from Amazon.com for $28. I could
have obtained from Amazon a paperback copy for a much lower price, but I would have had to
wait until July of this year to get it. The cost of manufacturing a hardcover copy of a book is not
double the cost of manufacturing a paperback copy. Rather, the sharp price difference is a form
of differential pricing. More specifically, this common marketing practice, used by book
publishers, combines two distinct price discrimination schemes. The first is known as versioning.
Just as was the case with respect to business class versus coach airline tickets, publishers expect
price insensitive consumers, like me, to buy the premium – in other words, hardcover editions –

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and poorer consumers to prefer the economy model. The second strategy is sometimes known
as intertemporal price discrimination. The reason the publishers do not ordinarily release the
paperback editions at the same time as the hardback editions is that they don’t want buyers
who care little about price but find paperbacks perfectly acceptable to opt for paperbacks, so
they wait until the market consisting of wealthy consumers has been pretty well exhausted
through sales of hardbacks before putting the cheaper versions on the shelves.
The same composite strategy underlies the so-called windowing system through which
most Hollywood movies, at least until recently, were marketed (see Figure 97). Typically, a firm
was first licensed for performances in American movie theaters. Roughly three months later, it
was released both in foreign theaters and through pay per view channels. Three months after
that, DVD copies were made available for sale and rental. After three more months, it was
released to premium cable television channels. A year later, it was shown on television in
countries outside the United States, and then on network television inside the United States.
And finally, after another three years, it was licensed to local television syndicators. The price
per viewing paid by consumers in each of these windows was lower than in the preceding
window. Again, we see here a combination of versioning, which prompts consumers to sort
themselves by format, and intertemporal discrimination, whereby the most price sensitive
consumers have to wait the longest.
There are many more examples of price discrimination by copyright owners, some of
which we’ll encounter later in the course, but there remains one more condition essential to the
strategy. To engage in effective price discrimination, the copyright owner must be able to
prevent, or at least to limit, arbitrage. In other words, it must be able to stop customers to
whom it sells copies of its work a low price from reselling them, either directly or with the aid of

Figure 97: Market windows for major films from release date, circa 1990

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intermediaries, to customers from the firm is seeking to extract a high price. If it can’t do so,
then the copyright owner forfeits its high margin customers, which is disastrous. This is where
the right to control distribution comes into play. What copyright owners would most like would
be a legal right to prevent altogether any resales of copies of their works. Not just for the reason
we’ve already seen – namely, that such a right would increase demand for their products – but
also for the subtler reason that it would enhance their capacity to charge different customers
different prices without worrying that poor customers who bought the copies for low prices
would resell them to rich customers for intermediate prices, and thus corrode the high-end
market.
To summarize, for three reasons, copyright owners would like strong rights to control
distribution of copies of their works. First, it would help them to attack intermediaries who
traffic in unauthorized copies. Second, it would enhance demand for copies of their works. And
third, it would enhance their ability to engage in differential pricing.
Opposed to these interests are not only the obvious economic interest of consumers, in
reducing the amount they have to pay for access to copyrighted works, but also three widely
shared attitudes hostile to the kind of control the copyright owners seek. First, copyright owners
who seek to prevent resales or lending of copies of their works are often seen as greedy. They’ve
already been paid once when a copy of their works was first sold. They’re not morally entitled to
more. This sentiment is loosely tied to the principle of proportionality that figures so
prominently, as we saw in lecture number two, in the fairness theory of copyright. Copyright
owners, it is widely thought, do not deserve to collect more revenue than they receive from the
first sale of copies. Exactly why not is unclear, but this attitude is very common. Second, many
people – and many lawyers in particular – are skeptical of attempts to control a thing after
you’ve sold it. Viewing the same issue from the other side, a widely-shared attitude is that once
you have bought an object, you are entitled to do with it whatever you want. Among the
manifestations of this sentiment in the law is the bias against restraints on alienation of real
property – in other words, land – and the impediments I mentioned once before to servitudes,
longstanding restrictions on what people who buy land can do on or with it. The same sentiment
figures in the debate over the Monsanto case, which was decided last year by the United States
Supreme Court, which concerned the right of a purchaser of seeds that contain genes subject to
patent protection to grow crops from that seed, save some of the seeds produced by those
crops, and then use the saved seed to grow more crops. The Monsanto case involved patent and
contract law, not copyright law, so the complex legal issues at issue in that case are not
pertinent to our subject here, but one of the general sentiments expressed often in the public
debate over that case is that the farmer, Vernon Bowman, having bought the seed, should be
able to do what he wants with it. The same sentiment tilts against the interests of copyright
owners to control redistribution of copies of their works.
The third attitude is skepticism concerning differential pricing. Now, this attitude is not
universal. Some forms of differential pricing – for example, the practice of US private universities
of charging students very different tuition fees depending on the financial resources of their

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families – are accepted without much grumpiness. But other forms, even trivial in amount, can
provoke rage. Here’s just one example. In the fall of 2000, Amazon.com began to adjust the
prices of a few DVDs, depending on the status of the purchasers. It seems – although most
Amazon representatives denied this – that repeat customers, identifiable by the Amazon cookies
on their computers, were quoted higher prices for films than were new customers. Presumably,
Amazon thought the new customers might shop around, and so offered them lower prices to
induce them to buy. When this practice was revealed on an online DVD talk forum, the response
of most participants was fury. “I will never buy another thing from those guys,” declared one
consumer. Surveys confirm the prevalence of the sentiment that underlies this reaction. For,
example in 2005, the Annenberg Center asked 1,500 adult internet users some questions
concerning their views of online marketing practices. 87% disagreed with the proposition that
“It’s OK if an online store I use charges different people different prices for the same products
during the same hour.”
The way this attitude bears on our subject today is that, to the extent copyright owners
seek increased control over the distribution of their works in order to more effectively engage in
differential pricing, they face strong – though not universal – popular resistance. The tension
between these competing forces is managed to some degree by a set of interlocking statutory
provisions, to which we’ll now turn.

17 USC § 106(3)

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the
exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or
other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending

17 USC § 602(a)

Importation into the United States or exportation from the United States, without the
authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work
that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive
right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106 actionable under section
501.

This subsection does not apply to —

(1) importation of copies or phonorecords under the authority or for the use of the
Government of the United States or of any State or political subdivision of a State, but

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 not including copies or phonorecords for use in schools, or copies of any audiovisual
work imported for purposes other than archival use;

(2) importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any
person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any
one time, or by any person arriving from outside the United States with respect to
copies or phonorecords forming part of such person’s personal baggage; or

(3) importation by or for an organization operated for scholarly, educational, or

religious purposes and not for private gain, with respect to no more than one copy of
an audiovisual work solely for its archival purposes, and no more than five copies or
phonorecords of any other work for its library lending or archival purposes, unless the
importation of such copies or phonorecords is part of an activity consisting of
systematic reproduction or distribution, engaged in by such organization in violation of
the provisions of section 108(g)(2)

17 USC § 109

(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or
phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is
entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of
the possession of that copy or phonorecord.

(b)(1)(A) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the

owners of copyright in the sound recording or the owner of copyright in a computer
program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program), and in
the case of a sound recording in the musical works embodied therein, neither the owner
of a particular phonorecord nor any person in possession of a particular copy of a
computer program (including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such
program), may, for the purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of,
or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord or computer program
(including any tape, disk, or other medium embodying such program) by rental, lease,
or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending.

(b)(1)(B) This subsection does not apply to —

(i) a computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot
be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product; or

(ii) a computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose

computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other
purposes.

(b)(1)(C) Nothing in this subsection affects any provision of chapter 9 of this title.

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 17 USC § 101

“Publication” is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by

sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to
distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further
distribution, public performance, or public display, constitutes publication. A public
performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication.

The financial interests of copyright owners are protected by Section 106(3) and 602(a) of
the US Statute. The first of these, as you can see, gives copyright owners the exclusive right “to
distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer
of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending.” 602(a) gives copyright owners analogous rights to
control importation and exportation of copies of their works. Now, if these are the only relevant
statutory provisions, they would reflect total victory by the copyright owners, but each of these
provisions is qualified by others. The right granted by 106(3) is curtailed quite sharply by 109(a),
which, as you can see provides that “the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully
made under this title, or any other person authorized by such owner, is entitled to sell or
otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.” This provision is widely
known as the first sale doctrine. The basic idea underlying this doctrine is that once a copyright
owner has sold a copy, he cannot control resales, gifts, et cetera. We’ll return to the precise
meaning of this provision in a minute. The right to prevent unauthorized importation of copies is
also qualified in various ways. Three specific exceptions are listed under 602(a). In addition, the
way in which 602(a) is phrased leaves open the possibility that it is qualified, not just by these
specific exemptions, but also by the much broader first sale doctrine embodied in 109(a). How
might this work? Well, you’ll notice that 602(a) refers to unauthorized importation as “an
infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies under Section 106.” Section 106, in turn,
makes all the rights it grants to copyright owners “subject to sections 107 through 122.”
Included in that list is 109(a), which we’ve already seen. Through this chain of connections, it’s
possible that the first sale doctrine qualifies the importation right, as well as the right to control
domestic distribution of copies of the work. We’ll return to this textual nuance shortly.
The first sale doctrine embodied in section 109(a) is itself subject to exceptions.
Specifically, to the provisions of 109(b)(1)(a). The key language is “neither the owner of a
particular phonorecord, nor any person in possession of a particular copy of a computer
program, may, for the purposes of a direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of that
phonorecord or computer program by rental, lease, or lending.” The primary purpose of this
provision was to shut down stores that, at the time of its adoption, were renting audio CDs to
customers who would then copy the sound recordings on those CDs to the hard drives of their
computers, return the CDs to the stores, and thereby avoid the cost of buying CDs of their own.
As you can see, this exception is subject to exceptions of its own. So graphically, the relationship
among these various provisions might be represented as shown in Figure 98 – 106(3) and the

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 Figure 98: The relationship between provisions of sections 602, 106 and 109

primary portion of 602(a) advance the interests of copyright owners. 109(a) and 602(a) (1–3)
establish limits on those rights, giving expression to the sentiments opposed to the copyright
owner’s interests. 109(b)(1)(a) reinstates a portion of 106(3), with respect to some categories of
works. 109(b)(1)(b) tempers that reinstatement. As I hope you can see from the diagram, this
combination of statutory provisions seeks to manage the deep tension between the competing
forces that shape this field of the law, but the statute is not precise enough to resolve all issues.
The result is that there’s lots of litigation along this fault line. I’ll describe two sets of cases of
this sort. Others will likely come up in the discussions that accompany this lecture.
The reason why the relationship between 109(a) and 602(a) is so important is that it
determines the power of copyright owners to engage in international geographic price
discrimination. In other words, to sell copies of their works at high prices to customers in the
United States, and at lower prices to customers in poorer countries. In lecture number three, I
mentioned one among the many companies that engage in this practice – Omega. Here’s a brief
reminder. Omega has obtained a US copyright on the design shown in Figure 23. Omega
engraves a version of this logo on the underside of its watches. Omega sells those watches all
over the world. Typically, it sells them for lower prices in poor countries than in the United
States. Some years ago, Costco, a discount retailer using an intermediary, purchased some of the
watches that Omega had sold cheaply outside the United States, imported them into the United
States, and then began selling them in its US stores for prices lower than those used by Omega’s
authorized US dealers. Omega brought suit against Costco, contending that the so-called parallel
importation violated Omega’s copyright in the logo. Now Costco had a seemingly strong
defense. In an earlier case, called Quality King vs Lanza, the United States Supreme Court held
that 109(a) did indeed limit the reach of 602(a), with the result that a copyright owner could not
block importation of copies that he or it had sold outside the United States. However, Quality
King involved so-called round trip parallel importation. In other words, a situation in which the
copies of the work in question were lawfully manufactured in the United States, shipped

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overseas, sold at low prices there, bought overseas by an arbitrageur, and then imported by the
arbitrageur back into the United States, where they were sold for prices lower than those
charged by authorized US dealers. Omega, relying on a concurring opinion by Justice Ginsburg in
the Quality King case, pointed out that its situation was different. The watches that bore its
copyrighted logo, and thus the copies of the logos themselves, were not first made in the United
States. They were manufactured in Switzerland. As a result, Omega argued, 109(a) did not bar its
claim against Costco because 109(a) only applies, as you can see, to copies “lawfully made under
this title.” The phrase, “this title,” refers to title 17 of the US Code, namely, the US Copyright
statute. Omega argued that, because the watches were not made in the US, they were not made
under the US statute, and thus the provision did not apply. And thus, Omega had a right, under
602, to block unauthorized importation of the watches bearing the logo into the United States.
It’s a clever argument, and it worked. The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed with
Omega, ruling that the first sale doctrine applies to copies manufactured outside the United
States only if an authorized first sale occurs within the United States. Costco asked the Supreme
Court to review the case, which it did, but the Supreme Court was unable to resolve the
question. Four justices sided with Costco, four with Omega, and Justice Kagan recused herself.
The result is that the lower court’s ruling stood. In other words, Omega won. But the main issue
had not been definitively resolved.
Last year, in the Kirtsaeng case, the Supreme Court was provided a second opportunity to
address this issue. The essential facts of that case were straightforward. Supap Kirtsaeng was
born in Thailand, but educated in the United States. In 2007, he was studying for a Ph.D. In
mathematics at UCLA. Like many students, he had discovered that copies of the English language
textbooks could be purchased more cheaply abroad than in the United States. Kirtsaeng decided
to capitalize on this fact in order to finance his graduate education. He asked his relatives in
Thailand to buy large quantities of textbooks of various sorts, and ship them to him in California.
He then resold the books to US students for prices below the rates that the publishers were
charging in the United States – well above the prices in Thailand. He was thus able to repay his
relatives and keep a substantial
amount of money for himself. This
system enabled him, in short order, to
earn roughly a million dollars. Enough
to finance his graduate education and
then some. At this point, you’re
probably wondering, wasn’t Kirtsaeng
aware of the legal risk he was
running? After all, the copies of the
books he was importing bore clear
warnings that his conduct was
Figure 99: An example of the import restriction text on a
unlawful, like the warning shown textbook

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Figure 99. He might have thought that he, like many students, could avoid the wrath of the
publishers if he operated on a small scale. But did he think that he could sell a million dollars of
books with impunity? Apparently, yes. In making that judgment, he relied on advice from his
relatives in Thailand, and upon the website Google Answers, which assured him that he could
legally resell the foreign additions in the United States. In the short term, Kirtsaeng’s reliance on
that advice proved foolish. One of the publishers, John Wiley, brought suit against him,
contending that unauthorized importation of the books constituted copyright infringement.
Because all of the books in question had been manufactured and first sold by Wiley’s wholly
owned subsidiary outside the United States, Wiley could and did point to the Omega decision for
support. Wiley prevailed in the trial court, and then the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Kirtsaeng asked the Supreme Court to review the case, which agreed. The stakes were very high.
Not just book publishers, but the sellers and buyers of all copyrighted materials distributed at
different prices in different countries would be affected by the outcome. As one might imagine,
the Supreme Court was deluged with briefs from organization with stakes in one result or
another. This legal battle was paralleled by a struggle for dominance in the so-called court of
public opinion. Here’s one Foray into that war, sponsored by the groups supporting Kirtsaeng.

[Video by the Owners’ Rights Initiative]

The Owners’ Rights Initiative hit the streets to see what you think of the Wiley v.
Kirtsaeng case.

Mark, Maryland: I think that once you’ve bought an item, you should be able to do with
it what you want. If you want to resell it, that should be up to you.

John, New York: Because I paid money for it, and gosh dang it, I should be able to do
whatever I want with it.

Toby, United Kingdom: I don’t own anything, I’m just borrowing things from a company
for a long time, which seems to be outrageous.

Jack, New York: How can they tell you that you don’t own what you buy? You used your
own money to buy that.

Mike, Kentucky: I think that would be totally unfair, and against capitalism.

Carolyn & Dan, Indiana: I would say it would be important to everybody, because that’s
just the way of America. We buy, we sell, we trade.

Toby, United Kingdom: Country boundaries aren’t what they once were. So, of course,
you should be able to buy and sell things, regardless of where you get them from.

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 Eric, Washington D.C.: Of course, of course. Because most of the things I’ve got on now
are made from someplace else.

Lawrence & Montay, Washington D.C.: I’d be very highly upset and pissed off due to
the simple fact that they’re trying to tell me what to do with an item.

Alan, Washington D.C.: It’ll affect everybody. Anybody that has a power to purchase
now will be impacted by this.

Doug, California: For one thing, in college books, it would be a killer. It’s already so
expensive to go to college that you should be able to use whatever textbooks we want,
wherever we got them, without having the threat of the government telling us that
that’s not appropriate to use.

Keenan, California: It really hurts the consumers. I’m really concerned about the
consumers because I’ m a consumer.

Toby, United Kingdom: That seems to add a whole new level of administration that’s
going to cost millions and millions of dollars. And that’s just – all that money going into
having to ask someone if you wants to sell your own things? That seems silly.

Tanisha, Washington D.C.: Just thinking of kind of the gravity of what that would mean.
It would piss me off a little bit.

Kim & Mia, Virginia: If I want to buy it, I’ll buy it. If I want to sell it, I’ll sell it. It’s my
right.

For more information visit www.ownersrightsinitiative.org

Perhaps moved in part by sentiments like these, the Supreme Court, in the Kirtsaeng case
– somewhat to my surprise – reversed the ruling of the lower court, holding that one way
parallel importation, like round trip parallel importation, is privileged by section 109. The heart
of the court’s rationale was that the statutory phrase “lawfully made under this title” is not a
geographic limitation. So long as copies of a work are made with the authorization of the
copyright holder, they are, in the Supreme Court’s judgment, lawfully made under this title. The
decision by the Supreme Court is widely and rightly regarded as a win for at least some
consumers in the United States, who may, as a result of the ruling, be able to obtain copyrighted
materials more cheaply. On the other hand, the decision disadvantages the residents of poor
countries. The reason is that the sellers of copyrighted materials are likely, in the future, to find
it somewhat harder to engage in international geographic price discrimination. If so, how will
they respond? One option, of course, will be to reduce the prices of their goods in the United
States. If their markets are poor countries are large enough, they may do that, but it’s at least as

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likely that they will increase the prices of their goods in poor countries, thus disadvantaging
consumers there.
So, returning to our chart, the ruling in Omega has now been superseded by the ruling in
Kirtsaeng. The struggle over this issue is probably not finished. Copyright owners, most of whom
are unhappy with this outcome, are already seeking to change the law, either through an
amendment of the US Copyright statute, or through adoption of a treaty provision that would
compel the United States and all other members of the treaty to amend the statute. Indeed,
they’re likely to seek not just a return to the Omega rule – which would forbid unauthorized one
way parallel importation – but elimination or qualification of the earlier ruling in Quality King,
which, as you recall, authorized round trip parallel importation. Stay tuned. But for the time
being, here’s where the law stands.
OK, that’s one of the zones of ongoing litigation on this fault line. There’s another volcano.
Autodesk makes CAD software. In other words, computer aided design programs. Its main
product is known as AutoCAD. It distributes AutoCAD in the old-fashioned way – namely, on CD-
ROMs. Just as we saw with Adobe, AutoCAD engages in explicit price discrimination. It sells the
program to commercial users, presumably architects, for very high prices. It then uses various
techniques to sell the program to other groups, such as students, for much lower prices. One of
those techniques is versioning. For example, a student edition – presumably a de-tuned edition –
of the program is available for less than 5% of the commercial version.
Another technique that Autodesk employs to facilitate price discrimination is contract. In
other words, the company seeks to impose upon customers various restrictions on what they’re
permitted to do with the copies of the programs they buy. In the 1990s, those restrictions
included the following. First, Autodesk retains title to all copies. Second, Autodesk grants the
customer a nonexclusive, non-transferable license to use the software. Third, the purchaser
agrees to refrain from various activities, including reverse engineering the software, or using it
outside the Western hemisphere. Fourth, the purchaser agrees to destroy copies of the software
within 60 days of the time the purchaser upgrades it. Among other things, these restrictions
sought to destroy the secondary market for copies of AutoCAD.
In 1999, a company called CTA acquired, through legitimate channels, 10 copies of the 14th
release of AutoCAD. Some months later, CTA paid a modest fee for an upgrade to obtain the 15th
release of the program. But instead of destroying its copies of the 14th release, CTA sold them to
a man named Vernor, who, in turn, offered them for sale on eBay. Vernor was a pure
intermediary. He signed no contract with Autodesk and never installed or used the software. His
only ambition was to resell the copies at a profit. Autodesk got wind of this plan, and sought to
block the eBay sales on the ground but they would violate Autodesk’s exclusive right under
106(3) to distribute copies of the program. Vernor contended that the sales in question were
privileged under 109(a). So, here’s how the competing parties told their stories and described
their legal implications.
Vernor conceded that Autodesk had a valid copyright in AutoCAD. Exercising its exclusive
right under 106(1) to reproduce the software, Autodesk made a copy on a CD-ROM. Exercising

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its exclusive right under 106(3) to distribute that copy, Autodesk then sold it to CTA. CTA then
exercised its privilege, under 109(a), to resell the validly acquired copy to Vernor, who, similarly,
relied on 109(a) in seeking to resell the copy through eBay to another buyer. As Vernor told the
tale, every step in this process, including the last one, was lawful (see Figure 100).

Figure 100: Vernor v Autodesk, Inc. – Vernor’s narrative

Autodesk, not surprisingly, saw things differently. Steps one and two were just as Vernor
described them, but instead of selling the copy to CTA, Autodesk contended that it merely
leased the copy to CTA in return for various promises. CTA then purported to sell to Vernor a
copy it did not know, because 109(a) only applies to “the owner of a particular copy.” It did not
shield this transaction. The purported resale thus violated Autodesk’s distribution rights under
106(3). For the same reason, this last transaction was not shielded by 109(a). Vernor was no
more an owner of the copy than was CTA. Thus, selling the copy on eBay also violated 106(3). In
sum, according to Autodesk, the last two transactions were unlawful (see Figure 101).

Figure 101: Vernor v Autodesk, Inc. – Autodesk’s narrative

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 The key issue in the case thus became whether the relationship between Autodesk and
CTA had been a lease or a sale. Vernor, of course, preferred the latter, Autodesk the former. In
2010, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in Autodesk’s favor. Here’s the decisive
portion of the court’s opinion.

We hold today that a software user is a licensee, rather than an owner of a copy, where
the copyright owner

(1) specifies that the user is granted a license

(2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and

(3) imposes notable use restrictions.

The way in which this decision fits into the overall landscape of the law governing
distribution rights is indicated on the mind map. It’s reasonably well settled that, using Nimmer’s
typology, a transaction involving a copy of a copyrighted work is covered by 109(a), and thus
lawful, if and only if four conditions are satisfied.

1. A copy was lawfully manufactured with the authorization of the copyright

owner.
2. The copy was transferred under the copyright owner’s authority.
3. The defendant qualifies as the lawful owner of that particular copy.
4. The defendant thereupon disposed of that particular copy, as opposed to, for
example, reproducing it.

When software firms provide customers copies of their programs in return for money,
requirements 1 and 2 are more or less automatically satisfied. However, if the software firm
adds to the transaction enough conditions to make the deal appear to be a lease of a copy, and
thus not a sale, then requirement 3 is not satisfied and as a result, the customer does not have a
privilege to resell that copy. This option is highly beneficial to software firms for two reasons.
First, by suppressing resales of copies, it enables the firms to sell more original copies. Second, it
helps the firm suppress arbitrage of copies sold cheaply to students and so forth, and thus
protects the firm’s primary markets, consisting of adult or commercial users. The result, as you
might expect, makes the software firms happy, but makes their customers much less happy.
Again, a highly technical ruling, which locates this particular transaction on one side rather than
the other of the fault line, has large economic implications.
A summary of the case law affecting provisions 602, 106 and 109 is shown in Figure 102.

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 Figure 102: Case law affecting the provisions of sections 602, 106 and 109

8.2. Performances
The statutory provisions that govern the rights of performance and display are relatively few,
but they’re slippery. So, it’s important to be attentive to nuances here. The primary provisions
are subsections 4, 5, and 6 of section 106 (see below). Subsection 4 gives the owner of the
copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical, choreographic, pantomime, or audiovisual work the
exclusive right to perform that work publicly. Subsection 5 is analogous. It applies to the same
types of copyrighted works, plus pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works and the individual images
of an audiovisual work. It gives the owner of such things the right to display them publicly.
Finally, subsection 6. This was added quite recently, specifically in 1996. As I hope you’ll recall
from lecture number 3, before 1996 the owners of copyrights and sound recordings in the
United States did not enjoy any rights in public performance. At that time, the only provision
dealing with public performances was subsection 4, and if you look back at that subsection,
you’ll notice that sound recordings do not appear in the list of types of works that are covered.
Musical works appear. As you know by now, that means musical compositions but not sound
recordings. As I explained in lecture number 3, the record companies that hold the copyrights in
most commercially valuable sound recordings have long complained about this state of affairs.
In 1996 and then with a little bit of adjustment in 1998, Congress responded partially to the
record companies’ pleas and granted them a limited, very limited, public performance right,
which is now embodied in subsection 6. As you can see, it only applies to performances “by
means of a digital audio transmission.” In just a minute, I’ll give you some examples of
transmissions that fit within this phrase.

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 17 USC § 106

106: Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has
the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following …

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work
publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion
picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means
of a digital audio transmission.

17 USC § 101

To “perform” a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by
means of any device or process or, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual
work, to show its images in any sequence or to make the sounds accompanying it
audible.

To “display” a work means to show a copy of it, either directly or by means of a film,
slide, television image, or any other device or process or, in the case of a motion picture
or other audiovisual work, to show individual images nonsequentially.

To perform or display a work “publicly” means—

(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a
substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social
acquaintances is gathered; or

(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a

place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process,
whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display
receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different
times.

The crucial terms in these three statutory provisions are performance, display, and public.
Fortunately, all three are defined in Section 101 of the statute. As you can see, “perform” is a
very capacious definition. I’ll give some examples of its reach shortly. The key word in the
definition of “display” is show. Both performances and displays of copyrighted works can only
give rise to liability if they’re done publicly. Section 101 defines “publicly” as one of two things.

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The first of these two subsections is sometimes called the Public Place Clause, and is the more
intuitively plausible meaning of public. The second subsection is sometimes known as the
Transmit Clause; it, as we’ll soon see, is a very generous definition of public that sweeps within it
many ways in which copyrighted materials are made available today.

MW: music work; SR: sound recording; private performances are marked in green, public ones in red

Figure 103: Violations of § 106

Those are the main statutory provisions. Now let’s turn to some examples to give these
provisions a bit of shape. Here’s a hypothetical but not implausible scenario, the purpose of
which is to illustrate these concepts (refer to MW: music work; SR: sound recording; private
performances are marked in green, public ones in red
Figure 103). Suppose:
▪ A sings a copyrighted musical composition into a microphone in a recording
studio.
▪ Record company B records A’s rendition on a record. I know these technologies
are quaint, but bear with me.
▪ C purchases a copy of the record and plays it on a turntable in his or her living
room. Sounds are generated, either from the turntable directly or more likely
from an amplifier and a set of speakers connected to the turntable. Those sounds
spread through C’s living room.
▪ Another copy of the record is purchased by radio station D. A disc jockey working
for the radio station plays the record on a turntable there. The signal generated by

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 the radio station is broadcast over the airwaves. The broadcast is represented in
this diagram by the dotted line on the slide. More specifically, this is a traditional
analog, over the air transmission.
▪ It’s received in the home of E, who, in her living room, plays another stereo,
depicted by a boombox. Sound comes out of the speakers into E’s living room.
▪ The next day, the disc jockey plays the record again, broadcasting it again through
an analog signal. This time, it’s received by a tuner and an associated stereo
system located in a restaurant (F). The sounds generated by the stereo spread
through the restaurant. The customers, eating their meals, hear it.
▪ The next month, the radio station shifts to a digital broadcasting technology. The
DJ plays the record again. Suppose cable system G picks up the digital signal and
relays it, through a cable of course, to homeowner H, who plays it through a
stereo in her home.
▪ Finally, suppose that the station abandons over the air broadcasting altogether
and shifts to webcasting over the internet. Yet again, the DJ plays the record. The
owner of a laptop (I) residing in another state receives that webcast and listens to
it in her living room.
Now let’s consider the legal significance of this sequence of events. My suggestion, when
you’re confronted with a real or hypothetical story of this sort, is that you analyze it in three
steps. Breaking the issues down this way may seem needlessly laborious, but it will help alert
you to some hidden landmines.
Step number 1 is to identify all of the performances. Keep in mind the capacious definition
of performance in the statute. Also keep in mind that when dealing with music, you have to look
for both performances of musical compositions and performances of sound recordings. Let’s
start with the musical work. Here are all the places in the hypothetical story where and when the
musical work (abbreviated with MW) was performed.
▪ When A sings the song, that’s a performance.
▪ When the sound emerges from the record player in the living room of C’s home,
that’s also a performance of the musical work.
▪ When the radio station plays the record the first time, it too is performing the
musical work. This is slightly less obvious, but remember that the term
performance includes to render a work either directly or by means of any device
or process. That has been construed to include sending signals of this sort.
▪ When E receives the signal in her living room and sends the sound out into her
living room, that’s yet another separate performance.
▪ Same thing happens with the restaurant. When the station sends the signal
containing a rendition of the song, that’s a performance. When the restaurant
receives that signal and plays it for its customers, that’s another performance.
▪ Things get even more complicated when we get to the cable system. Here there
are three performances: by the station when it broadcasts the rendition of the

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 song, by the cable system when it relays that signal, and by the homeowner who
receives the relayed signal and plays it in her home.
▪ With respect to the webcast, there are only two: by the station and by the
recipient when she plays it.
Each time A’s rendition of the musical work is performed, the sound recording embodying
that rendition is also performed, except of course when A sang it, because there’s no recording
yet. Why differentiate the performance of the musical work and the performances of the sound
recording? Because the copyrights in these things may well be held by different parties and
because, as you already know, they’re governed by different rules.
All right. That’s step 1 of the analysis.
Having identified all of the performances, the next step is to determine which of them are
public. If they’re not public, we don’t have to worry about them anymore. If they are, we’ll have
to proceed to step 3.
▪ A’s performance is not public because it’s done in the studio without an audience,
and this doesn’t fit either of the two definitions of public.
▪ Neither of C’s two performances, of the musical work or of the sound recording, is
public, because they occur in C’s living room.
▪ The same is of course true of E’s living room, H’s living room, and I’s living room.
▪ The radio station (D), however, is in a very different position. Every time it
broadcasts a signal containing the song, it is publicly performing both the
composition and the sound recording. The relevant definition of public is, of
course, the Transmit Clause, specifically this part of the clause: “to transmit a
performance of the work to the public, even if the members of the public capable
of receiving the performance receive it in separate places or at different times.”
The result is that, even if all of the station’s listeners are home alone in their living
rooms, the transmission of the signal to them is still public.
▪ The same is true of the transmission by the cable company (G). This may not be
altogether obvious to you, but soon I’ll return to the special legal status of cable
companies.
▪ What about the performance in the restaurant (F)? That’s not a transmission, so
the Transmit Clause is not relevant, but the other definition of public, the so-
called Public Space Clause, applies. What if there’s only one patron eating dinner
when the song is played, or indeed no customers at all? Doesn’t matter. So long as
the restaurant is open to the public, the performance is public.
The third and last step is to survey the public performances we’ve identified and
determine if there any grounds for exempting them from the reach of the statute. There are
several possible exemptions, one of which you already know. If the work performed is a sound
recording and if the way in which it is performed is not a digital audio transmission, then it’s not
covered by either 106(4) or 106(6). So, all of these performances escape, either because they are
analog or they are not transmissions:

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 ▪ D’s performance of the SR to E
▪ D’s performance of the SR to F
▪ F’s performance of the SR
For the time being, anyway, the rest do not.
This concludes our survey of the basics. Now let’s consider some refinements. Focus on
the upper right-hand corner of the diagram. You’ll recall that the way in which the music got into
E’s ears is that singer A sang the composition, record company B recorded A’s rendition, radio
section D played the record and broadcast the signal over the airwaves. E’s radio, located in her
living room, picked up that signal and converted it into sound waves. If E listens to the music
while alone in her living room, the two performances that occur at E are surely not public. Now
let’s alter the facts slightly. Suppose that E’s dining room is adjacent to her living room. She has
a dinner party in the dining room, and the invitees are able to hear the music coming out of the
radio. Is that a public performance? The answer is no. The guests are social acquaintances
gathered together in a room that’s not open to the public.
Suppose that E is a professor. She invites the students in one of her seminars to her house
for dinner. The radio is playing in the background. Is that a public performance? This is closer to
the line. The answer is still probably no, but an argument might be made that E’s home is now
“a place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its
social acquaintances is gathered.”
Change the facts once again. The personnel are the same, but instead of hosting her
students in her house, E holds a party in a semi-separate room of a restaurant. The radio in the
room plays A’s rendition. Is that a public performance? Yes. The restaurant is a place that’s open
to the public, and therefore, under the first of the two clauses, would clearly be considered
public.
Now suppose that E takes her radio to a public park at 5 o’clock in the morning, tunes it to
the D station, and listens to it while doing some exercises. The park is otherwise empty, so no
one but E hears the radio. Is that a public performance? Strictly speaking, yes, because the place
is open to the public, even though she’s the only listener. The chances of copyright owners
pursuing her for infringement are tiny, but at least technically that’s a public performance. It’s
still possible that it may nevertheless be excused by one of the exceptions we’ll consider later in
this lecture, but E is at least presumptively in trouble.
For the past few minutes, we’ve been considering possible applications of the first and
more intuitive of the definitions of public, the Public Place Clause. The more serious and
economically important puzzles in this area arise under the second branch, the so-called
Transmit Clause. Here are three illustrative cases.
The first is Redhorn, one of the old chestnuts of copyright law. It involved a very early
application of VCR technology. The defendant operated a somewhat shady operation that
rented VHS tapes but also provided small, carpeted rooms in the back of the facility where you
could have a VHS tape played. Here’s how the system worked. The customer would walk into the
front of the store, where he’d see many tapes displayed. He’d select one. The attendant would

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place it into a VCR and activate it. The customer would retire to a room in the back, where he
alone, or with a companion or two, would watch it. The court of appeals ruled that this system
entailed public performances of the audiovisual works on the VHS tapes for two independent
reasons. First, because the facility is open to the public. This again is a bit counterintuitive. After
all, it’s only open to a couple of members of the public at a given time. But as a whole, it’s open
to the public and that’s enough to render the performances public under clause number 1. The
second reason is more interesting for our purposes. The performances are also public because
they involve transmissions. Short transmissions, to be sure, presumably from the front desk to
the room in the back, but transmissions nevertheless, and members of the public are capable of
receiving those transmissions in the same place or separate places at different times. The court
didn’t spell this out in great detail, but its analysis seems to be that a given audiovisual work is
shown to successive customers or groups of customers in the same room at different times
through the same transmission facility. That’s enough to make it public and to make the
proprietor liable for some $44,000.
The second case is the important recent decision in Cablevision, one aspect of which I
discussed in the previous lecture. The essential facts are depicted in Figure 83. As you’ll recall,
the owners of the copyrights in the works that would be stored and then replayed by Cablevision
challenged this technology on three grounds. A, that the brief retention of slices of each work in
the BMR buffer constituted in the aggregate an unauthorized reproduction of the work. B, that
the more durable retention of a copy on the hard drive of the Arroyo server also violated 106(1).
And C, that the transmission from the Arroyo server to the customer, when the customer asks to
watch one of his saved programs, constitutes a public performance of the work. The trial court,
as we saw, accepted all three claims. But the court of appeals rejected all three. How did the
court of appeals reject the third argument? It might have done so by ruling that even if the
transmission involved a public performance, that transmission is initiated by the subscriber
when he presses the button on his remote control in his living room, not by Cablevision. But it
did not. The court assumed, for the sake of argument, that Cablevision is responsible for the
transmission. Nevertheless, it ruled that the transmission did not violate Section 106(4). Crucial
to this ruling are two facts – that the transmission is only delivered to one person at a time and
that each subscriber receives his transmission from the unique copy the work. If Cablevision
transmitted the work to multiple subscribers seriatim from the same copy, then in the court of
appeals’ judgment, this case would resemble Redhorn, which, as we saw, gave rise to liability.
But the fact that each subscriber received a transmission from his own personal copy made all
the difference. Here’s the crucial language from the opinion. “Because each RS DVR playback
transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced but that
subscriber, we conclude that such transmissions are not performances to the public and
therefore do not infringe any exclusive right of public performance.” This fact was also
emphasized by the solicitor general when advising the Supreme Court not to review the
decision.

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 As we saw in lecture number 7, the ruling in Cablevision catalyzed a great deal of
investment in cloud-based services – several billion dollars. However, the aspect of the court’s
ruling I just emphasized renders that investment less efficacious than it could be. Why? Because
constructing systems that store individual copies of works for individual subscribers is very
inefficient. The Cablevision ruling also catalyzed considerable innovation with respect to
technologies and business models in the entertainment industry. When those innovations have
been challenged by copyright owners, some have been held to be lawful, while others have been
ruled to run afoul of the owner’s rights. The most important of the innovations that came to
grief was the service briefly offered by Aereo, an ingenious but risky startup. To understand the
nature and novelty of the Aereo system, you need a bit of background.
For a long time, as you probably know, television stations have been broadcasting
entertainment and sports programming free over the public airwaves. This system has worked
well for consumers located in metropolitan areas with good television reception, but less well
for consumers in rural areas with poor reception. For several decades, the latter group of
consumers has overcome this impediment by subscribing to cable television services such as
Comcast in the United States. Among the many channels that cable companies typically carry are
over the air broadcasts that the cable systems pick up in major cities and then we redistribute
through their cables. Do the cable companies have to pay the owners of the copyrights in the
programs that they relay in this fashion? When cable systems were first introduced, the
Supreme Court answered no, on the grounds that the cable companies neither reproduced nor
publicly performed the programs. In 1976, Congress repudiated that position and in the process
adopted the expansive definition of public performance with which we’ve been wrestling. Since
then, the cable companies have been obliged to pay copyright owners whose programs they
retransmit, although the amount they pay is capped by a special compulsory license of the sort
I’ve mentioned before and we’ll consider again in the final segment of this lecture. Nowadays, a
growing group of consumers get access to audiovisual entertainment not through over the air
broadcasts or by subscribing to expensive cable systems, but through the internet. This
arrangement works fine if the programming they want is available either for free, from sites like
YouTube, or from various fee-based on-demand or subscription services now accessible through
the internet, but what if the programming they want to watch is broadcast over the airwaves by
television stations located in distant cities? Until recently, there was no convenient way for them
to gain access to that material. Enter Aereo, the third case.
For consumers of the sort I’ve just described, located in the New York metropolitan area,
Aereo set up a new subscription service. Here’s how it worked. Suppose, counterfactually, that I
live in Westchester County, I’m a fan of the New York Yankees baseball team, and I don’t
subscribe to cable TV. A subset of Yankees games are broadcast on WWOR, an over-the-air
television station based in northern New Jersey, which operates a broadcast tower on the top of
the Empire State Building. When I’m at home, I watch the broadcast for free, but I often travel
for work, and I want to watch the games when I’m on the road. For a fee of $12 per month,
Aereo would, at my request, pick up the broadcast of a particular game, convert it to packets,

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and stream those packets to me over the internet, enabling me to watch the game on my laptop
or tablet. Now if the way that Aereo picked up the program was by building and operating a
single big TV receiver on Long Island, then it would have been working very much like a cable
company and thus would have been obliged to pay fees to the owners of the copyrights in the
broadcast of the games. But it didn’t. Instead, Ariel obtained thousands of tiny TV antennas,
each the size of a dime, which it arranged in arrays. Then, when I asked to see a particular game,
Aereo would rent me one of those tiny, individual antennas and tune it to the free, over the air
broadcast. One more potentially important feature of Aereo’s system. The game would not be
shown to me live. Instead, like Cablevision, Aereo captured and recorded the live program. The
packet sent to me would be from that personal recording. However, the resultant lag time was
tiny, a few seconds. A different service offered by Aereo, not considered in the judicial opinion
that I’m about to describe, allowed subscribers like me to time-shift programs – for example, to
replay the recording of the game hours or days after it was first broadcast. But for the time
being, keep your focus on the nearly live broadcasts.
By now, it should be obvious that the reason why Aereo used this seemingly bizarre
technology was to make its system resemble, as closely as possible, the system created and
upheld in the Cablevision decision and thus to avoid having to pay for the material it was
supplying to its subscribers. At first it seemed that Aereo had succeeded. When copyright
owners challenged the system, the trial court ruled in favor of Aereo, relying heavily on the
Cablevision doctrine. So did the court of appeals for the Second Circuit, by a vote of 2 to 1. But
the Supreme Court granted certiorari and in July of 2014 reversed by a vote of 6 to 3. The basis
for the Supreme Court’s ruling, unfortunately, is not completely clear. Justice Breyer, writing for
the court, repeatedly stressed that Aereo’s business looked a lot like a cable television service,
which Congress had made clear both (a) performed programs they relayed, and (b) made those
performances to the public. But what about the aspect of the Aereo system that differentiated
from a cable system – namely, that each Aereo subscriber received an individual transmission
from an individual copy of the program at issue? Breyer’s answer, in brief, was that neither the
subscribers nor the owners of the copyrights in the programs cared about what was going on
under the hood, and so neither should the law. Breyer’s analysis is distilled in the sentence set
forth below.

[I]n light of the purpose and text of the [Transmit] Clause, we conclude that when an
entity communicates the same contemporaneously perceptible images and sounds to
multiple people, it transmits a performance to them regardless of the number of
discrete communications it makes.

This language is quite broad. Among other things, it seems to render irrelevant the factor
that the court of appeals treated as so important in Cablevision – namely, whether a
transmission is made to a single subscriber using a single unique copy produced by that

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subscriber. Does this then mean that RS DVR services are doomed? Some copyright owners and
commentators think so. My own view is no. Most RS DVR systems remain lawful in the United
States. The principal reason is that, although Justice Breyer did not expressly endorse the
Cablevision decision, he went out of this way to emphasize several limitations on the Supreme
Court’s ruling against Aereo. For example, Breyer stressed the fact that neither Aereo nor its
subscribers had paid for access to the programs that Aereo streamed. And Breyer strongly
suggested that the case would have come out differently otherwise. Here’s the crucial sentence:

[A]n entity that transmits a performance to individuals in their capacities as owners or

possessors does not perform to ‘the public,’ whereas an entity like Aereo that transmits
to large numbers of paying subscribers who lack any prior relationship to the works
does so perform.

This sentence, although not a model of clarity, would seem to leave a safe harbor for
cloud locker services and arguably for services like Cablevision that allow consumers who have
already paid for programming to watch those programs at later times or in different places.
Finally, Breyer pointedly emphasized “[T]he doctrine of ‘fair use’ can help to prevent
inappropriate or inequitable applications of the [Transmit] Clause.” The potentially expensive
safe harbor that might be built on that sentence will become apparent next week. Sadly, the net
effect of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Aereo is to reduce considerably the clarity that in the
wake of Cablevision stimulated so much investment in cloud-based technologies. For the next
few years, lower courts confronted with challenges to businesses that offer consumers new
kinds of streaming services will have to determine whether they are more like Cablevision or
more like Aereo. Until the dust settles, entrepreneurs and technology innovators will have some
trouble predicting what they can and cannot do.
An additional source of instability is the divergence between the United States and Europe
with respect to the permissibility of services of this general sort. As I hope you’ll call from the
first lecture in this series, one of the multilateral treaties to which the United States is a party is
the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996. Articles 6 and 8 of that treaty require member countries to
provide copyright owners a generous version of the right of distribution and a right of
communication to the public. Both provisions use the phrase “make available to the public,”
which arguably encompasses more activities than are reached by US law. Nevertheless, after the
treaty was ratified, the United States took the position that this language did not require any
adjustment in US law because sections 106(3) and 106(4), as construed by the US courts, already
adequately provided such a so-called make available right. That contention was dubious when it
was first made and has become more so over time. In Europe, as professor Jane Ginsburg of
Columbia Law School has shown, the right to make works available to the public is construed
more broadly than in the United States and in particular is less forgiving of cloud-based services
of the sorts we have been considering. The Information Society Directive of 2001, which

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implemented in the EU the WIPO Copyright Treaties, requires EU member states to “provide
authors with the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit any communication to the public of their
works by wire or wireless means, including the making available to the public of their works in
such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually
chosen by them.” In 2013, the European Court of Justice ruled that a British company called
TVCatchup, which had offered a service that resembled that provided by Aereo, violated this
particular entitlement. The ruling forced a redesign of TVCatchup, and that company is now in
financial trouble. Even more striking was the insistence by the European Commission that Italy
rescind a law that had granted partial immunity to an RS DVR service analogous to that offered
by Cablevision.
The United States is not likely in the near future to adopt the EU’s more restrictive
interpretation of the so-called make available right, but the gap between the US and the EU on
this score is not good for business. In particular, it’s likely to bedevil enterprises that seek to
provide novel cloud-based services not just to US customers but to users of the internet in other
countries. I’ve concentrated in this lecture entirely on section 106(4) and have paid no attention
to section 106(5), the right of public display. The reasons are that the bulk of the economic and
litigation action involves performances, not displays, and that the definition of display is clearer
and more intuitive than that of performance. The statute defines “display”, pretty much the way
you’d expect, as to show a copy of the work either directly or by means of a film, slide, television
image, or other device or process, or in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
to show the individual images nonsequentially. That definition creates few interpretive
difficulties with respect to real space displays. Now recently, information technology, such as the
practice of framing websites, has generated some interesting interpretive problems, but I’ll leave
such matters to the discussions that will accompany this lecture.

8.3. Exceptions & Limitations

In this segment, I’ll examine statutory exceptions to and limitations upon copyright owners’
rights of public performance and display. For this purpose, we’ll be returning once again to the
mind map of copyright law.
The first thing to notice is that the exceptions are embodied Exceptions
in a long, itemized list. The general strategy underlying this list ▪ Classroom
contrasts very sharply with the strategy underlying the more ▪ Distance learning
famous fair use doctrine, which we’ll be considering next week. The
▪ Religion
basic idea underlying fair use, as you’ll see, is that we use general,
▪ Nonprofit
open-ended standards to confer upon courts a great deal of
discretion to decide on an ad hoc basis whether a particular, ▪ Homestyle
unauthorized activity by a defendant should be excused as fair. By ▪ FMLA
contrast, the list of exceptions to the public performance right are, ▪ Some webcasts
or at least appear to be, quite precise. As we’ll see, this approach ▪ Real-space displays
resembles more closely the European style of exceptions and

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limitations than it does the US fair use approach. So, let’s run down the list.

17 USC § 110

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of
copyright:

(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-

face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar
place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual
work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy
that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the
performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;

(2) except with respect to a work produced or marketed primarily for performance or
display as part of mediated instructional activities transmitted via digital networks, or a
performance or display that is given by means of a copy or phonorecord that is not
lawfully made and acquired under this title, and the transmitting government body or
accredited nonprofit educational institution knew or had reason to believe was not
lawfully made and acquired, the performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work
or reasonable and limited portions of any other work, or display of a work in an amount
comparable to that which is typically displayed in the course of a live classroom session,
by or in the course of a transmission, if—

(A) the performance or display is made by, at the direction of, or under the actual
supervision of an instructor as an integral part of a class session offered as a regular
part of the systematic mediated instructional activities of a governmental body or an
accredited nonprofit educational institution;

(B) the performance or display is directly related and of material assistance to the
teaching content of the transmission;

I the transmission is made solely for, and, to the extent technologically feasible, the
reception of such transmission is limited to—

(i) students officially enrolled in the course for which the transmission is made; or

(ii) officers or employees of governmental bodies as a part of their official duties or

employment; and

(D) the transmitting body or institution—

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 (i) institutes policies regarding copyright, provides informational materials to faculty,
students, and relevant staff members that accurately describe, and promote
compliance with, the laws of the United States relating to copyright, and provides
notice to students that materials used in connection with the course may be subject to
copyright protection; and

(ii) in the case of digital transmissions—

(1) applies technological measures that reasonably prevent—

(aa) retention of the work in accessible form by recipients of the transmission from the
transmitting body or institution for longer than the class session; and

(bb) unauthorized further dissemination of the work in accessible form by such

recipients to others; and

(II) does not engage in conduct that could reasonably be expected to interfere with
technological measures used by copyright owners to prevent such retention or
unauthorized further dissemination;

One of the more straightforward exceptions is section 110(1). That provision permits in a
classroom a public performance or display that would otherwise violates Section 106(4) or
106(5) as long as it’s done live, and as long as the copy of the work in question was prepared
lawfully. This means that when I present audiovisual works in the course of outlining case
studies in my classroom, I’m on safe ground, so as long as the material I show was prepared
lawfully. A closely related provision is 110(2), also known as the Teach Act, which deals with
distance learning. It’s a very good idea to have a statutory provision that creates a safe harbor
for distance learning. Unfortunately, in practice this particular provision is almost completely
ineffective. The first thing you notice about 110(2) is that it’s extremely complicated, contrasting
sharply with the simplicity of 110(1). The portions underlined impose upon a defendant who
seeks to invoke this provision many quite detailed obligations. Most importantly, 110(2) is only
applicable to formal instruction of enrolled students. That’s it’s inapplicable to the copies of
these recorded lectures that I make available to the public. It’s also limited to streaming of
materials. If a teacher wishes to invoke this provision, he cannot make copies of any of those
materials available for downloading, nor can he stream copyrighted materials in a way that
enables students to copy them. Again, this restriction renders the provision useless for the kind
of instruction I’m trying to do in this course. Next, the provision is limited to materials that are
not designed for distance education. In other words, the copyrighted works at issue have to have
been designed for some other purpose and then adapted to distance education. A teacher must
accompany those materials with instructions about copyright law. This may not be a problem in
this course, which happens to be about copyright law, but it’s a burden with respect to most
other courses. Finally, the teacher must adopt technologies to prevent the recipients from

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saving the materials to which they are given access. These restrictions, when you add them all
up, are sufficiently burdensome that very few distance learning enterprises rely on 110(2). To
the extent that its purpose was to facilitate distance education, it’s widely considered to have
been a failure. Now, it likely occurs to you to ask how then does Fisher get away with including
some copyrighted materials in his recorded lectures? The answer is that some are licensed. But
for the most part, I rely on the fair use doctrine. Next week, you’ll be in a position to judge
whether my invocation of fair use is persuasive.

17 USC § 110

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of
copyright:

(1) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work or of a dramatico-musical

work of a religious nature, or display of a work, in the course of services at a place
of worship or other religious assembly;

Section 110(3) is much simpler than 110(2). It deals with public performances of religious
works in the course of services. It’s not obvious that this exception advances social welfare.
Putting aside the constraints imposed by the clauses in the US Constitution pertaining to the
establishment and free exercise of religion, and just doing the provisioning from a policy angle,
the result of 110(3) is to make it a lot easier for churches and other religious establishments to
operate. But it also means that the creators of religious materials, specifically non-dramatic,
literary musical works, don’t get paid as much insofar as often the principal value of their
creations is through performances. Perhaps the premise is that religious composers are
motivated by non-monetary incentives, and thus we don’t need to compensate them in order to
stimulate their work? Not clear.

17 USC § 110

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of
copyright:

(4) performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work otherwise than in a

transmission to the public, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial
advantage and without payment of any fee or other compensation for the performance
to any of its performers, promoters, or organizers, if—

(A) there is no direct or indirect admission charge; or

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 (B) the proceeds, after deducting the reasonable costs of producing the performance,
are used exclusively for educational, religious, or charitable purposes and not for
private financial gain, except where the copyright owner has served notice of objection
to the performance under the following conditions:

(i) the notice shall be in writing and signed by the copyright owner or such owner’s duly
authorized agent; and

(ii) the notice shall be served on the person responsible for the performance at least
seven days before the date of the performance, and shall state the reasons for the
objection; and

(iii) the notice shall comply, in form, content, and manner of service, with requirements
that the Register of Copyrights shall prescribe by regulation;

Section 110(4) is the so-called nonprofit exception. This one is often neglected, but it’s
actually very important. As you can see, it privileges live performances of a non-dramatic literary
or musical work without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage. Restaurant
waiters, for example, sometimes sing Happy Birthday to patrons. That’s not copyright
infringement as long as there’s no direct or indirect commercial advantage. If the restaurant or
the waiters charge the friends of the birthday boy or girl, they would not be shielded by this
provision, but as long as there’s no independent charge for the performance, they’re probably
on safe ground. Some years ago there was a big controversy that implicated this particular
provision. ASCAP is one of the organizations in the United States that issues blanket licenses,
blanket performance licenses, to many organizations allowing them to publicly perform musical
works. Foolishly, ASCAP apparently decided to seek license fees from the Girl Scouts in return for
permitting the Scouts to sing songs around their campfires. This was a public relations disaster
for ASCAP. The Wall Street Journal wrote a scathing article about it. And in the end, ASCAP
backed down and now grants the Girl Scouts public performance rights for a nominal fee. How
did ASCAP get itself in this position in the first place? In particular, doesn’t 110(4) permit the
Scouts to perform the songs without getting a license? It’s not entirely clear, but the answer
seems to be the Girl Scout camps that the ASCAP threatened with liability were charging for
access to them. That made 110(4) inapplicable.

17 USC § 110

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of
copyright:

(5)

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 (A) except as provided in subparagraph (B), communication of a transmission
embodying a performance or display of a work by the public reception of the
transmission on a single receiving apparatus of a kind commonly used in private
homes, unless—

(i) a direct charge is made to see or hear the transmission; or

(ii) the transmission thus received is further transmitted to the public;

(B) communication by an establishment of a transmission or retransmission embodying

a performance or display of a nondramatic musical work intended to be received by the
general public, originated by a radio or television broadcast station licensed as such by
the Federal Communications Commission, or, if an audiovisual transmission, by a cable
system or satellite carrier, if—

(i) in the case of an establishment other than a food service or drinking establishment,
either the establishment in which the communication occurs has less than 2,000 gross
square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other
purpose), or the establishment in which the communication occurs has 2,000 or more
gross square feet of space (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other
purpose) and—

(I) if the performance is by audio means only, the performance is communicated by

means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4
loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space; or

(II) if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the
performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4
audiovisual devices, of which not more than 1 audiovisual device is located in any 1
room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches,
and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a
total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are
located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

(ii) in the case of a food service or drinking establishment, either the establishment in
which the communication occurs has less than 3,750 gross square feet of space
(excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose), or the
establishment in which the communication occurs has 3,750 gross square feet of space
or more (excluding space used for customer parking and for no other purpose) and—

(1) if the performance is by audio means only, the performance is communicated by

means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4
loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space; or

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 (II) if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the
performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4
audiovisual devices, of which not more than one audiovisual device is located in any 1
room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches,
and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a
total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are
located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

(iii) no direct charge is made to see or hear the transmission or retransmission;

(iv) the transmission or retransmission is not further transmitted beyond the

establishment where it is received; and

(v) the transmission or retransmission is licensed by the copyright owner of the work so
publicly performed or displayed;

Now, we get to two related exceptions – the so-called home-style exception and the
FMLA, which is an abbreviation for Fairness in Music Licensing Act. The home-style exception
embodied in Section 110(5)(B) is, as its informal name suggests, a privilege for publicly
performing copyrighted works using the kind of apparatus that you would ordinarily find in a
home. That’s a little vague, and it’s changing as technology evolves, but the rough idea is that if
the gizmo you used perform a work is the kind of tuner plus speakers that you would ordinarily
have in your living room, then it’s OK. The standard is vague and not often litigated, but there it
is. As I trust you see, this exception operates to shield some of the performances we were
worried about in the previous segment of this lecture. Unfortunately, it’s not broad enough to
shield stores and restaurants who want to play music to entertain their customers, but need to
deploy apparatuses bigger than you would find in an ordinary home. So, organizations
representing restaurants and stores sought and obtained 110(5)(B) commonly known as the
Fairness in Music Licensing Act. This one is extremely complex. You can read the details at your
leisure. The operators of bars, restaurants, and retailers when deciding how big an operation to
set up and how to outfit it, pay lot of attention to the details here. If they’re able to stay under
these statutory ceilings, they can escape altogether an obligation to pay copyright owners,
particularly ASCAP, any licensing fees. An alarm bell should be going off now. You’ll recall that
the Berne Convention requires member countries to grant certain substantive rights and limits
their ability to carve exceptions out those rights. The TRIPS Agreement, discussed in lecture
number one, incorporates and extends those requirements and creates a mechanism for
punishing WTO countries that fail to abide by them. May the US without running afoul of those
agreements carve out of the performance right an exception this broad? The European Union
thought no and brought a dispute resolution proceeding against the US concerning the FMLA
and won. In other words, the US, in this respect, was deemed to be in violation of TRIPS. So, did
the US Congress amended the statute? Surprisingly, no. Instead, the US responded by submitting

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this dispute to binding arbitration which resulted in a monetary judgment. The result was that
the United States has to pay the EU a fee and continues to do so, over a million a year, to
compensate for the injuries that EU copyright owners incur because of this exemption.

17 USC § 109

I Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(5), the owner of a particular copy

lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled,
without the authority of the copyright owner, to display that copy publicly, either
directly or by the projection of no more than one image at a time, to viewers present at
the place where the copy is located.

(d) The privileges prescribed by subsections (a) and (c) do not, unless authorized by the
copyright owner, extend to any person who has acquired possession of the copy or
phonorecord from the copyright owner, by rental, lease, loan, or otherwise, without
acquiring ownership of it.

The last of the exceptions we’re going to deal with in this lecture concerns not public
performances, but public displays. This exemption is contained not in section 110, which has
occupied us until this point, but in section 109. As we can see here, 109I provides
notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(5). That’s the public display right. The owner of a
particular copy lawfully made under this title to display that work publicly is not violated if he
shows it to viewers present at the place where the copy is located. The upshot is that you can
hang a painting on the wall of your living room, and you can host a wedding reception or a
garden tour in your house, enabling lots of strangers to see the painting without infringing the
painter’s copyright. As you can see, this is a major exception and helps to relieve the otherwise
quite surprising reach of 106(5).
For the past several minutes, we have been examining types of performances that the law
excuses outright. In other words, we’ve been studying statutory provisions that give people an
unqualified privilege to engage in particular sorts of performances and displays without
permission and without paying the copyright owners anything. We turn finally to a set of
provisions that permit people to engage in particular sorts of performances without permission,
but require them to pay the copyright owner’s fees that are set in some way by the government.
As you know now, such provisions are known as compulsory licenses. From the standpoint of the
copyright owners, these provisions are not great because they deprive the owners of the
capacity to control uses of their works and, typically, though not invariably, force them to accept
license fees that are lower than the copyright owners given their druthers would demand. But
from the standpoint of the owners, such provisions are much better than the exceptions we’ve
just finished surveying because the owners are at least paid something.

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 There are five main compulsory licenses. These provisions Compulsory licenses
give qualified privileges to public broadcasting organizations, 1. Public broadcasting
some types of webcasts engaged in digital audio transmissions,
system
re-transmissions by cable systems and satellites, and jukeboxes.
2. Some webcasts
The ways in which the compulsory fees are set are complex and
vary considerably across these provisions. Businesses that 3. Cable retransmissions
depend on these compulsory licenses for revenue or freedom to 4. Satellite retransmissions
operate, of course, pay a great deal of attention to the details of 5. Jukeboxes
the regimes, but I will not do so here. Instead, I will concentrate
on the general, normative question posed by all such compulsory licenses. What might justify
using this technique? The question is difficult and important because you can readily see reasons
why governments should not use this technique. As I mentioned, it deprives owners of control.
They must acquiesce in uses of their works that they might hate. You will recall from lecture
number two that scholars like Rob Merges sharply criticize compulsory licenses on this basis. In
addition, the processes by which most of the compulsory rates are set and collected are
expensive and cumbersome. The advocates of compulsory licenses bear the burden of
establishing that despite these drawbacks, compulsory licenses make sense. How might they do
so? Defenders of compulsory licenses commonly make four arguments. I’ll describe them, note
the principal rebuttals to these arguments, and let you weigh the competing claims.
The first argument is the compulsory licenses facilitate socially beneficial uses of
copyrighted materials that otherwise would be frustrated by high transaction costs. It would be
prohibitively costly, so the argument goes, for jukebox operators, say, to negotiate licenses with
the owners of the copyrights in all the songs and sound recordings they want to perform. The
result is that were it not for compulsory licenses, we would have no jukeboxes. The retort is that
transaction costs are not as high as the story suggests. And information technology is causing
them to decline. So, it is said, compulsory licenses are outmoded.
The second argument is that inequality in the bargaining power of the copyright owners,
on one hand, and these particular types of users on the other, would enable the owners in an
uncontrolled market to extract excessive license fees from the users. Excessive either in the
sense of being exploitative and unfair, or in the sense of being much higher than is necessary to
motivate the owners’ creativity and, thus, socially wasteful. Skeptics suggest that the
beneficiaries of most of these compulsory licenses are far from being powerless.
The third argument is that the ratio of socially beneficial incentives to corresponding social
losses is higher with respect to compulsory licenses than with respect to freely-negotiated
licenses. We touched on this argument briefly in lecture number four. Here’s a brief review.
Copyright law, seen through the eyes of an economist, is a device that shields an innovator from
competition in sales of copies of his creation. At least if there are no close substitutes for his
innovation, this shield enables the innovator to set the price for access to those copies well
above the marginal cost of producing them. The resultant monopoly profits, represented by the
blue zone in this now familiar simplified graph (Figure 104, left), provide an incentive for

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 Figure 104: The economic effects of a copyright vs that of a compulsory licensing system

innovators to produce their creations in the first instance. An unfortunate side effect of the
strategy is that some potential consumers are priced out of the market for copies of the
creation, giving rise to a welfare loss represented by the red zone. That’s regrettable, but we
accept those social costs in order to offer creators sufficiently large carrots to induce them to
make things we need or enjoy. If administered sensibly, compulsory licenses, it is argued, enable
us to improve on the system. Compulsory licenses force copyright owners to accept fees lower
than they would otherwise demand. That, of course, reduces their profits, but the loss is
partially offset by an increase in output. The result is that the blue zone in this picture (Figure
104, right) is smaller than the blue zone in the preceding picture, but not by an enormous
amount. Conversely, as you can readily see when the images are juxtaposed, the imposition of a
compulsory license sharply reduces the concomitant dead-weight loss. The ratio between
incentives and losses associated with uncontrolled licensing markets on the left is lower than the
ratio between incentives and losses associated with controlled markets on the right. Opponents
contend that the administrative costs associated with the system on the right will exceed the
cost savings it enables.
The last of the four arguments is the simplest. Compulsory licenses are sometimes
necessary, it is said, to enable socially-beneficial activities to flourish. This is a hard argument to
make with respect cable re-transmissions, but perhaps easier with respect to public
broadcasting systems. The argument can be expressed in the language of economics. Public
broadcasting has strong positive externalities that the stations are unable to capture, so we
need to reduce its costs if it is to survive. Or the same argument can be expressed in more moral
terms. Public broadcasting helps educate the citizenry, generating a more informed, responsible,
and tolerant electorate. For that reason, we should and do place a thumb on its side of the scale.
You decide who’s right.

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FAIR USE

9.1. The History of Fair Use

In the seventh and eighth lectures, I described the four economic rights enjoyed by the copyright
owner, the rights of reproduction, modification, distribution, and public performance. Along the
way, I identified several specific exceptions and limitations, each of which narrows the reach of
one of those four economic rights. In addition to the specific exceptions that we considered
there, there are in the United States two general limitations on copyright entitlements – in other
words, limitations that are applicable to all four of the economic rights. These are the doctrines
of fair use and copyright misuse. Of the two, fair use is by far the more important, so I will
concentrate exclusively on it in this lecture. If you’re curious about copyright misuse, you can, of
course, explore on your own the pertinent branch of the map of copyright law that accompanies
this lecture. Here’s how my presentation will be organized.
In the first segment of the lecture, I will describe the history of the fair use doctrine in the
United States. In the second segment, I will describe the shape of the fair use doctrine today,
illustrating my analysis with examples drawn from several modern cases. In the third and final
segment, I will describe how some countries other than the United States attempt to deal with
the issues that in this country are addressed using fair use. My hope is that, by the end, you’ll
not only have a sense of how the fair use doctrine works, but also its merits and demerits, and
how it stacks up against alternative approaches employed by other countries.
The seeds of what would become the fair use doctrine in the United States were planted
in English law beginning in the mid-18th century. Then, in the case of Folsom vs. Marsh, just a
story relied in part on the English precedents to hold that some activities inconsistent with the
US federal copyright statute nevertheless constituted “fair and bona fide abridgments” or
“justifiable uses,” and therefore did not give rise to liability. The language in which just his story
purported to distill English cases was to prove, as we’ll see, influential. Here’s how he put it.

In deciding whether to excuse a particular use, one should look to the nature and
objects of the selections made, the quantity and value of the materials used, and the

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 degree in which the use may prejudice the sale, or diminish the profits, or supersede the
objects of the original work.

In several other US cases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, federal courts followed
Folsom in excusing as fair various activities that appeared to run afoul of the copyright statute.
In these early decisions, the question of what constituted a fair use was not crisply differentiated
from the issue of whether the defendant’s behavior abridged the plaintiff’s exclusive rights. But
by the middle of the 20th century, courts in the US had begun consistently to refer to the concept
of Fair Use as a distinct legal issue. Specifically, as an affirmative defense excusing otherwise
unlawful conduct.
For most of its history, fair use was an entirely judge-made doctrine. That changed in 1976
when Congress revamped the copyright statute, it acknowledged and approved the line of
judicial decisions that had created fair use, and Congress codified those decisions in Section 107
of the reconstructed copyright statute. When codifying fair use however, Congress made
explicit, but it did not intend to “freeze” the doctrine, but rather expected it to continue to
evolve particularly in order to accommodate “rapid technological change.” The text of Section
107 is set forth below.

17 USC § 107

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted
work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other
means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news
reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or
research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a
work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such
finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

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 As you can see it has three parts. The first maybe thought of as a general introduction. The
most important words in this portion of the provision are the first eight. As you can see, they
make clear that Section 107 qualifies all of the exclusive rights enjoyed by a copyright owner,
including the Visual Artists Rights Act, which is embodied in Section 106a.
The middle portion of this introductory paragraph appears also to be important because it
seems to identify a set of activities that are especially eligible for treatment as fair uses. As we
will see, however, the courts have not given this list of illustrative activities much weight. The
heart of Section 107 to which the courts have given a great deal of weight is the middle portion
(“In determining whether the use …”). Several dimensions of this paragraph merit emphasis.
Most importantly, fair use, as you can see, is an ad hoc case specific doctrine. It is applied on a
case by case basis by considering the four numbered factors. No one of these factors is
determinative, nor is the list of factors exhaustive as one can tell by the use of the verb shall
include.
The third segment of Section 107 can be thought of as a coda. “The fact of the work is
unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such findings made upon consideration of
all of the above factors.” This provision was added later. Its purpose was to repudiate some
decisions by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that had sharply limited the availability
of the fair use doctrine for biographers who quoted in their works, unpublished letters, diaries,
and so forth. The coda does not grant the biographers an unqualified privilege to use such
things, but it reduces the height of the hurdle that biographers must clear.
Since the adoption of Section 107, the fair use doctrine has been construed and applied
four times by the United States Supreme Court. In three of those four cases, the court’s analysis
was elaborate. In the remaining portion of this segment of the lecture, I’ll describe the three
major cases, the way in which the Supreme Court resolved them, and how, as a result, the fair
use doctrine has evolved.
The first of the three decisions was Sony Corporation vs. Universal City Studios – popularly
known as the Betamax case. Here’s some background. The chart set forth in Figure 22 should by
now be familiar to you. It describes the legal relationships and business models and gives shape
to the film industry in the United States. In the 1970s, a significant portion of the revenues upon
which the film studios depended came license fees the studios derived from television networks.
Those fees were generated as follows. You’ll recall from the preceding lecture that the US film
studios traditionally relied on a so-called windowing system to maximize revenue they were able
to extract from a heterogeneous group of customers. We’re concerned here with the seventh of
the eight traditional windows (refer to Figure 97 on page 186). Roughly two years after a film
was first released in US theaters, the studio would typically license it to a television network. The
network would remove material inappropriate for general audiences, and divide the film into
roughly 10 minute segments inserting advertisements in between those segments. This
composite would then be broadcast to the network’s viewers. The viewers would not pay either
the networks or the studios directly. Instead, they would purchase, or so it was thought, more of
the products that were advertised in the course of the film. The advertisers paid a portion of

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their increased revenue to the television networks in the form of advertising fees, and the
networks in turn paid a portion of those fees to the studios thus closing the loop. This system
has been running well for several decades.
Then in the late 1970s, the Sony Corporation disrupted it by offering consumers, for the
first time, affordable and convenient videocassette recorders known as VCRs. Sony sold these
machines to a rapidly growing set of consumers receiving in return substantial revenue. I know
because I bought one in 1983 and it wasn’t cheap. One of the functions of these recorders was
to enable consumers to make copies of the films broadcast by the television networks. Now you
might think that this development would please the networks and the studios because the
markets for their shows and films would grow, but the studios, as it turned out, were more
worried about the likelihood that viewers would use their new VCRs to avoid watching the
embedded advertisements. The simple way of doing this was by fast forwarding through those
advertisements during the playback of the tapes – a technique still commonly employed by
viewers using more modern technologies. A more complex way of avoiding the advertisements
was to designate a member of the family to watch a program when it was broadcast live, and to
pause the recording whenever advertisements appeared, thus enabling the other members of
the family to watch the tape later to avoid seeing the advertisements altogether. Advertisers
fearing this effect threatened to reduce the fees they paid the networks. The networks in turn
threatened to reduce the license fees they paid the studios.
Two of the studios, Disney and Universal, decided to try to stop this threat. How? In
theory, they could have pursued individual VCR users for copyright infringement. As you know
by now, making a verbatim copy of an audio-visual work violates Section 106.1 of the statute.
That’s what the viewers were doing with their new machines. So, the studios could have brought
infringement suits against the viewers. They did not for two reasons. First, there were too many
viewers to make this strategy effective. Individual lawsuits would have been hopelessly
impractical. Second, the studios did not wish to alienate their customers. So instead, they
brought an infringement action against Sony, the manufacturer of the machines that made this
conduct possible. Now Sony was not making any copies of any film, So the studios were unable
to assert that Sony was itself violating section 106.1 of the statute. Instead, the studios asserted
that Sony was engaged in contributory copyright infringement by facilitating and encouraging
the unlawful behavior of the viewers.
The lawsuit percolated slowly up through the courts. The trial court found in favor of
Sony. The ninth circuit reversed. And finally, in 1984, the United States Supreme Court decided,
by a vote of five to four, with Sony, ruling that it had not engaged in contributory copyright
infringement. The court’s ruling depended upon two nested propositions. First, the manufacture
of a device that can be used to violate the copyright laws is liable for contributory infringement
only if that device is not “capable of substantial noninfringing uses.” Second, timeshifting
copyrighted programs is a fair use. The first of these two propositions has had a major effect on
the law governing the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement. We will return to this
aspect of the Betamax case when we examine contributory infringement doctrine in the 11th

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lecture in the series. For now, our focus is on the
second of the propositions. Here’s a bit more
detail concerning its underpinnings.
The majority of The Supreme Court
pointed out that VCRs are commonly used for
two quite different purposes. First, they’re
sometimes used for “librarying”, a term the
courts invented to describe taping broadcast
television shows or films with an expectation of
retaining the tapes and using them to replay the
shows or films repeatedly. That activity is tacitly
promoted by the advertisement in Figure 105.
Second, VCRs are even more often employed to
tape shows or films that are broadcast at a time
inconvenient for the viewer, enabling the viewer
to watch them once at a later time, whereupon
the tapes are erased. The latter function,
Figure 105: An advert for Sony Betamax tape storage
promoted by this advertisement, the court cabinets
described as “timeshifting”. Because time
shifting is a common use of the machines, if it were lawful, Sony could escape liability under the
first of the two holdings. The court decided that timeshifting was indeed lawful because it
qualified as a fair use under Section 107 of the statute, and therefore, Sony was home free. To
support its judgment on this issue, the court surveyed the four statutory fair use factors. With
respect to the first factor, the court emphasized the fact that the behavior of the VCR users was
in the court’s judgment noncommercial in character. Here’s how Justice Stevens writing for the
court put the point.

Although not conclusive, the first factor requires that the commercial or nonprofit
character of an activity be weighed in any fair use decision. If the Betamax were used
to make copies for a commercial or profit making purpose, such use would be
presumptively unfair. The contrary presumption is appropriate here, however, because
the district court’s findings plainly establish that timeshifting for private home use must
be characterized as a noncommercial, nonprofit activity.

Interestingly, Stevens did not mention in his opinion the second statutory factor – the
nature of the copyrighted work, so we’ll leave that box blank. The third factor – the amount of
copying – would seem to disfavor of finding a fair use, insofar as the VCR users were making
verbatim copies of entire shows or films. “Nevertheless, the court ruled that in light of the fact
that “timeshifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to

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witness in its entirety free of charge,” the fact that the entire work is reproduced does not have
its ordinary effect of militating against the finding of fair use. The court thus implied that this
third factor was neutral. The decisive factor in the court’s judgment was the fourth – the
magnitude of the adverse impact upon the potential market for the studio’s films. In the court’s
judgment, the noncommercial character of the viewer’s activities cast the burden of proof with
respect to this factor upon the studios. Here’s how it put the point.

A challenge to a noncommercial use of a copyrighted work requires proof either that

the particular use is harmful. Or that, if it should become widespread, it would
adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work. Actual present harm
need not be shown, nor is it necessary to show as certainty that future harm will result.
What is necessary is that showing by preponderance of the evidence that some
meaningful likelihood of future harm exists.

In the court’s view, the record in the case – which had been created in 1978 – failed to
establish a likelihood of economic injury to the studios. Accordingly, the court ruled that the
fourth factor inclined in favor of a finding of fair use. Finally, the court pointed to a variable not
included in the statutory list of factors. “The district court’s conclusions are buttressed by the
fact that to the extent time shifting expands public access to freely broadcast television
programs, it yields societal benefits.” Taking all these variables into account, the Supreme Court
affirmed the district court’s judgment that timeshifting should be considered fair.
Justice Blackmun wrote a dissent in the case, which was joined by three other justices.
Blackmun disagreed with the majority of the justices on two main points. First, drawing on the
Ninth Circuit’s opinion, he differentiated what he called ordinary and productive uses of
copyrighted materials. Suggesting that the latter – meaning productive uses – are more likely to
qualify as fair than the former. Here’s how Blackmun made his argument.

The situations in which fair use is most commonly recognized are listed in section 107
itself. Fair use may be found when a work is used “for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching, … scholarship, or research.” … Each of these uses
reflects a common theme. Each is a productive use resulting in some added benefit to
the public beyond that produced by the first author’s work. The fair use doctrine, in
other words, permits works to be used for “socially laudable purposes”. I am aware of
no case in which the reproduction of a copyrighted work for the sole benefit of the user
has been held to be fair use.

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 Second, Blackmun interpreted the fourth statutory factor more expansively than did the
majority. Specifically, Blackmun emphasized the adjective potential in the statute. Here’s how he
interpreted that word.

The requirement that a putatively infringing use of the copyrighted work, to be “fair,”
must not impair a “potential” market for that work has two implications. First, and
infringer cannot prevail merely by demonstrating that the copyright holder suffered no
net harm from the infringer’s action. Indeed, even the showing that the infringement
has resulted it in a net benefit to the copyright holder will not suffice. Rather, the
infringer must demonstrate that he had not impaired the copyright holder’s ability to
demand compensation from (or to deny access to) any group who would otherwise be
willing to pay to see or hear the copyrighted work. Second, the fact that a given market
for a copyrighted work would not be available to the copyright holder were it not for
the infringer’s activities does not permit infringer to exploit that market without
compensating the copyright holder.

Applying this definition of potential market to the facts of the case, Blackmun concluded
that the needle tilted toward the studios. And so far as a finding of fair use, we deprive them of
access to the “market consisting of those persons who find it impossible or inconvenient to
watch the programs at the time they are broadcast, and who wish to watch them at other times.
These persons are willing to pay for the privilege of watching the copyrighted work at their
convenience as is evidenced by the fact that they are willing to pay for VCRs and tapes.
Undoubtedly, most also would be willing to pay some kind of loyalty to copyright holders. The
studios correctly argue that they’ve been deprived of the ability to exploit this sizable market.”
The majority of the justices, as you’ve seen, were unconvinced.
In the many briefs filed with the Supreme Court – and in associated congressional
testimony which was being conducted at more or less the same time – the studios and their
allies predicted dire consequences if Sony escaped liability. Most lurid was a statement by Jack
Valenti, the president of the MPAA whom you encountered in lecture number six. Valenti
famously declared, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the
Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” As it turned out, the result of the court’s
decision was not so dire. Indeed, the film industry seems to have benefited from the machines.
Box office revenues did not seem to suffer. Even more dramatically, the widespread distribution
of VCRs made possible the emergence of a new and even more lucrative market consisting of
home video rentals and purchases.
While the courts were dealing with the Betamax case, a second major dispute implicating
the fair use doctrine was brewing. The facts were very different. In the late 1970s, former
President Gerald Ford with a substantial assistance of a ghost writer wrote an autobiography. He
assigned the copyright in the book to Harper and Row in return for a substantial payment. In

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1979 Harper and Row entered into a contract with Time Magazine, under which Time acquired
the right to publish excerpts from the book just before the publication of the book itself.
Unfortunately for Time, The Nation Magazine scooped it. Here’s how.
A few weeks before the Time article was to appear, an unknown person provided a copy
of the manuscript to Victor Navaski, who was then editor of The Nation. Navaski hastily drafted
an article describing the book. Included in that article were some 300 words taken from Ford’s
manuscript. When The Nation’s story appeared, Time Magazine canceled its contract with
Harper and Row, and refused to pay the balance of the contract price. Harper and Row
thereupon brought a copyright infringement suit against The Nation. Once again, the parties
traded victories as the case wound its way upward through the judicial system. The district court
ruled in favor of Harper and Row by a vote of two to one. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
reversed, ruling that the modest amount of verbatim copying made by The Nation should be
excused as fair. The Court of Appeals ruling was in turn reversed by the United States Supreme
Court by a vote of six to three. Justice O’Connor, writing for the court, concluded that all four of
the fair use factors tilted in favor of the plaintiff. With respect to the first factor, she emphasized
the following two points. First, the defendant was making money from the unauthorized use.
The Betamax opinion, you’ll recall, had included the sentence, “Every commercial use of
copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of a monopoly privilege that
belongs to the owner of copyright.” That presumption, O’Connor ruled, operated to the
disadvantage of the defendant here because he was engaged in a profit-making venture.
Second, O’Connor stressed the illicit way in which Navaski had gained access to the plaintiff’s
manuscript. This was germane, she contended, because one dimension of the “character” of the
defendant’s use is “the propriety of the defendant’s conduct.” Fair use, she insisted,
presupposes good faith and fair dealing.
With respect to the second statutory factor, O’Connor conceded that “the law generally
recognizes a greater need to disseminate factual works than works of fiction or fantasy.”
However, she concluded that the quotations Navaski had taken from Ford’s manuscript were
more expressive than factual. Even more important was the fact that the manuscript had been
unpublished at the time the defendant acted, and thus economically especially vulnerable.
With respect to the third factor, O’Connor ruled that the assessment of amount must be
as much qualitative as quantitative. The fact that Navaski had only taken some 300 words was
less important than the fact that the portion taken was “essentially the heart of the book,”
including the precise language in which Ford explained his decision to pardon Richard Nixon.
Like the court in the Betamax case, O’Connor placed greatest weight on the fourth and
final factor. But she defined the phrase “potential market” in the fourth factor more broadly
than had just Stevens in the Betamax case. Citing Justice Blackmun’s Betamax dissent, O’Connor
ruled that “to negate fair use, one need only show that if the challenged use should become
widespread, it would adversely affect the potential market for the copyrighted work. This inquiry
must take into account not only harm to the original, but harm to the market for derivative
works.” Application of that framework to the facts of this case plainly favored the plaintiff, she

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ruled, because Time Magazine’s decision to cancel the contract with Harper and Row cost it
significant revenue. The bottom line is the fair use defense failed.
The third of the three cases arrived in the Supreme Court almost a decade later. Whereas
the Betamax case, as we saw, involved audio-visual works, and the Harper and Row case
involved literary works, this one involved music. The plaintiff was Acuff-Rose Music, a music
publisher that held the copyright in the composition, “Oh, Pretty Woman”, originally written by
Roy Orbison. Here’s an excerpt of Orbison’s rendition of his composition. [Music: Roy Orbison,
“Oh, Pretty Woman”.]
In 1989, Luther Campbell, one of the members of the rap group, 2 Live Crew, wrote a song
that he characterized as a parody of Orbison’s composition. Here’s an excerpt of 2 Live Crew’s
rendition of Campbell’s song. [Music: 2 Live Crew, “Pretty Woman”.]
Before this recording was released, the manager of 2 Live Crew sought a license from
Acuff-Rose, but was refused. 2 Live Crew released the recording anyway. A year later, after
roughly 200,000 copies have been sold, Acuff-Rose brought a copyright infringement suit. Now
you might wonder why 2 Live Crew did not rely upon the Section 115 so-called cover license that
we’ve discussed previously, which would have allowed them to release the recording without
permission provided they paid Acuff-Rose a modest fee which they seemed to have been going
to do. The reason is that, as You’ll recall the Section 115 license is only available to a musician
who makes a cover that does not alter “the basic melody or fundamental character” of the
composition at issue. 2 Live Crew, as you might expect, conceded that they could not satisfy that
requirement. As a result, the only basis on which 2 Live Crew might have avoided liability was
fair use.
Once again, the courts that consider the case split. The trial court ruled that 2 Live Crew
was shielded by the fair use doctrine. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed by a
vote of two to one, and the United States Supreme Court in turn reversed the Court of Appeals,
this time in a unanimous opinion. Although technically, the Supreme Court remanded the case
for further proceedings, its ruling was widely and rightly interpreted as a victory for 2 Live Crew.
Although Justice Souter, writing for the court, purported to merely be applying well settled
principles, in fact his opinion represented a substantial reconfiguration of the fair use doctrine.
The most important of the shifts implicit, in Souter’s opinion, concerned factor number one.
You’ll recall that in the Betamax case, Justice Blackmun, in dissent, had differentiated ordinary
from productive uses of copyrighted works, arguing unsuccessfully that the latter deserved
wider latitude when applying the fair use doctrine. And Campbell, just as Souter, tacitly adopted
Blackmun’s position. The crucial language is below.

The first factor in a fair use enquiry is ‘the purpose and character of the use.’… The
central purpose of this investigation is to see, in Justice Story’s words, whether the new
work merely ‘supersede[s] the objects’ of the original creation, or instead adds
something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with

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 new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what
extent the new work is ‘transformative.’ Although such transformative use is not
absolutely necessary for a finding of fair use, Sony, [464 U.S.] at 455, n. 40, the goal of
copyright, to promote science and the arts, is generally furthered by the creation of
transformative works. Such works thus lie at the heart of the fair use doctrine’s
guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright, see, e. g., Sony, supra, at
478-480 (Blackmun, J., dissenting), and the more transformative the new work, the less
will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a
finding of fair use.

The principles set forth in this paragraph, as we will see, have colored all subsequent fair
use jurisprudence. Applying this approach to the facts of the Campbell case, the Supreme Court
announced broadly “parody is an obvious claim to transformative value.” What then constitutes
a parody? The court offered several definitions, including the following.

Modern dictionaries accordingly describe a parity as a “literary or artistic work that

imitates the characteristic style of an author, or a work, for comic effect or ridicule,” or
as a “composition in prose or verse, in which the characteristics turns of thought and
phrase, and an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them
appear ridiculous.” For the purposes of copyright law, the nub of the definitions and the
heart of any parodist’s claim to quote from existing material, is the use of some
elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in part,
comments on that author’s works.

All of the justices, except Justice Kennedy, seemed satisfied that 2 Live Crew’s song fit
within this definition, and thus that the first statutory factor favored the defendant. To be sure,
the Supreme Court did not rule that any work that falls within this definition automatically
qualifies as fair. On the contrary, the court announced that “parody, like any other use, has to
work its way through the relevant statutory factors and be judged case by case in light of the
ends of copyright law.” However, as we will see, the way in which the court worked those
statutory factors strongly favored parodists.
With respect to the second factor, the court conceded that Orbison’s song “fell within the
core of copyright’s protective purposes,” but it discounted the significance of that fact when the
defendant’s work consists of a parody. You’ll recall that in the Harper and Row case, Justice
O’Connor countered the third factor against Victor Navaski on the grounds that he had taken the
heart of President Ford’s biography. In the Campbell case, the Court of Appeals relied in part on
O’Connor’s language when ruling against 2 Live Crew.

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 Justice Souter, writing for the Supreme Court, appeared to agree with the premise.
Namely that 2 Live Crew had taken the heart of Orbison’s song. However, Souter did not
consider that fact fatal. Here’s the way he put the point.

If quotation of the opening riff and the first line may be said to go to the heart of the
original, the heart is also what most readily conjures up the song for parody. And it is
the heart at which parody takes aim. Copying does not become excessive in relation to
parodic purpose merely because the portion taken was the original’s heart. If 2 Live
Crew had copied a significantly less memorable part of the original, it is difficult to see
how its parodic character would come through.

The Supreme Court did not definitively resolve the application of the fourth factor, instead
remanding the case to the lower courts for reconsideration of this issue. But the guidelines that
Souter provided the lower courts strongly suggested that the outcome of that inquiry would
favor 2 Live Crew. In particular, the Supreme Court repudiated the “presumption that the Court
of Appeals had quite plausibly derived from the Betamax and Harper and Row opinions. Namely
the presumption that commercial uses of copyrighted materials give rise to injuries to the
market for the original work.” Souter and Campbell limited the scope of that ostensible
presumption to the context of “verbatim copying of the original in its entirety for commercial
purposes.” No such presumption, he contended, is appropriate when the defendant’s use is
transformative as in parody. The likely result, the 2 Live Crew song would qualify as a fair use.
So, this concludes our review of the way in which fair use doctrine in the United States
evolved from its inception in the early 19th century through the Campbell case. The table below
summarizes the application of the four fair use factors in the three cases.

Table 5: The application of the fair use factors in the Sony, Harper & Row, and Campbell cases

Sony Harper & Row Campbell

1. Purpose and character of
defendant’s use ▪ ▪ ▪
2. Nature of copyright work ▪ ▪
3. Amount of copying Neutral ▪ Neutral

4. Impact on potential market ▪ ▪ ▪

Fair Unfair Fair

▪ Favours fairness ▪ Disfavours fairness

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9.2. Fair Use Today
Many cases implicating the fair use doctrine have been decided by the federal courts since 1976,
when section 107 was added to the federal statute. The most important of those cases are, of
course, the three United States Supreme Court decisions that I reviewed in the previous
segment of this lecture. But those three decisions leave many issues unresolved. Some, but not
all, of the gaps left by the Supreme Court have been filled by the lower court’s rulings. In this
segment of the lecture, I’ll try to describe the shape of the fair use doctrine today. I’ll attempt
both to identify the dimensions of the doctrine that are now reasonably well settled and to
highlight the dimensions that remain contested. For this purpose, I’ll be using the now familiar
map of copyright law.
As we’ve seen, courts almost always analyze their fair use defenses by considering the
four factors listed in section 107. I will follow their lead in this regard. In other words, I will
describe to you what each factor has come to mean and the role it has come to play in the
overall landscape of fair use. The first factor, as you now know, concerns the purpose and
character of the defendant’s activity. The courts look askance at some kinds of behavior and
regard much more favorably other kinds of behavior. Four sub-factors under this general
heading can be distilled from the case law. These so-called sub-factors identify the kinds of
things that the courts attend to when discussing the character of the defendant’s behavior.
The first sub-factor is whether the defendant is engaged in commercial or non-commercial
activities. As you might imagine, the more commercial the defendant’s conduct, the less likely is
the defendant to be given the benefit of fair use. This sub-factor, as we’ve already seen, figured
prominently in the Betamax case. It has been declining in importance since then but has not
disappeared altogether.
You might think that the application of this sub-factor would be straightforward, and often
it is. But difficulties arise out of the ambiguity of the term “commercial.” Courts rarely define
that term explicitly. Most often, they seem tacitly to assume that “commercial” means revenue
generating or perhaps profit making, but occasionally, in borderline cases, courts will attempt to
define the term more precisely. One such definition can be found in the Harper & Row case.
There, Justice O’Connor defined “commercial” as “whether the user stands to profit from the
exploitation of the copyrighted material without paying the customary price.” This would be an
altogether conventional definition but for the term “customary,” which seems to imply that
some potentially profit-making activities are nevertheless not commercial in character if it’s not
customary for firms engaged in the activity at issue to pay for access to works of the sort claimed
by the plaintiff. It’s unlikely that Justice O’Connor intended to narrow the meaning of
“commercial” in quite this way, but judicial definitions sometimes assume lives of their own, and
this one has. So for example, Justice O’Connor definition can be found in the 11th Circuit’s
opinion in the Letterese case and the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in the AV case. A much more
generous definition of the term “commercial” can be found in the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in the
Napster case. Now, we’ll discuss Napster in some detail in the 11th lecture when we examine, as I

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said, the doctrine of contributory copyright infringement, but the basic facts of the Napster case
are undoubtedly familiar to most of you. The Napster file sharing service did not itself
redistribute sound recordings, but it facilitated unauthorized copying and distribution of sound
recordings by its subscribers. One of the issues in the infringement suit brought against Napster
by the record companies and the music publishers was whether the conduct of Napster
subscribers qualified as fair uses, just as the conduct of Sony’s customers, as we’ve seen,
qualified as fair uses in the Betamax case. The Ninth Circuit concluded no. One of the steps in
the Ninth Circuit’s analysis that led to this conclusion was the judgment that the behavior of the
individual Napster users should be considered commercial in character. That highly counter-
intuitive finding rested upon the capacious definition of “commercial”: in the Ninth Circuit’s
judgment, the term included “repeated and exploitative copying in order to save the expense of
purchasing legitimate copies.” Thus, even though the Napster users were not making any
money, they were engaged in commercial behavior, said the Ninth Circuit, because they were
avoiding paying money. This is an outlier position. It’s far from clear that other courts in
analogous circumstances would follow the Ninth Circuit’s lead.
In some fair use cases, the defendant’s behavior does not give rise directly to an increased
revenue stream but contributes to an overall process or enterprise whose ultimate objective is
plainly commercial. The courts have not yet worked out a consistent way of handling such cases.
So here are two influential decisions involving this general issue that resolved it in different
ways. The first case is Sega Enterprises versus Accolade, which was decided by the Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1992. To understand the decision requires a bit of background. In
the context of computer software, the term “interoperability” refers to the ability of one
program to talk or work with another. An especially important context involving interoperability
concerns the relationship between operating systems and application programs. The intellectual
property questions implicated by this issue have been examined most thoroughly by Julie Cohen,
who teaches copyright at Georgetown. As Cohen observed in an article some time ago, there are
three main business models adopted by different
groups of software firms pertaining to the issue of
interoperability.
The first approach, exemplified by Microsoft,
grants the developers of application programs free or
more or less free access to the interfaces necessary
to render their programs compatible with a
proprietary operating system. The second business
model, which was pursued at least at one time by
several game console manufacturers, including
Nintendo, entails permitting the developer of
application programs – in this case, games – to
manufacture and distribute games that would run on Figure 106: Interoperability

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a proprietary operating system console, but only if the game developers pay license fees. The
third strategy, exemplified by MAI Systems Corporation, repudiates interoperability.
Manufacturers adopting this approach seek to maintain complete control over application
programs as well as their operating systems.
The Sega case involved the second of these three approaches. The plaintiff, Sega,
manufactured and sold game consoles which included operating systems. A small piece of the
operating system consisted of a bit of code known as a lockout program. Sega’s own games as
well as the games produced by independent but licensed game manufacturers included the key
necessary to open the lock on Sega’s system. The defendant in this case, Accolade, wished to
manufacture and distribute games compatible with the Sega system without obtaining a license
from Sega and without paying the associated license fees. To do this, Accolade engineers made
copies of significant portions of Sega’s software, used decompilers to ascertain the crucial piece
of source code, and then included the essential bit in its own games, thereby rendering them
compatible with the Sega system. Sega brought suit asserting, among other things, that by
copying Sega’s software in the course of this reverse engineering process, Accolade had engaged
in copyright infringement. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Accolade had
indeed violated section 106(1) of the statute, but it escaped liability under the fair use doctrine.
The central theme in the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was that Accolade’s purpose was legitimate and
socially beneficial. It’s not altogether obvious why, unless one believes that increasing the
availability of video games enhances social welfare, but in any event, our main concern here is
with the portion of the court’s opinion that addresses the nature and character of the
defendant’s activity and specifically whether Accolade’s conduct should be described as

Figure 107: Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. (9th Cir. 1992)

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commercial or not. The Ninth Circuit, when addressing that issue, conceded that Accolade was a
for-profit company and the ultimate ambition of the challenged behavior was, of course, to
enhance Accolade’s profits. Nevertheless, the Ninth Circuit refused to classify Accolade’s
unauthorized copying as commercial in character. Here’s the relevant passage from the opinion.

Taken together, these facts indicate that although Accolade’s ultimate purpose was the
release of Genesis-compatible games for sale, its direct purpose in copying Sega’s code,
and thus its direct use of the copyrighted material, was simply to study the functional
requirements for Genesis compatibility so that it could modify existing games and make
them usable with the Genesis console. Moreover, no other method of studying those
codes was available to Accolade. On these facts, we conclude that Accolade copied
Sega’s code for a legitimate, essentially non-exploitative purpose and that the
commercial aspects of its use can best be described as of minimal significance.

OK, that’s one approach.

The second case was decided a few years later by the Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit. The essential facts were as follows. Texaco employed between 400 and 500 researchers
nationwide. Their job was to conduct scientific research in order to develop new products and
technologies in the petroleum industry. Texaco subscribed to various scientific journals.
However, it did not purchase enough copies of those journals to serve fully the needs of its many
researchers. A custom seems to have developed within the Texaco facilities under which
individual scientists would either make themselves or ask to be made for them 232utho copies
of articles contained in the print journals that the scientist might find useful in their own
research. The publishers and copyright owners of the articles challenged this practice as
copyright infringement. Texaco’s primary line of defense for this behavior was fair use. The
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ultimately sided with the publishers and rejected the fair
use defense. The step in the court’s analysis with which we are primarily concerned here
involves whether the behavior of the scientists qualified as commercial. The Court of Appeals
equivocated on this point. Unlike the Ninth Circuit, the Second Circuit did not discount
altogether the profit-making objective of the company as a whole. However, it too accorded
some weight to the fact that the immediate objective of the scientists was research. Here’s the
key passage in the Second Circuit’s opinion.

In this particular case, the link between Texaco’s commercial gain and its copying is
somewhat attenuated, the copying at most merely facilitating Chickering’s research
[Chickering was one of the scientists] that might have led to the production of
commercially-valuable products. Still, we need not ignore the for-profit nature of
Texaco’s enterprise, especially since we can confidently conclude that Texaco reaps at

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 least some indirect economic advantage from its photocopying. As the publishers
emphasized, Texaco’s photocopying for Chickering could be regarded simply as another
factor of production utilizing Texaco’s efforts to develop profitable products.
Conceptualized in this way, it is not obvious why it is fair for Texaco to avoid having to
pay at least some price to copyright holders for the right to photocopy the original
articles.

So where does the combination of these two cases leave us? The answer is,
unfortunately, without clear guidance. When employees within a for-profit enterprise engage in
unauthorized copying whose immediate purpose might be characterized as research or study,
the employer may be able to contend that it should not be hit with the label “commercial.” But
how much latitude it will be given on this score is, unfortunately, hard to predict.
As I said, the question of whether a defendant’s behavior is commercial or non-
commercial in character remains a significant part of the fair use inquiry. However, that sub-
factor is being eclipsed increasingly by the second sub-factor, which asks whether the
defendant’s behavior is transformative. As we saw, this theme was highlighted by the United
States Supreme Court in the Campbell case. Since the Campbell decision, the issue of
transformativeness has grown further in importance. Today, it’s fair to say that defendants
unable to persuade a court that their activities are transformative are unlikely to prevail on fair
use grounds, whereas defendants who are able to assume the mantle of transformativeness are
quite likely to prevail. As one might expect, litigants now spend much of their time struggling
over who has the better of the argument on this issue. Unfortunately, as we will see, there
remains significant ambiguity concerning the possible meaning or meanings of the term
“transformative.” This uncertainty destabilizes fair use analyses and increases the notorious
unpredictability of the doctrine as a whole.
The only dimension of this issue that is clear cut concerns the status of parody. It’s now
well settled that parodies, even bad parodies, do qualify as transformative uses. Plaintiffs no
longer contended parodies of their works are not transformative. Instead, plaintiffs seek to
persuade tribunals that, in borderline cases, the defendants’ works do not constitute parodies.
Much hinges on this issue. When evaluating disputes of this sort, courts commonly make
reference to the definitions of parody that were offered by the Supreme Court in Campbell.
You’ve seen these definitions once before in this lecture. Here they are again.

Modern dictionaries describe a parody as a “literary or artistic work that imitates the
characteristic style of an author or work for comic effect or ridicule” or as a
“composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and phrase
in an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear
ridiculous.” For the purposes of copyright law, the nub of the definitions is the use of

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 some elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in
part, comments on that author’s works.

The ambit of this definition is perhaps best illustrated by example. Annie Liebovitz, as you
likely know, is a famous and accomplished photographer. In 1991, she took a nude photograph
of the pregnant Demi Moore which appeared on the cover of the August 1991 issue of Vanity
Fair magazine. The photo plainly alluded to Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” (see Figure 108).
In 1994, Paramount Pictures began to promote its upcoming movie Naked Gun 33⅓. One
of its posters included this composite photo of Leslie Nielsen, the star of the film. Liebovitz
brought a copyright infringement suit. Interestingly, Paramount conceded that its poster
violated Liebovitz’s rights under section 106 but sought refuge in fair use. The district court
granted summary judgment for the defendant, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. A key step in
the Court of Appeals analysis was a determination that the poster constituted a parody of the
Demi Moore photo. The court justified that determination in the following terms.

Being different from an original does not inevitably comment on the original.
Nevertheless, the ad [meaning the poster] is not merely different. It differs in a way
that may reasonably be perceived as commenting through ridicule on what a viewer
might reasonably think is the undue self-importance conveyed by the subject of the
Liebovitz photograph. A photographer posing a well-known actress in a manner that
calls to mind a well-known painting must expect or at least tolerate a parodist’s
deflating ridicule. Apart from ridiculing pretentiousness, the ad might also reasonably
be perceived as interpreting the Liebovitz photograph to extol the beauty of the
pregnant female body and, rather unchivalrously, to express disagreement with this

Figure 108: The Vanity Fair cover featuring Demi Moore, a portion of Botecelli's "The Birth of
Venus", and the Naked gun 33⅓: The Final Insult poster that parodies the Vanity Fair cover

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 message. The district court thought such a comment was reasonably to be perceived
from the contrast between a serious portrayal of a beautiful woman taking great pride
in the majesty of her pregnant body and a ridiculous image of a smirking, foolish-
looking pregnant man.

A very similar analysis underlay the determination five years later by the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals that a series of photos by Thomas Forsythe constituted parodies of Mattel’s
copyrighted character Barbie. Figure 109 shows a familiar image of Barbie. Mattel owns
copyrights to parts of this figure – specifically, in the court’s words, “to the unadorned Superstar
Barbie head and parts of the figure, including revisions to the hands, feet, neck, shoulder, and
buttocks.” Forsythe, without permission, took a series of photos of naked Barbie dolls, which he
called “Food Chain Barbie” (shown in Figure 109).
The Ninth Circuit, when the case arrived at its doorstep, concluded that Forsythe’s photos
plainly qualified as parodies.

Figure 109: Mattel’s Barbie and photos from Forsythe’s series “Food Chain Barbie”

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 Mattel, through impressive marketing, has established Barbie as the ideal American
woman and a symbol of American girlhood for many. As abundantly evidenced in the
record, Mattel’s advertisements show these plastic dolls dressed in various outfits,
leading glamorous lifestyles, and engaged in exciting activities. To sell its product,
Mattel uses associations of beauty, wealth, and glamour. Forsythe turns this image on
its head, so to speak, by displaying carefully-positioned, nude, and sometimes frazzled-
looking Barbies in often ridiculous and apparently dangerous situations. His lighting,
background, props, and camera angles all serve to create a context for Mattel’s
copyrighted work that transform Barbie’s meaning. Forsythe presents the viewer with a
different set of associations and a different context for this plastic figure. In some of
Forsythe’s photos, Barbie is about to be destroyed or harmed by domestic life in the
form of kitchen appliances yet continues displaying her well-known smile, disturbingly
oblivious to her predicament. As perpetrated in some of Forsythe’s photographs, the
appliances are substantial and overwhelming, while Barbie looks defenseless. In other
photographs, Forsythe conveys a sexualized perspective of Barbie by showing the nude
doll in sexually-suggestive contexts. It’s not difficult to see the commentary that
Forsythe intended or the harm that he perceived in Barbie’s influence on gender roles
and the position of women in society.

An important procedural issue lurks in this passage. The Ninth Circuit is not interested in
what the public at large thinks of Forsythe’s photos. Indeed, it approved the trial court’s refusal
to consider a survey that Mattel had commissioned on the issue. Why? Because “the issue of
whether a work is a parody is a question of law, not a matter of public majority opinion.”
So, those are two cases in which the defendant successfully invoked the privileged status
of parodies. To repeat, parodies are not per se entitled to the fair use defense, but attaining that
status helps you a great deal. In part because of the importance of this issue, courts are not
always so receptive to defendants’ claims that their works constitute parodies. For example, the
Second Circuit brushed aside the contention of Jeffrey Koons that when he used the photograph
shown in Figure 110 as the reference work for this painted wooden sculpture (shown in Figure
111) he meant to mock the conventional, saccharine character of the photo. The court rejected
Koons’ claim that his work was a parody of the plaintiff’s. Its rejection was based in part on the
fact that the photograph was not widely known to the public, and thus most viewers of the
sculpture would not know what it was aimed at, but in addition, the court was not persuaded
that the sculpture meant to critique the photo.

The problem in the instant case is that even given that String of Puppies is a satirical
critique of our materialistic society, it is difficult to discern any parody of the
photograph Puppies itself. We conclude, therefore, that this first factor of the fair use
doctrine cuts against a finding of fair use. The circumstances of this case indicate that

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Figure 110: Art Rogers, photograph: Puppies, 1980 Figure 111: Jeff Koons, wood painted sculpture: String of
Puppies, 1998

Koons’ copying of the photograph Puppies was done in bad faith primarily for profit-
making motives and did not constitute a parody of the original work.

The same court was similarly unimpressed by the efforts of the defendants in the Castle
Rock case, which I discussed in the preceding lecture, to establish that their trivia book was a
parody of the Seinfeld television series. The defendant argued that the book “is a quintessential
example of critical text of the TV environment … expos[ing] all of the show’s nothingness to
articulate its true motive forces and its social and moral dimensions”. The court was unmoved.
“Any transformative purpose possessed by the defendant’s book is slight to nonexistent. We
reject the argument that it was created to educate Seinfeld viewers or to criticize, expose, or
otherwise comment upon Seinfeld. The book’s purpose, as evidenced definitively by the
statements of the book’s creators and by the book itself, is to repackage Seinfeld to entertain
Seinfeld viewers.”
So, to repeat, parodies definitively qualify as transformative under factor number one.
What about a defendant’s work that criticizes a plaintiff’s work but does not mock it? These too
are highly likely to be treated as transformative. Here’s an example. One of John Lennon’s most
famous songs is “Imagine.” Portions of its lyrics are critical of organized religion. Here’s an
excerpt.

[Music: John Lennon, “Imagine”.]

(Lyrics) It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.
Imagine all the people…

In this case, the defendant, without permission, included this segment of Lennon’s
recording of the song in a movie that defended theories of intelligent design and criticized

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theories of evolution. The Southern District of New York ruled that the use of the excerpt from
Lennon’s song was transformative because its purpose was “to criticize what the filmmakers see
as the naiveté of John Lennon’s views,” and the court went on to rule in the defendant’s favor.
That non-parody criticism counts as transformative is not quite so clear as the proposition
that parody counts as transformative. Indeed, at least one case, the Free Republic decision
decided by the Central District of California in 2000, seems to stand for the opposite position.
But the privileged status of criticism nowadays approaches that of parody.
Beyond this point, the meaning of “transformative” becomes increasingly contested and
murky. Figure 112 shows a graphic representation of the nature of the ongoing debate on this
front. Parody, as we’ve seen, clearly qualifies. A work by a defendant that criticizes the plaintiff’s
work is also highly likely to qualify as transformative. Outside of this central zone, there are
currently four main competing interpretations of “transformation.” The first treats works that
physically modify the plaintiff’s work as transformative. The second equates the term
“transformative” with “socially beneficial.” The third attaches the term “transformative” to
works by defendants that have purposes that are different from the purposes of the plaintiff’s
works. And the fourth associates the term “transformative” with creative uses of plaintiff’s
works. This diagram intentionally depicts these interpretations as overlapping because, as you
might imagine, some works will qualify as transformative under more than one interpretation.

Case color legend: Defendant prevailed (green); Plaintiff prevailed (red); Unresolved (black).

Figure 112: The nature of “transformative” and leading cases involving fair use

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Were the circle simply boundaries, the diagram would be misleading in that it would suggest
that each category has crisp boundaries. In truth, they’re all matters of degree. For example, one
defendant’s work might be slightly socially beneficial, while another’s might be strongly so. Thus,
the areas are shaded, recognizing that each category varies in density – strong near the core,
weaker near the edges. Mapped onto this diagram are the leading cases involving fair use.
I’ve tried, by locating each case or set of cases, to suggest which and how many of the
meanings of “transformative” they might qualify for. The colors of the case names indicate who
won or was favored. In the green cases, the defendant prevailed – in other words, the court
either ruled in the defendant’s favor or indicated the fair use was likely. In the red cases, the
plaintiff prevailed in the same sense. In the black cases, the issue of fair use was never resolved.
Some of these cases you already know about. Others I will discuss later, and still others will be
addressed in the classes and seminars that accompany this lecture series. One of the functions
of this map is to suggest the relative strength of these four competing interpretations within the
current case law.
For a while, the physical modifications approach seemed to have a significant following,
but it has since faded. Why? Most likely because this interpretation is hard to reconcile with the
proposition that copyright owners enjoy under section 106(2) the right to control the making of
derivative works. Thus, as you’ll notice, many of the cases within this zone are red, meaning that
the fair use defense failed.
More popular is the second approach, which looks to the degree to which a defendant’s
conduct can be thought of as socially beneficial. However, you’ll also see some red cases in this
zone. More popular still is the different purposes approach. Most of the cases in this zone,
especially recent cases, you’ll see are green. The last approach finds as yet only modest support
in the case law, although it figures more strongly in scholarship. We’ll return to this fourth
option when we discuss cultural theory in the next lecture.
So, that’s where things currently stand with respect to transformation. Because of the
prominent place of this issue in modern fair use doctrine, the struggle over the meaning of this
term will likely continue for some time. I’ve devoted disproportionate attention to the first two
sub-factors of factor number one because they’re particularly important. The current status of
the other sub-factors and of the second and third factors in the list in section 107 can be
described much more quickly. You’ll recall that Justice O’Connor in Harper & Row decreed that
fair use presupposes “good faith and fair dealing.” As you might expect, lower courts give that
statement some weight, but as it turns out, not much. Here’s a representative statement by the
Second Circuit.

[J]ust how much weight within the first factor should a court place on this sub-factor of
bad faith? … Campbell provides … support for the proposition that while the good or
bad faith of a defendant generally should be considered, it generally contributes little
to fair use analysis. … We believe this analysis further supports our conclusion that a

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 finding of bad faith is not to be weighed very heavily within the first fair use factor and
cannot be made central to fair use analysis. The Court recognized the continuing
relevance of Harper & Row but clarified that the bad faith sub-factor can be de-
emphasized and will not be dispositive of the first factor or fair use.

The Harper & Row opinion also included a statement suggesting that customary activities
were more likely to qualify as fair than unconventional ones. “The fair use doctrine was
predicated,” said Justice O’Connor, “on the author’s implied consent to reasonable and
customary use when he released his work for public consumption.” This perspective associates
the concept of fair use with an implicit license issued by a copyright owner. Some scholars – for
example, Lloyd Weinreb in an influential article in the Harvard Law Review – have endorsed this
perspective, but it has little following currently in the case law, in part because so many fair use
cases nowadays involve new technologies as to which custom is essentially irrelevant.
If the first statutory factor focuses on the defendant, the second focuses on the plaintiff.
The basic idea here is that some kinds of copyrighted works deserve stronger protections against
unauthorized activities than do others. The way this is achieved is by making it harder for
defendants to assert fair use when they make unauthorized uses of the former than the latter.
So, what kinds of works are more deserving of protection? There are two well-recognized
answers to that question and one additional answer that is implicit in the case law but not
expressly recognized. The two well-established variables are A, unpublished works get more
protection than published works, and B, creative works get more protection than factual ones.
The Second Circuit’s decision in the Blanch case summarizes these two variables nicely.

Two types of distinctions as to the nature of the copyrighted work have emerged that
have figured in the decisions evaluating the second factor – one, whether the work is
expressive or creative, such as a work of fiction, or more factual, with a greater leeway
being allowed to a claim of fair use where the work is factual or informational; and
two, whether the work is published or unpublished, with the scope for fair use involving
unpublished works being considerably narrower.

This point bears emphasis, because it’s not often recognized. Not all works, it turns out,
enjoy the same degree of protection. The closer you are to the bottom left corner of Figure 113,
the stronger your legal shields. The closer you are to the upper right corner, the weaker your
shields. The implicit supplement to these two variables is that, in practice, computer software
seems to get less protection than other sorts of copyrighted works. In other words, in the
software context, defendants have an easier road to hoe.

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 The third factor is the least surprising
component of modern fair use doctrine.
The more you take from a plaintiff’s work,
the weaker, in general, is your fair use
defense. As from the Harper & Row case,
the inquiry under this factor is both
quantitative and qualitative. If you take a
small slice but it’s a very important part of
the plaintiff’s work, you’re in trouble on this
front. Note that, at least ostensibly, it
doesn’t matter whether the slice you take Figure 113: Strength of copyright protection
forms a large or small portion of your own
work. It’s only relevant whether it’s a large and important part of the plaintiff’s.
The only thing that’s surprising about this variable is how often it does not prove decisive.
Think of the cases we’ve considered thus far. In the Betamax case, the VCR users were making
verbatim copies of entire copyrighted works and yet were found to have engaged in fair use. In
Harper & Row, by contrast, the Nation took some 300 words from Ford’s vastly larger
manuscript and still lost.
We come finally to factor number four. For many years, this was said to be the most
important factor. Today, it may have to play second fiddle to factor number one and the
transformativeness inquiry in particular, but it’s still given great weight. The core idea is
straightforward. The greater the injury sustained by the plaintiff as a result of the defendant’s
conduct, the less likely it is that the defendant’s conduct will be deemed fair. But as we’ll see,
complexities and conflicts lie just under the surface of that statement.
The first guideline when applying this factor is that not all kinds of what might be
considered injuries count. In particular, it’s now reasonably clear that four types of what might
be considered losses by the plaintiff are excluded from consideration. First, a plaintiff cannot
claim that he suffered economic harm because he was prevented from charging the defendant a
license fee. Among the reasons that foregone license fees from the defendant are excluded from
the analysis is that otherwise the fourth factor would always favor the plaintiff, which was
plainly not Congress’ intent. Second, loss of revenue resulting from the plaintiff’s inability to
charge the defendant or others for the right to make transformative uses of the plaintiff’s work
also do not count. As you can see, this sub-factor dovetails with the first factor. It reinforces the
privileged position within the fair use calculus of transformative uses. To illustrate, a plaintiff
cannot assert under the auspices of the fourth factor that he suffers economic losses because of
his inability to charge parodists fees. Third, as we saw in the Campbell case, plaintiffs cannot
assert as economic injuries diminution in their markets resulting from defendants’ criticism or
ridicule of their works. The borderline question, the answer to which is not yet clear, concerns
injuries arising from what might be called tarnishment of the plaintiff’s work – in other words,
corrosion as result of the defendant’s conduct of the positive associations that the plaintiff’s

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work has in the minds of consumers. Finally, at least one court has held that a plaintiff can only
complain of injuries to the market for the copyrighted work at issue in the case, not collateral
injuries to other copyrighted works owned by the plaintiff.
These exclusions are important, but they leave many opportunities for plaintiffs to identify
economic harms. In particular plaintiffs may count under the fourth factor not only damage to
the existing markets for the copyrighted works but also damage to “potential markets” for the
work, and they may also claim injuries that have not yet occurred as a result of the defendant’s
behavior but that will occur if the defendant’s conduct becomes widespread.
The most important and fraught word in this formula is “potential.” As I say, it’s now clear
that injuries to potential markets count in the plaintiff’s favor. What’s unclear is what constitutes
a potential market. One can find in the case law a broad spectrum of approaches to this key
question. Near one extreme is the position apparently taken by the Ninth Circuit in the Galoob
case. Potential markets consist of markets that the plaintiff has developed or is likely to develop.
This approach would exclude, for example, markets that the plaintiff lacks the technical capacity
to exploit or that are within the defendant’s control. Near the opposite extreme is the position
that, as we saw, was taken by Justice Blackmun dissenting in the Betamax case. Any group of
people who would pay for access to the plaintiff’s work constitute a potential market, even if the
plaintiff is unable or uninterested in exploiting that market and even if the market would not
exist but for the defendant’s initiative or technological innovation. In between these positions
are several intermediate options. The formulation that seems to appear most often in the case
law is the one listed on the third tier on the chart. The markets cognizable under the fourth
factor include “traditional, reasonable, or likely to be developed markets,” but some courts
expressly or implicitly adopt positions more favorable to plaintiffs or more favorable to
defendants.
A possible explanation for why this crucial issue remains unresolved is that no court has
convincingly connected its stance on this question to any of the underlying theories of copyright.
Until that happens, litigants and judges will struggle to define the set of harms that plaintiffs
may point to when resisting fair use defenses.

9.3. Other Approaches

In this final portion of the lecture, I will juxtapose the US fair use doctrine with the approaches
taken to similar issues by countries outside the United States. Which legal regime makes the
most sense is currently hotly debated. Many countries – for example, Australia, China, Hong
Kong New, Zealand and South Africa – are currently reviewing their laws in this area, so the legal
landscape may shift soon. In the meantime, you can and should form your own opinions
concerning which approach is optimal.
In the past 15 years, five countries have adopted general exceptions to the rights of
copyright owners that resemble the fair use doctrine in the United States. Their details vary in
ways that may prove to be important, but they share with the US regime two crucial
characteristics. First, comprehensive coverage – in other words, these regimes are potentially

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applicable to all types of activities – and second, reliance on Countries with general
ad hoc multi-factor analysis to determine whether particular exceptions similar to the fair
non-permissive uses of copyrighted materials should be use doctrine
deemed fair. I’ll be referring to legal regimes that share 1. Sri Lanka (2003)
these characteristics as model number one. Here are some
2. Singapore (2004)
examples.
3. Israel (2007)
4. South Korea (2011)
Sri Lanka – Intellectual Property Act
5. Philippines (2012)
Section 11: Fair Use

11. (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (1) of section 9, the fair use of a
work, including such use by reproduction in copies or by any other means specified by
that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching
(including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, shall not be an
infringement of copyright.

(2) The following factors shall be considered in determining whether the use made of a
work in any particular case is fair use :—

(a) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
nature or is for non-profit educational purposes ;
(b) the nature of the copyrighted work ;
(c) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole ; and
(d) the effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted
work.

(3) The acts of fair use shall include the circumstances specified in section 12.

As you can see, the relevant provision of the Sri Lankan copyright act is virtually identical
to section 107 of the US Act – it has the same preamble and the same four factors. It emits only
the coda of section 107, which makes clear that unauthorized uses of unpublished works can
sometimes qualify as fair.

Singapore – Copyright Act

Section 35: Fair dealing in relation to works

(2) For the purposes of this Act, the matters to which regard shall be had, in
determining whether a dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or

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 with an adaptation of a literary, dramatic or musical work, being a dealing by way of
copying the whole or a part of the work or adaptation, constitutes a fair dealing with
the work or adaptation for any purpose other than a purpose referred to in section 36
or 37 shall include —

(a) the purpose and character of the dealing, including whether such dealing is of a
commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes;
(b) the nature of the work or adaptation;
(c) the amount and substantiality of the part copied taken in relation to the whole
work or adaptation;
(d) the effect of the dealing upon the potential market for, or value of, the work or
adaptation; and
I the possibility of obtaining the work or adaptation within a reasonable time at
an ordinary commercial price.

Singapore’s copyright statute, amended the year after Sri Lanka’s norm, is similar. Factors
a, b, c, and d once again echo, as you can see, the components of fair use in the United States.
But factor E is new: the instruction to consider “the possibility of obtaining the work or
adaptation within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price” has the effect of limiting
the availability of fair use somewhat, because it weakens the position of defendants who could
have obtained a license from the plaintiff but refused to do so. It may also put pressure on
copyright owners to collaborate in the organization of systems – like the Copyright Clearance
Center in the United States – that are designed to facilitate licensing, although that remains to
be seen. If it does the net effect would be roughly analogous to a compulsory licensing system of
the sort we have previously considered in this course. Economists disagree concerning whether
this provision can be shown to have contributed to Singapore’s subsequent economic boon.

Israel – Copyright Act

Section 19: Fair Use

(a) Fair use of a work is permitted for purposes such as: private study, research,
criticism, review, journalistic reporting, quotation, or instruction and examination by an
educational institution.

(b) In determining whether a use made of a work is fair within the meaning of this
section the factors to be considered shall include, inter alia, all of the following:

(1) The purpose and character of the use;

(2) The character of the work used;
(3) The scope of the use, quantitatively and qualitatively, in relation to the work as a

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 whole;
(4) The impact of the use on the value of the work and its potential market.

I The Minister may make regulations prescribing conditions under which a use shall be
deemed a fair use.

The Israeli provision adopted three years after Singapore’s adds yet another novel
element. As you can see, the final subsection empowers the Minister of Justice to “make
regulations prescribing conditions under which a use shall be deemed a fair use”. Thus far,
apparently, the government has not exercised this power, but it offers an intriguing potential
way of providing guidance, both to copyright owners and to users, concerning their respective
rights through a mechanism less expensive and fraught than litigation. Another feature of the
Israeli regime that emerges from the case law, rather than the statute or accompanying
regulations, concerns attribution. Professor L. Corcoran has pointed out that some courts in
Israel have taken the position that “appropriate credit must be accorded to the original author in
order for the use to be considered fair”. Such a requirement would implicitly import into the fair
use doctrine one of the components of moral rights. A possible justification for such a move will
emerge from our discussion next week of cultural theory.

South Korea – Copyright Act

Article 35-3: Fair Use of the Work

Art 35-3: (1) Other than the cases stipulated from Article 23 to Article 35–2, Article
101–3 to Article 101–5 it shall be permissible to use works for purposes such as news
reporting, criticism, education, or research which do not conflict with a normal
exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of
the right holder.

(2) The following four factors must be considered in determining whether a particular
use is fair:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial
nature or is for nonprofit purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as
a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the actual and potential market or value of the
copyrighted work.

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 An adjustment of the copyright system of South Korea, adopted – not coincidentally –
soon after the completion of a free trade agreement between Korea and the United States, also
echoes section 107, but with a different tweak. As you can see, the preamble of the Korean
statute incorporates a version of the so-called three-step test, which we considered in lecture
number one. Only uses “which do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and do not
unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests or the right holder” and also pass muster under
the four factors can be deemed fair. This tweak proved decisive in a 2013 decision in which the
Seoul district court denied a fair use defense to a liquor wholesaler who posted news articles for
his employees, reasoning that recognizing such an exemption would indeed conflict with the
normal exploitation of those works and unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the
copyright holders.

Philippines – Intellectual Property Code

Section 185: Fair Use of a Copyrighted Work

185.1. The fair use of a copyrighted work for criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching including multiple copies for classroom use, scholarship, research, and similar
purposes is not an infringement of copyright. Decompilation, which is understood here
to be the reproduction of the code and translation of the forms of the computer
program to achieve the inter-operability of an independently created computer
program with other programs may also constitute fair use. In determining whether the
use made of a work in any particular case is fair use, the factors to be considered shall
include:

(a) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
nature or is for non-profit education purposes;
(b) The nature of the copyrighted work;
(c) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole; and
(d) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

185.2. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not by itself bar a finding of fair use if
such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

The parallel provision of the Philippine statute also deviates slightly from section 107 of
the US statute, but in a way that expands rather than constricts its coverage. As you can see, the
provision invites courts to treat as fair decompilation of computer programs for the purpose of
achieving interoperability with other programs

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 So, those are the principal extant examples of model number one. Although the number
of countries that currently employ this approach is small, the overall trend in the world is toward
this model. It’s likely that in the next few years more countries will adopt similar systems.
Radically different, at least inform, is model number 2, to which currently a much larger
set of countries subscribe. Instead of conferring upon judges substantial discretion in
determining on an ad hoc basis which uses should be deemed fair, under this approach the
legislature specifies in advance the kinds of uses that are permissible and thus indirectly declares
that all other uses that encroach on the copyright owner’s exclusive rights are impermissible.
The paradigmatic application of this approach is the system currently employed in the European
Union.

EU Copyright Directive

Article 5: Exceptions and limitations (some parts summarized)

Section 1: Mandatory exception

1. Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or

incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose
sole purpose is to enable:

(a) a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or

(b) a lawful use

of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent

economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in
Article 2.

2. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the reproduction right
provided for in Article 2 in the following cases:

5.2(a). Photocopying
5.2(b). Private copying
5.2(c). Reproductions by Libraries
5.2(d). Ephemeral Recordings
5.2I. Reproductions by Social Institutions

3. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the rights provided for in
Articles 2 [right of reproduction] and 3 [right to communicate or make works available
to the public] in the following cases:

5.3(a). Teaching and Research

5.3(b). People with Disabilities

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 5.3(c). Current Events
5.3(d). Criticism or Review
5.3I. Governmental Use
5.3(f). Speeches
5.3(g). Religion
5.3(h). Architecture and Sculpture
5.3(i). Incidental Inclusion
5.3(j). Advertising Art
5.3(k). Parody
5.3(l). Equipment Repair
5.3(m). Reconstructing buildings
5.3(n). Private study
5.3(o). Minor pre-existing exceptions

As you can see, article 5 of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, which binds all member
countries, sets forth a list of specific exceptions and limitations. Only one of those exceptions is
mandatory under article 5.1: countries must exempt from liability incidental economically
unimportant reproductions of copyrighted works either by Internet intermediaries or that are
necessary to facilitate other lawful activities. All of the other provisions in the directive are
permissive: they identify types of unauthorized use of copyrighted materials that member
countries may permit but are not obliged to do so. The five sub-parts of section 5.2 identify uses
that unless excused would violate only the right of reproduction. The 15 sub parts of section 5.3
identify uses that unless excused would violate both the right of reproduction and the right to
communicate works or make them available to the public. Altogether, there are 21 provisions in
the list; some are extremely specific, such as 5.3(m) which pertains to copying a building plan for
the purpose of reconstructing the building in question, and 5.3(j), which pertains to reproducing
or showing work solely for the purpose of advertising exhibitions or sales of art. Others are
broader and more culturally important, such as 5.3(b), which governs reproductions of
copyrighted works in order to make them a more usable by people with disabilities, 5.3(d),
which pertains to quotation of copyrighted works for the purpose of criticizing them, and 5.3(k),
which governs use for the purpose of caricature, parody, or pastiche activities that – as we’ve
seen – figure prominently in US fair use case law.
To repeat, all of the provisions except for 5.1 are permissive. So, which of these have been
adopted in which countries? It’s a hard question to answer. There are currently 28 member
countries of the EU, although the number will soon shrink to 27. Multiplying 28 countries by 20
optional provisions yields 560 possible implementations. I considered trying to create a chart
indicating which countries have implemented which provisions, but was daunted by the scale of
the task. Fortunately, a selfless group of European copyright scholars have recently done so.
Their work can be found at the website copyrightexceptions.eu.

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Figure 114: Implementation status of the 22 exceptions and limitations to copyright for all 28 EU member states

Figure 114 shows the chart that the scholars have created, indicating the treatment in
each member country of each option. As you can see, some of the directives’ invitations to
create exceptions have been accepted by all or almost all of the member countries. Examples
include 5.2I, which gives latitude to public libraries and museums when reproducing materials,
so long as it’s not used for commercial advantage; 5.3(a), which pertains to reproductions or
communications tied closely to teaching or scientific research; 5.3(b), previously mentioned,
which benefits persons with disabilities; and 5.3(c), which is designed to give the press some
freedom when reproducing or communicating copyrighted materials pertaining to “current
economic political or religious topics”, so long as they give the sources appropriate attribution.
Others are less widely accepted; an unsurprising example is 5.3(l), which pertains to copying for
the purpose of repairing or demonstrating equipment; much more surprising, at least to US
lawyers and residents, is the incomplete acceptance of 5.3(k), which governs parody and its
cousins.
There’s a great deal of information in this chart and I encourage you to pause at this point
and study it. However, one crucial dimension is necessarily omitted from the chart – namely,
how exactly each country has implemented each of the provisions that it has chosen to
incorporate. As Professor Bernt Hugenholtz points out in a recent article, some of the provisions
of article 5 of the directive are drafted in a way that leaves the legislators of the member
countries considerable discretion in this regard, and they have exercised that discretion in very
different ways. Consider, for example, 5.3(d), which permits member countries to privilege
“quotations for purposes such as criticism or review provided they relate to a work which has
already been lawfully made available to the public in which the source is indicated and their use
is in accordance with fair practice and the extent required by the specific purpose”. The
language, and in particular the language I emphasized in the quotation, permits – indeed forces
– a legislature either itself to make a judgment concerning what constitutes fair practice or to

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delegate that judgment to the courts. As Professor Hugenholtz points out, the French legislature
has chosen to define the quotation right narrowly, limiting the privilege to quote analyses and
short quotations justified by the critical polemical educational scientific or informatory nature of
the work in which they are incorporated. Swedish law, by contrast, is more permissive: anyone
may, in accordance with proper usage and to the extent necessary for the purpose, quote from
works which have been made available to the public. The relevant provision of the law in the
Netherlands is also generous, but makes more explicit reference to social practice; a quotation
there need only be “commensurate with what might reasonably be accepted in accordance with
social custom and the number and size of the quoted passages are justified by the purpose to be
achieved”. Many other similarly wide variations on the ways in which each provision has been
implemented in the different member countries can be identified by visiting the website created
by the European scholars, clicking on particular provisions, and then clicking on the countries
and the adjacent maps of the region. Try it. One of the conclusions you’re likely to take away is
that copyright law in the European Union is less harmonized than is commonly supposed.
Putting these variations to one side, it’s important to remember that the list of exceptions
and limitations in article 5 is exhaustive. Member countries, as we have seen, are not obliged to
recognize all and they adapt a subset, but they may not recognize more. Many of the activities
that escape liability in the United States on fair use grounds are dealt with in specific provisions
in the EU’s list, but other things – such as copying student essays verbatim for the purpose of
running a plagiarism detection service – that have been able to pass muster under fair use in the
United States are too new or idiosyncratic to have been anticipated in 2001 and thus would be
hard to justify under the EU’s approach.

Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China

Section 4: Limitations on Rights (summarized)

Article 22: In the following cases, a work may be used without permission from, and
without payment of remuneration to, the copyright owner, provided that the name of
the author and the title of the work are mentioned and the other rights enjoyed by the
copyright owner in accordance with this Law are not prejudiced:

(1) Personal study

(2) Comment
(3) Inclusion for current events
(4) Rebroadcasts for current events
(5) Speeches
(6) Teaching or research
(7) Governmental use
(8) Libraries

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 (9) Free live performances
(10) Copying public art
(11) Translations from Han
(12) Transliteration into braille

China currently employs the same general approach used by the European Union. Article
22 of China’s copyright law contains a list of enumerated exceptions, although it is shorter than
the EU list. Some items are relatively conventional – for example, the ninth exception for
“gratuitous live performances of a published work for which no fees are charged the public nor
payments are made to performers” echoes a provision of the US statute, and the tenth
exception, which privileges “copying, drawing, photographing or video recording of a work of art
put up or displayed in an outdoor public place” is an enlarged version of section 5.3(h) of the EU
directive, which permits countries to privilege “use of works such as works of architecture or
sculpture made to be located in public places”, which in turn echoes but expands upon a narrow
safe harbor in US law. But, two provisions in article 22 of the Chinese statute stand out for their
novelty and scope. Section 9, which creates an expansive privilege for free live performances of
public works, and section 11, which establishes a privilege to translate “a public published work
of Chinese citizen or legal entity from Han language into minority national languages for
publication and distribution in the country”.
Figure 114, displayed earlier, catalogues the implementation of the set of exceptions and
limitations enumerated in article 5 of the EU directive. The green squares identify countries that
have adapted each. Figure 115 includes an overlay that indicates in green which of those

Figure 115: Implementation status of the 22 exceptions and limitations to copyright for all 28 EU member states, with
China added for comparison

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provisions find analogues in the law of China. I use the word analogues deliberately because the
language of the relevant provisions of China’s article 22, whose numbers are shown inside the
green squares, differs significantly from the corresponding language used in the EU. At the
bottom of the chart are indicated the two provisions of the Chinese statute that find no
counterparts in Europe, and, finally, indicated in red are the provisions accepted in at least some
EU countries that have no counterparts in China.
So, as we’ve seen, there are currently two polar positions with respect to copyright
limitations: the open-ended fair use approach, employed in the United States and a few other
countries, and the enumerated exceptions approach, pursued in the EU, China and several other
nations. In between these two models is another group of countries that have adopted what
might be described as hybrid approaches. These combine in some way the ad hoc analysis that
prevails in the United States with the strategy exemplified by the EU of listing specific safe
harbors. Such hybrids come in various shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples.
The relevant provision of the copyright statute of Malaysia contains a very long list of
exceptions, making it resemble the EU regime, but the first provision in the list is unusually
broad: it exempts acts “by way of fair dealing including for purposes of research private study
criticism review or the reporting of news or current events”. The resemblance to the US fair use
doctrine is strongly reinforced by an accompanying provision that lists the factors that should be
considered when determining whether a particular use is fair. These factors are virtually
identical the factors identified in section 107.
The list of enumerated exceptions in India’s statute is even longer. It includes 33 safe
harbors – indeed, the legislature ran out of letters in the alphabet – but, as is true in Malaysia,
the first item in the list is phrased quite broadly, seemingly inviting courts to make their own
determinations concerning which activities within the zones of private use, research, criticism, or
review should constitute fair dealing. India did not invent the idea fair dealing; the phrase and
the concept originated, as one might expect, in the United Kingdom, but the relevant portions of
UK law have recently been substantially revised in ways that move it closer to the United States.
A highly influential report by a commission chaired by Ian Hargreaves prompted parliament to
add to a rather narrow fair dealing defense several important new safe harbors, including one
for caricature, parody or pastiche. To be sure, these revisions fell short of adding a truly open-
ended fair use doctrine to UK law. Indeed, as pointed out by Professor Jamie Boyle, the
commission, of which Boyle was a member, was at pains to renounce the ostensibly vague US
approach. However, as Boyle also points out, when you add all these changes up they come
pretty close to matching the ambit of the US system. That generalization is reinforced by reading
a helpful summary of the current state of UK law put by the UK Copyright Service, to which I
provided a link in the map.
So, to summarize: there currently exists in the world what could be described as a
spectrum of approaches to the identification of exceptions and limitations to copyright. At one
extreme is the United States, the opposite extreme is the European Union, and in between are
several hybrids.

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 So, which strategy is best? That question is often addressed as if it were purely a question
of the optimal legal form. So conceived, the question is a variant of an age-old debate in legal
theory. Fair use is said to be an example of a type of legal norm commonly known as a standard,
while the enumerated exceptions approach is an example of a type of legal norm commonly
known, somewhat confusingly, as a rule. A standard is a norm that makes direct reference to
policy objectives, such as the avoidance of unjust enrichment or, say, minimizing harm to the
environment, and then leaves judges or other officials lots of discretion in deciding how best to
accomplish those ends when resolving particular disputes. A rule, by contrast, constrains
discretion; it requires judges or other officials to respond in a determinant way to a specific set
of readily ascertainable variables. So, for example, a norm that declared that only wise persons
are eligible to be president would be a standard; by contrast, a norm that declares that only
persons over 35 years old may be president, such as the norms currently in force in the United
States, Indonesia and Brazil, is a rule. Here’s another example: a norm prescribing that custody
of children in contested divorces shall be determined by considering only “the best interest of
the child” is a standard; by contrast, a norm proscribing that the community property of a
divorcing couple shall be divided exactly equally between the former spouses is a rule.
Standards and rules, it is widely believed, have characteristic advantages and
disadvantages. For example, standards are more flexible, but also more unpredictable; rules are
more predictable and also less conducive to corruption or bias, but rules are also inevitably both
under over-inclusive and under-inclusive – in other words, they will fail to advance policy goals
as precisely as well-administered standards. So, which is better? The conventional answer is that
it varies by context.
Much of the debate about fair use employs this framework. Should we have more
“ruleness” – in other words, move closer to the EU approach – or should we have more
“standardness” – in other words, move closer to the US approach. Scholars who argue about the
issue in these terms draw on many of the same considerations that figure in the more general
debate about the relative merits of rules and standards. However, close study of the ways in
which these various legal regimes operate in practice casts doubt on the accuracy and utility of
these axes of differentiation.

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 Consider first the question of predictability: it’s “A Pattern Oriented Approach to
commonly said that US law, the regime most like a standard, is, Fair Use” by Michael Madison
as one might expect, highly unpredictable. Whether the (2004)
defendant in a particular case will be able to escape liability by 1. Journalism
invoking section 107 is difficult to determine in advance and
2. Parody and satire
depends, to a distressing degree, on the personalities or
3. Criticism and comment
attitudes of the judge, judges or jury called upon to make the
determination. That’s true, but several scholars have argued 4. Scholarship and research
convincingly not as true as is commonly thought. The reason is 5. Reverse engineering
that over time the courts have tacitly subdivided the universe 6. Legal and political
of cases implicating colorable fair use defenses into subfields argument
and have converged on guidelines concerning how the four
7. Storytelling
factors will be interpreted in each subfield. An example of
8. Comparative advertising,
scholarship in this vein is a 2004 article by Professor Michael
information merchants,
Madison, in which he argues that most fair use cases in the
United States conform to one of eight patterns (listed on the and ordinary personal use
right) and that the results reached in each sector are less
unpredictable than is usually thought. The taxonomies offered by other scholars in this group
differ, but they make the same general argument concerning sector-specific relative stability.
The upshot is that the unpredictability of fair use may not be as severe as the conventional
accounts suggest. The corresponding supposed rigidity and resistance to judicial discretion of
the enumerated exceptions approach may also be overstated. As we have seen, many of the
provisions in the list of exceptions used by many countries give judges a fair amount of latitude
when determining which activities to condemn and which to exempt. This leads to a more
fundamental point: even when the statutes did not confirm such authority on judges, judges
sometimes claim it. China provides important examples. As we’ve seen, article 22 of China’s
Copyright Act, like article 5 of the EU Copyright Directive, purports to be exhaustive. However, as
Professor Seagull Song has shown (“Reevaluating Fair Use in China”, 2011), Chinese judges have
sometimes asserted the authority to exempt from liability activities that do not fall into any of
the 12 exceptions enumerated in the statute. For example, in a 2006 case a state-owned
television station sought to escape liability for an unauthorized broadcast of the plaintiff’s
copyrighted movie by invoking section 22(6) which privileges some activities in connection with
“classroom teaching or scientific research”. Beijing Haidian District Court rejected this argument,
concluding – plausibly – that section 6 only covers uses in connection with in-person classroom
teaching. However, the court did not treat its rejection of section 6 as decisive; instead, it went
on to entertain the possibility that a consideration of (a) the purpose of the defendant’s activity
and (b) its effect on the market for the plaintiff’s work might support denial of copyright liability.
Similarly, in a more recent dispute involving facts essentially identical to the Google Books case
in the United States, the Beijing Higher People’s Court ruled that in exceptional circumstances
exceptions and limitations outside the zone specified in article 22 should be recognized by the

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courts. And what factors should be considered in determining whether a case is exceptional in
the sense? “The intention and type of use, the nature of the work being protected, the
proportion of the work being used, and whether the defendant’s behavior has affected the
normal use of the work and whether it will unreasonably damage the legal rights of the
copyright owner”. Such considerations resemble, reasonably closely, those that a US court
considers under the auspices of section 107. Now, we should not make too much of judicial
statements like these. Other courts in China, at other times, have treated the list of exceptions
set forth in article 22 as truly exhaustive, and even the courts that have ventured outside the
statutory garden have done so cautiously as evidenced by the fact that in both of the cases just
summarized the defendant in the end lost. In other words, the court in each dispute concluded
that the necessary exceptional circumstances had not been demonstrated. One result was that
Google lost in China, whereas it won in the United States. Nevertheless, both cases reveal
Chinese judges tugging a regime that ostensibly exemplifies model number two in the direction
of model number one.
The ways in which courts are called upon to interpret statutes in the middle zone also calls
into question the common assumption that these regimes are less likely to excuse unauthorized
uses of copyrighted materials than type one regimes. For example, in a recent case the Delhi
High Court ruled that commercial reproduction of course packs by a copy shop is not unlawful. In
doing so, the court relied not on the expansive language of section 52(a), which I discussed a
minute ago, but on an aggressive interpretation of one of the specific enumerated exceptions –
specifically, section 52(i), which immunizes “the reproduction of any work by a teacher or a pupil
in the course of instruction”. The court forthrightly tied its ruling to a general policy argument:

Copyright, specially in literary works, is thus not an inevitable, divine, or natural right
that confers on authors the absolute ownership of their creations. It is designed rather
to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the intellectual enrichment of the
public. Copyright is intended to increase and not to impede the harvest of knowledge. It
is intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors in order to benefit
the public.

Viewed from this angle, the activity of the defendant which had the effect of increasing
sharply the affordability of course materials to students should be excused, so the court ruled.
By contrast, a court in South Korea – one of the countries that employ the open-ended model
number one – recently ruled against the fair use argument made by a company claiming,
analogously, that it’s unauthorized activities would have important educational benefits.
The capacity of courts lying in the middle zone to extend the reach of seemingly narrowly-
crafted exceptions is also evident in recent history of Canada. At the start of the 21st century, the
statutory exceptions in the Canadian copyright statute were not especially capacious. However,
as Michael Geist has shown, the Canadian Supreme Court in a series of important opinions read

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those provisions very broadly. Perhaps most importantly, the court, nudged by activists like
Geist himself, led the world in reconceiving the boundaries on copyright owners’ entitlements
not as “exceptions” to an otherwise comprehensive set of authors’ exclusive rights, but as
expressions of and shields for offsetting rights of the users of copyrighted materials. In another
recent essay, Professor Elkin-Koren offers a theoretical justification for such a reorientation.
The bottom line: it’s probably fair to say that overall model number one is superior to
model number two to the extent one values flexibility and generosity of scope, and that model
number two is superior to the extent one values predictability and constraints on judicial
discretion. But the differences between these two approaches on these axes are not as great as
is usually supposed. In determining the ambit instability of the limitations upon copyright, the
overall legal form employed by the legislature in a particular country may be less important than
(a) the details of the individual provisions within that model and (b) the attitudes toward
intellectual property held by the judges who are called upon to interpret those provisions.
Now, returning to the United States for a moment, here’s a final orthogonal note about
legal form. As I’ve indicated, it’s assumed nearly universally that the US fair use doctrine is a
standard, as opposed to a rule, and has both the strengths and the weaknesses of a standard.
But if you examine section 107 and the case law built upon it closely, that characterization
proves not entirely accurate. A true standard, you’ll recall, identifies a substantive goal – like
promoting the best interests of children or ensuring that national leaders are wise – and then
gives judges discretion in advancing that goal. That’s not really what the fair use doctrine in the
United States does; rather, section 107 identifies some factors the judges should consider, but
doesn’t tell them why those factors matter. It doesn’t, in other words, identify the pertinent
substantive goal. The result is the judges in the United States are forced to decide for
themselves what copyright law should be trying to achieve: maximize social welfare, reward
authors fairly, protect personhood interests – as we’ve seen all those are possible aspirations.
Which one is your primary concern will make a big difference in how the statutory fair use
factors are construed and applied. Judges in the United States disagree concerning the
fundamental purposes of copyright; it should thus not be surprising that as a result those judges
disagree somewhat concerning how fair use should be construed. To function as a true standard,
the doctrine would have to identify more explicitly one or more substantive goals. Such an
adjustment of the doctrine would have several advantages, including reduction in the
unpredictability of how it would be applied to novel problems. Such a reform could be
implemented relatively easily at the statutory level by inserting into the preamble of section 107
a statement of its overarching objective. Alternatively, the United States Supreme Court could
sharpen up the normative foundation of the doctrinal revolution it initiated in the Campbell
decision. That leaves only the question of what the substantive objective should be. A possible
answer to that question is presented at the end of the next lecture in this series.

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CULTURAL THEORY

10.1. Premises
As you know by now, there are four main theories of intellectual property in general, and
copyright in particular.
The fairness theory, which finds inspiration in the work of John Locke, centers on the
principle that the law should be organized to provide authors and inventors what they morally
deserve. Somewhat more specifically, the law, seen from this perspective, should award them
property interest or monetary rewards commensurate with their creative efforts. The fairness
approach has disproportionate influence in the United States and other countries influenced by
the common-law tradition, but finds some support throughout the world.
The personality theory, which finds inspiration in the work of Kant and Hegel, is founded
on the principles that intellectual products are extensions of the personalities of their creators,
and that the law should be organized to respect and nourish the psychic bonds between creators
and their expressive products. The dimension of copyright law that is most closely associated
with personality theory is the set of so-called moral rights, which are most generously
recognized and enforced in continental Europe, and in other jurisdictions influenced by the civil
law tradition.
The third approach is the welfare theory, a branch of the broad philosophic tradition of
utilitarianism. The welfare theory of copyright starts with the proposition that intellectual
products are public goods, an unusual and especially important subset of products defined by
two related characteristics: they are both non-rivalrous and nonexcludable. Copyright law, seen
from this angle, constitutes a mechanism employed by governments to prevent such public
goods from being produced in less than socially optimal quantities. The general guideline that
emerges from this philosophic tradition is that the law should be adjusted so as to combine
optimally, on the one hand, incentives for innovation, and on the other hand, mechanisms for
ensuring that the fruits of innovation can be consumed or reused by others. This theory has
gained in strength in recent years. It is now the dominant approach to copyright law, at least in
the United States, in part because of the resonance between it and the utilitarian tenor of the
Constitutional clause on which intellectual property rights founded in the United States, and in

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part because this theory has been refined and popularized by an influential group of scholars,
some of whom have since become judges.
We come, finally, to the fourth theory. This is currently the least well known and least
influential of the approaches, but it is, I think, growing in strength, both among scholars and
among lawmakers. It centers on the principle that copyright law, like other fields of law, should
be organized so as to foster and sustain a just and attractive culture. The cultural theory
incorporates some aspects of the other three theories, but as we’ll see, also stands apart from
them on important dimensions. Like the welfare theory, it’s prospective and consequential – in
other words, it urges us to create a legal framework that will enable or prompt people to behave
in ways that will give rise to a more attractive society in the future. But it differs from welfare
theory in a fundamental respect: it’s not founded on the principle of consumer sovereignty, the
notion that we should measure people’s wellbeing by what they themselves currently desire or
loathe. In other words, the cultural theory takes the risky and controversial position that people
are not always the best judges of their own interests, and that the law should sometimes guide
them in directions they are not currently inclined to go. Like the personality theory, the cultural
theory tries to identify in advance fundamental human needs. However, as we’ll see, the set of
needs that figure in most current versions of cultural theory is different from the set that figures
in personality theory. Cultural theory is also much less willing to privilege the psychic bonds
between artists and their creations over all other considerations.
Like the fairness theory, and unlike the welfare theory, cultural theory is intensely
concerned with justice. However, it’s less interested in individualized conceptions of justice – in
other words, attempts to give individual workers or authors what they have earned through
their labor – and more concerned with distributive justice – in other words, ensuring that all
persons are given fair shares of material resources, and above all, fair access to the
opportunities necessary for full human flourishing.
In the second segment of this lecture, it will become apparent that these differences in
orientation prompt advocates of cultural theory to recommend a pattern of reforms to copyright
law that is significantly different from the pattern commended by any of the other approaches.
As my tone undoubtedly conveys, I myself find this approach to be the most congenial and
powerful of the four. The result is that my presentation of this approach will be less
dispassionate than were my presentations of the other three. I’ll do my best at the end to
identify the main weaknesses of cultural theory, but it would be hopeless for me to conceal the
fact that I find it to be, on balance, the most powerful of the four approaches. Needless to say,
you should make your own judgments concerning the merits and demerits of this perspective.
One of the reasons why I have waited until now to present this argument to you is to ensure that
you are familiar with the rival approaches and their doctrinal implications, and thus inoculated
against my favoritism.
Here’s how I plan to organize my presentation. In the first segment of the lecture, I will
outline the premises of this approach. In the second segment, I will canvas various issues in
copyright law, with which you are now familiar, and suggest how cultural theory might

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illuminate them. In the third, I will address a few possible reforms outside of copyright law that
the cultural theory might commend, and then discuss the principal limitations and vulnerabilities
of this argument. So, let’s begin.
At the outset, it should be emphasized that, like each of the other three approaches,
cultural theory is best understood as a family of related arguments, not a single, tightly-knit,
determinant argument. Put differently, it’s an orientation – a way of thinking about life, culture,
and law – not an algorithm. Partly as a result, people who adopt this approach disagree among
themselves, just as, as we have seen, the economists who dominate the welfare approach, and
the philosophers who dominate the fairness approach, also disagree among themselves. Who,
then, are the people who have contributed to the cultural theory? They are surely not limited to
law. Indeed, most of the inspiration from this approach comes from outside law. In philosophy,
it has deep roots in the work of Aristotle and more modern expression in the arguments of
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In political theory, roots can be found in the writings of the
18th century commonwealth men, such as Trenchard and Gordon in England, the early Karl Marx,
Alexis de Tocquevile, Hannah Arendt, and modern communitarian theorists. Recently, the work
of several social psychologists, including Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, Martin Seligman, and
Christopher Atman, have lent substantial support to this perspective.
Among legal scholars, and specifically among the subset of legal scholars who focus on
intellectual property, important contributors include Keith Aoki, Yochai Benkler, Julie Cohen, Neil
Netanell, Madhavi Sunder, Talha Syed. Some of their works are listed on the map. If you’re
curious about their perspectives, follow the links. My own work in this area began with an essay
I wrote on fair use in 1988 and has continued to guide my exploration of different dimensions of
intellectual property ever since. Indeed, I find myself closer to this approach now than I did a
decade ago. During the remainder of this lecture, I will focus on my own particular variant of
cultural theory. These other scholars are, as I say, pursuing analogous projects, but likely none
would agree with all aspects of my argument. The most fundamental of
the premises upon which the argument is based is the proposition that Conditions necessary
there exists such a thing as human nature – it’s hard to discern, but real for the full realization
and stable. Because of their nature, people flourish under some of personhood
conditions and suffer, or atrophy, under others. From those observations
1. Life
emerges a normative guideline. Social and political institutions, including
law, should be organized so as to facilitate human flourishing. Eight 2. Health
conditions contribute to human flourishing. Not all eight are essential to 3. Autonomy
a full and satisfying life. Indeed it’s doubtful that anyone has ever fully 4. Engagement
experienced, on a sustained basis, all eight. Life isn’t perfect. But these 5. Self-expression
are the components of a good life. The most obvious is life itself. The
6. Competence
flourishing is possible only if you are alive – somewhat more specifically,
7. Connection
if you are able to live a life of normal length. Nuances lurk in the adjective
“normal,” but we need not tarry to consider them here. The second, 8. Privacy

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nearly as obvious, is health. Illness impairs flourishing. Freedom from psychic and physical pain is
one of the conditions that contributes to living well. As Martha Nussbaum observes, health, in
this sense, includes reproductive health. Now things begin to get more subtle and controversial.
A substantial degree of autonomy is important to human flourishing. No one, of course, is wholly
self-made or self-directed, but a life without a substantial degree of self-determination is a life
not fully lived. George Kateb, the person from whom I first learned political theory, put the point
memorably. “One’s dignity resides in being, to some important degree, a person of one’s own
creating, making, choosing, rather than being merely a creature or a socially manufactured,
conditioned, manipulated thing, half-animal and half-mechanical, and therefore wholly
socialized.” Kateb, in this passage, was drawing in part on the work of John Stuart Mill, who also
emphasized the constitutive value of choice. The same theme figures heavily in the writings of
many other liberal theorists, including John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. It also infuses Yochai
Benkler’s commentaries on the affordances enabled by participation in information networks.
It’s important to note three refinements of this idea. First, autonomy does not mean
freedom from social connections. On the contrary, it means, rather, that the bonds and
communities through which we define ourselves are at least partly chosen, not inherited or
coerced. Second, the dimension of autonomy that turns out to contribute most to well-being is
the subjective feeling of self-determination, which is only partly dependent on the objective
number of options that one has. Third, autonomy not only makes one feel better, it’s also
adaptive. Social psychologists have found that autonomous motivations, meaning motivations
arising out of voluntary choice, increase job performance, particularly when the task at issue is
complex and requires creativity.
Of course, one can have too much of a good thing, even autonomy, as Barry Schwartz has
shown. But a substantial degree of self-determination is key to the good life. The fourth of the
conditions conducive to flourishing is engagement, by which I mean participation in shaping an
important dimension of one’s environment. Many groups of theorists have emphasized one or
another aspect of this principle. Karl Marx, for example, placed great weight in his insightful
early writings on engagement in work. People ought to have access to what he called meaningful
work, by which he meant work that requires skill and concentration, presents the laborer with
challenges and problems he can overcome only through the exercise of initiative and creativity,
and is part of a larger project he considers socially valuable and must take into account in
making his decisions. Notice that the fact that the job is connected to a socially valuable project
is part of this vision, but not the whole of it. Fulfillment comes only through participation in the
choices that determine the direction of the venture and whether it succeeds. That’s where
engagement lies. Notice also the beneficial role played in this vision by risk. Certainty that a
venture will succeed innervates engagement.
But work is not the only arena in which one can find fulfilling engagement. Another is
politics. This theme figured prominently in the work of classical Republican political theorists,
including the pamphleteers and activists who helped power the American Revolution. They
celebrated what they called civic virtue, a key component of which was active participation in

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politics. But not any sort of participation – rather, they privileged participation in a particular
posture – altruistic, deliberative, genuinely committed to the welfare of the polity as a whole,
not to the advancement of self-interest or factional interest. Again, we see the conjoining of
involvement, choice, and, last but not least, commitment to a larger enterprise one believes to
be socially beneficial. In Martin Seligman’s words, “using one’s signature strengths and talents to
belong to and serve something bigger than oneself.” Within legal scholarship, this theme found
expression in a highly influential set of articles during the 1980s and 1990s that sought to
reorient constitutional law and administrative law around the idea of altruistic, deliberative
citizenship. Key figures in that surge were Frank Michelman and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein later
went on to become a central figure in the Obama administration.
Yet another arena for self-fulfilling engagement is culture itself. We live today in a cloud of
symbols and images that, like our jobs and our polities, are all too often out of our control. The
result is cultural alienation analogous to alienation in the workplace. Retaking some degree of
responsibility and control for the shape of that semiotic environment is another way of achieving
engagement.
Each of these groups of theorists argued vigorously for the benefits, individual and
collective, of the particular kind of engagement they celebrated. My own view is that no one of
these forms of participation has pride of place, and that it’s hopeless to try to do them all. There
just aren’t enough weekends. The more general insight, latent in all three variants, is that active,
risky, altruistic engagement in the shaping of a significant aspect of one’s world is key to human
flourishing.
Closely related to engagement in this sense is self-expression. Projecting oneself into or
onto the world has long been regarded as constitutive. It’s at this point that the cultural theory
of copyright overlaps most clearly with the personality theory. Indeed, the reflections I discussed
in the second lecture by T. H. Green and others concerning the importance of preserving
opportunities for self-expression could be simply incorporated here by reference. A more recent
manifestation of the same theme can be found in the work of Larry Lessig, in particular his book
on remix.
Competence, we know intuitively, is also crucial to human flourishing. We feel better, and
we do better, when we have a sense that we are capable of performing the tasks we address –
not that we are certain of success, but that we have the requisite talents and skills. A large body
of literature in social psychology confirms this intuition. A sense of competence is key to
learning, and a sense that one is incompetent is strongly correlated with depression. Again, the
subjective feeling of competence is at least as important as the reality for both performance and
well-being. This fact creates interesting complications and possibilities when combined with the
fact that assessments of competence are often distorted in systematic ways. Unskilled people,
psychologists tell us, typically overestimate their competence, while highly skilled people
typically underestimate their competence. But this is a nuance, not the core point.
The seventh theme in the list should not be surprising. We flourish through connection
with others. We atrophy alone. The vocabulary employed to express this age-old insight in

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different disciplines varies. A philosopher, such as Nussbaum, might use the term “affiliation.”
The psychologists, Deci and Ryan, use the term “relatedness” and place it on a par with
autonomy and competence as a fundamental human need. In political theory, the theme finds
clearest expression in communitarian arguments.
Finally, privacy – on this issue, like self-expression, the cultural approach of copyright
overlaps with the personality theory. Both invite attention to the fundamental human need for
relief from the crowd, access to settings conducive to experimentation, and intimacy.
The list is rough and tentative. It is grounded in millennia of reflection and experience, but
it is still being tested and refined. Date categories are not watertight. On the contrary, these
conditions reinforce and run into one another. That, in turn, means that the set of functionings
essential to human flourishing could be organized somewhat differently. But with those
qualifications, there’s remarkable convergence by scholars working in many disciplines
concerning the importance of these eight things to a good life.
Having cataloged briefly the conditions that contribute to human flourishing, the next
issue is how widely available we should strive to make those conditions. An enormous literature
within political theory addresses that question. Many different criteria have been proposed for
how much equality or inequality with respect to
these or any other resources is morally justified. Contending positions on distributive justice
Three of the many contending positions are listed ▪ “Universal basic capabilities” –
on the right. Exploring this literature would take us
Nussbaum/Sen
very far afield. Fortunately, for present purposes,
▪ “Sufficientism” – Harry Frankfurt
we need not do so because there’s broad,
although, of course, not unanimous, agreement ▪ “Democratic equality” – Elizabeth
among the contending camps that all societies Anderson
today are characterized by unjustifiably high levels
of inequality. In other words, our task for the foreseeable future is to adjust our institutions so
as to make the eight conditions constitutive of a good life more widely and equally available. At
some point, the issue of just how equal will become salient, but unfortunately, not in the near
term. So when considering modifications of copyright law, we can postpone efforts to resolve
this fundamental issue decisively and instead commit ourselves to substantial movement in the
direction of equality.
How, then, could we make a good life more widely available? Many possible initiatives
undoubtedly spring to mind. Suppress both organized and disorganized violence. Increase the
availability of health care and vaccines. Reorganize workplaces to increase opportunities for
genuine participation, and so forth. It would be foolish to attempt here to itemize all of the
political and legal reforms that would help advance the goals I have posited. Although some
initiatives are obvious, others are not at all. I’m just now beginning work on a book, tentatively
entitled Good Life, Good Law, that will attempt a partial survey of this large landscape. It will
likely take years. For the time being, we can and should limit our attention to dimensions of
reform that are likely to implicate the subject at hand – namely, copyright. As you might expect,

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those dimensions all involve improving our culture, broadly defined. Four dimensions of culture
seem especially closely connected to realization of the aspirations we have identified thus far.
The first is cultural diversity. Diversity fosters human flourishing in many interlocking ways. It
increases both the fact and the experience of choice. Thus, at least if those choices concern
things that matter to the chooser, diversity increases autonomy. Diversity also increases
invitations and opportunities for self-expression and for engagement to other dimensions of the
good life. The way in which these themes reinforce one another was recognized long ago by Mill.
“The more multifarious the lifestyles and ideas on public display in a society, the more each of its
members must decide for herself what to think and how to act, thereby developing her own
mental and moral faculties, and rendering the culture as a whole even more rich, diversified, and
animating.” For many of the same reasons, a rich artistic tradition sustains opportunities for
flourishing of many sorts. This point was made crisply by Ronald Dworkin, one of the foremost
Anglo-American legal theorists. “The more complex and resonant the shared language of a
culture, the richer it is in the raw materials of representation, metaphor, and allusion, the more
opportunities for creativity and subtlety in communication and thought it affords the members
of the culture.” This claim, and the related notion that governments should actively seek to
foster a rich artistic tradition, is unlikely to shock Europeans, but it is far from universally
accepted in the United States or many other countries. It should be.
Third, education, it turns out, is the linchpin of the good life. Autonomy, engagement, self-
expression, and competence are all dependent upon the kind of knowledge and skills that only
education can provide. Recognizing that education is the preconditions for many dimensions of
human flourishing has two important implications. First, it highlights the importance of ensuring
that education is widely – ideally, universally – available. Second, it should guide reform of
extant educational systems. Our goal should be to enable and encourage lifelong learning that
supports creativity, competence, and confidence. We currently fall far short of that. Technology
is rapidly expanding our capacity to construct a system for vibrant, empowering, lifelong
education available to people worldwide. We should adjust copyright law to facilitate that
project, not impede it.
The fourth dimension of a nourishing culture is democracy – by this, I mean, to the extent
feasible, participatory democracy, not representative democracy. There are two aspects of this
theme. The first and more familiar is political democracy. There are, of course, well-known
reasons grounded in considerations of legitimacy and the quality of governance for vesting
political power in the people at large. I will not rehearse those arguments here. For present
purposes, I’m more concerned with a less instrumental value of political democracy, the value
that most impressed Tocqueville when he visited the United States in the early 19th century –
specifically, the beneficial effect of political engagement on the people who participate in
governance. Active citizenship, in short, is good for the heart and the soul, as well as the polity.
For essentially the same reason, we should strive to increase participatory democracy with
respect to cultural meanings, what John Fiske, Michael Madow, and Jack Balkan have called
semiotic democracy. This theme merits some more elaboration.

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 During the 19th and 20th centuries, the cloud of images and symbols I mentioned a minute
ago gradually, then rapidly, became increasingly dense. Equally important, control over the
content of that cloud became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer companies,
advertising houses, and political consultants located in a few countries. The semiotic power, in
other words, was held by fewer and fewer people. To be sure, the concentration was never
total. As cultural populists point out, opportunities for cultural resistance – for recoding
centrally-fashioned and distributed symbols – survived. But those opportunities shrank, and the
refashioned images almost never have the currency of the originals.
Information technology not only is enabling radically new forms of education, as I just
mentioned. It is also beginning to reverse this trend toward the concentration of semiotic
power. Digital technologies are enabling an ever-larger group of people to engage in remixing of
cultural forms. Surveys done by my colleagues John Palfrey and Erst Gosser suggests that,
already, roughly one in four young people worldwide now engage in remixing digital content
into their own artistic creations. That number will surely climb. This is a trend that should be
celebrated and facilitated, not denounced. It implicates favorably several of the dimensions of
the good life. Specifically, it expands opportunities for autonomy, engagement, self-expression,
competence, and connection. Now, to be sure, it’s crucial that we not lose sight of the
importance of preserving the incentives and rewards for the creation of the cultural artifacts
that others can then remix. But there may be ways of tuning copyright law to reconcile these
competing goals. That possibility and many other potential reforms of the copyright system,
we’ll take up next.

10.2. Implications
In the previous segment of the lecture, I outlined the premises of one variant of that approach.
We now turn to some implications for copyright law of that variant. The question I’ll try to
answer is: if for our aspiration were to foster A, opportunities for the good life, and B, the
cultural conditions that sustain such opportunities, how might we adjust the law? Listed on the
next page are 13 zones of possible legal reform. Items 1 through 8 involve copyright law proper.
Items 9 through 11 involve alternatives or supplements to copyright. Items 12 and 13 involve
other intellectual property regimes. In this segment of the lecture, I’ll consider the first eight
which, as I say, concern copyright law itself. In the third and last segment of the lecture, I’ll
consider, among other things, the supplementary implications alluded to in items 9, 10, and 11.
The remainder I’ll leave to another time and place.
This list of possible zones of reform is meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive. It’s
designed to suggest how the theory might be applied, not to provide a comprehensive recipe for
rebuilding copyright.
The first doctrinal implication is probably the most obvious. Copyright law affects
education in countless ways. We should adjust and apply the law so as to enable, not interfere
with, the kind of education I sketched and advocated before the break. For example, in lecture
number eight in this series, I discussed the provision of the US copyright statute that attempts to

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facilitate distance learning. We saw that that provision, Zones of possible legal reform
popularly known as the TEACH Act, is almost completely 1. Education
ineffective in practice. Its limitations are so severe that almost 2. The idea/fact/expression
no distance learning venture relies on it. Certainly, I’m not distinction
relying on it for this course. Right now, meaning the winter of 3. Fair use
2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization is 4. Moral rights
discussing a possible model provision that countries might 5. Libraries
employ in the future to enable d istance education. When 6. Formalities
addressing this issue on the national or the global level, our 7. Compulsory licensing
goal should be to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunities 8. Differential pricing
for distance learning enabled by new technologies without, of 9. Supplementary government
course, corroding crucial incentives to create educational funding
materials in the first instance. A useful exercise in this regard 10. Alternative compensation
might be to ask what legal reforms would be necessary to system for recorded
make possible an edX course analogous to the one supported entertainment
by this lecture series but in a field where the thicket of 11. Traditional knowledge
copyrights is more dense. Constructing an edX course that 12. Trademark reform
focuses on law, and in particular on US law, is relatively easy, 13. Patent reform
because the primary source of materials – statutes, judicial
opinions, and so forth – are in the public domain in the United States. Developing a similar
course that deals with contemporary art, for example, or a modern social science would be
much harder, because a much smaller percentage of the pertinent source materials are publicly
available. It’s worth asking yourself which of the rules we have examined thus far in this course
would I amend in order to make such a course feasible. In particular, how would I qualify
copyright owners’ existing rights to control the reproduction, distribution, and public
performance of their works?
Here’s another dimension of the same general theme. As we will see next week, most
countries now have statutes penalizing the distribution and use of technologies that circumvent
technological protection measures – in other words, technologies that neutralize the forms of
encryption commonly used by copyright owners and others to prevent unauthorized access to or
use of copies of their creations. Sometimes, those statutes inhibit education – for example, by
frustrating the work of teachers and students in film studies courses. As we will see, some
exceptions to the anti-circumvention rules have already been carved out so as to facilitate
education. We can and should create more such exceptions.
Both of the possible reforms I’ve discussed thus far would curtail the entitlements of
copyright owners, but enabling education does not always point in that direction. Sometimes, it
might be achieved by strengthening the rights of copyright owners. For instance, as we saw in
lecture number eight, software firms frequently strive to separate the set of potential
purchasers of their products into at least two groups, commercial users and educational users,
and then to charge much higher prices to the former than to the latter. Here are two examples

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you’ve seen before. Of course, the reason that firms do this is to increase their profits – they’re
not altruistic. Differential pricing of this sort, they have discovered, is lucrative, but it also
redounds the benefit of education. Many more students and faculty are able to obtain and use
application programs if the firms are able to maintain these practices than if they are not.
Viewed through the lens of the cultural theory I’ve outlined, that’s something we should applaud
and preserve. How? By adjusting legal doctrines to help the software firms engage in this
behavior. More specifically, by defending the rules that inhibit arbitrage which corrodes such
differential pricing systems. One such rule we saw is the interpretation of the first sale doctrine
adopted recently by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the Autodesk case. That
interpretation enables software firms, by characterizing their transactions with their customers
as leases of copies of the programs rather than as sales of copies of the programs, to suppress
secondary markets in the copies they provide to students and teachers, and that in turn will
enable the firms to keep the prices of those educational copies low. And that’s what we want. I
hasten to add that there may be other implications or applications of the Autodesk ruling that
we should be less happy about, but this one seems commendable.
A less obvious, more general application of cultural theory concerns the
idea/fact/expression distinction that, as we saw in lecture number one, underlies the copyright
systems of every country in the world. Copyright law, as you now know, does not protect either
ideas or facts. It only protects original ways of expressing those ideas and facts. Many
applications to this principle are straightforward. To take an immediate example, the somewhat
heretical claim I made a few minutes ago, namely that the Autodesk decision may be consistent
with a sociocultural theory of copyright, is an idea. You are thus free to describe that idea to
anyone else in any medium provided that you use your own words to express it, but you may
not without my permission use the sequence of words that I employed to express the idea. Now
in reality, as you know, I have already given permission for many uses of my exact words through
the Creative Commons licenses under which these lectures are distributed, but ignore that fact
for the purposes of this illustrative hypothetical.
Even though the general principle is clear enough, applying it in borderline cases is
sometimes difficult. For example, what if the particular way in which I’ve expressed the
defensibility of Autodesk is the only efficient way of expressing that idea? Then may you use my
exact words? Yes, under the merger doctrine. What if my language is not the only efficient way
of expressing the idea but one of a small set of efficient ways? May you use my formulation? Not
so clear. Here’s another edge case. In the previous lecture, I described the facts of the Harper &
Row decision in which Victor Navasky took some 300 words from President Ford’s
autobiography. Among the most distinctive phrases lifted by Navasky where those in which
President Ford described his deliberations concerning whether to pardon his predecessor,
Richard Nixon. An illustrative excerpt from Navasky’s article is set forth below.

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 In justifying the pardon, Ford goes out of this way to assure the reader that
“compassion for Nixon as an individual hadn’t prompted my decision at all.” Rather, he
did it because he had to “get the monkey off my back one way or the other.”

The language that is underlined and in quotation marks was taken from Ford’s book. The
remaining language was Navasky’s. Justice Brennan, dissenting in this case, contended that two
aspects of the copyright system should have been construed so as to afford Navasky some
latitude. First, says Brennan, some leeway must be given to subsequent authors seeking to
convey facts, because those wishing to express the ideas contained in factual works often can
choose from only a narrow range of expression. Second, Brennan contended that when
evaluating the fair use defense weight should have been given both to the factual character of
the plaintiff’s work and to its public importance. But even Brennan did not challenge the claim
that quoting 300 of Ford’s words in this way constituted a prima facie violation of section 106(1)
of the statute. Justice O’Connor, writing for the majority, was even less forgiving. Here’s her
language.

The Nation has admitted to lifting verbatim quotes of the author’s original language
totaling between 300 and 400 words and constituting some 13% of the Nation article.
In using generous verbatim excerpts of Mr. Ford’s unpublished manuscript to lend
authenticity to its account of the forthcoming memoirs, the Nation effectively
arrogated to itself the right of first publication, an important marketable subsidiary
right.

Viewed through the lens of the cultural theory I have outlined, this is troubling.
Participatory political democracy, as we’ve seen, is one of the fundamental features of an
attractive and stimulating society. Political democracy is only possible if the citizenry is informed.
It’s hard to imagine an issue more central to political debate and engagement than the precise
reasons why one president decided to pardon another president for a crime.
Copyright law already contains a device that would have enabled the Supreme Court to
respect this consideration. Language of the sort lifted from the manuscript by Navasky could
quite plausibly have been described as a fact. Generalizing the point, we or the Supreme Court
could have declared that any language or material essential to political deliberation and civic
engagement is either a fact or an idea and thus up for grabs in the political arena. That would
have left Navasky off the hook without needing to reach the fair use doctrine, and the result
would’ve been to encourage journalists in the future to make more widely available analogous
utterances by major public figures.
Here’s another example of the same point. You’ll recall our discussion in lecture number
six of the case that considered whether Martin Luther King complied with the statutory

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formalities established by the 1909 copyright statute when delivering his “I Have a Dream”
speech on the Washington Mall. Held, King had complied with those formalities, and thus his
estate could continue to assert a copyright in the speech. Again, viewed through lens of cultural
theory, that outcome is problematic. Broad public access to the extraordinarily powerful
language in which King expressed his vision of civil rights would foster democracy and civic
engagement. Rephrasing this consideration in the language of copyright law, shouldn’t the text
of the speech now be considered a fact? This principle need not threaten the core of copyright
law. What type of candy Kramer dropped into the body of a patient during one episode of the
Seinfeld show does not constitute a fact, but statements by public figures essential to
deliberation and civic engagement should be. A more radical extension of the same general
approach would entail denying copyright protection to materials to which subsequent authors
must have access in order to express themselves effectively. That principle arguably already
underlies not only the merger doctrine but also the scenes a faire doctrine, which as we’ve seen
denies copyright protection to images or scenes that are as a practical matter essential to work
within a particular genre. The merger and scenes a faire doctrines have cousins elsewhere in
intellectual property law, for example, in the rule that trademarks lose protection when they
become generic and in the nominative use defense also in trademark law. If we interpreted or
supplemented merger and scenes a faire this way, we would deny copyright protection to works
or aspects of works that subsequent speakers need to be able to speak effectively. For example,
we would permit historians and appropriation artists to use news photos that they could not
have taken themselves. By contrast, if we were persuaded by the logic of the Bridgeport Music
case, we would not permit rap artists to sample sound recordings without permission because,
as you now know, the law, at least in the United States, permits rap artists and others to
recreate those recordings in the studios, and thus they do not need access to the originals in
order to work effectively.
Next topic. As you know by now, there are two general regulators of the scope of
copyright in the United States. The first is the idea/fact/expression distinction which we have
just reconsidered from the vantage point of cultural theory. The second is fair use. How might
cultural theory illuminate fair use? You will recall that when we were discussing welfare theory
in lecture number four I suggested that each of the various entitlements that might be assigned
to copyright owners could be evaluated on the basis of a ratio, the numerator of which is the
economic benefits that entitlement would provide to creators and thus the incentive it offered
to creativity and the denominator of which is the social losses that entitlement would cause.
Generally speaking, we would like to assign to copyright owners entitlements to carry with them
high ratios, i.e., that, to use Louis Kaplow’s words, “give us a big bang for our buck.” And we
would like to deny to copyright owners entitlements that carry with them low ratios – in other
words, that cause social welfare losses that are large compared to the economic benefits they
confer on copyright owners. The fair use doctrine offers one device we might employ for this
purpose. We could declare to be fair unauthorized uses that encroach on entitlements that have
low ratios and declare to be unfair unauthorized uses that encroach on entitlements that have

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high ratios. A modified version of this methodology might be employed if our beacon were
cultural theory rather than welfare theory. Specifically, we could declare to be fair unauthorized
uses that encroach on entitlements that provide copyright owners modest benefits but erect
substantial impediments to the pursuit of a just and attractive society. On the other hand, we
could declare to be unfair unauthorized uses that encroach on entitlements that impede the
good society in ways that are modest compared to the benefits they provide to copyright
owners.
Here’s an easy example. Commentary and criticism are culturally beneficial for many
reasons. They help consumers determine which books they wish to read or which films they wish
to watch before they waste time sampling them. Equally important, engagement in commentary
and criticism is enlightening, and we should look for opportunities to facilitate it. That in turn
suggests that copying copyrighted materials for the purposes of commentary and criticism
should be privileged under the fair use doctrine. Copying for parody would be an especially
clear-cut case. As you know, parody is, as a practical matter, privileged in the large majority of
cases in the United States. But not all countries are as lenient in this respect. They should be.
Here’s a harder example. You’ll recall from the preceding lecture that the meaning of the
crucial term “transformative” in US fair use doctrine is currently unclear. An interpretation of
that term that associates it with physical modifications has fallen out of favor. But two other

Case color legend: Defendant prevailed (green); Plaintiff prevailed (red); Unresolved (black).

Figure 116: Leading cases where “transformative” was defined as “creative” highlighted by the green ellipse

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interpretations in which “transformative” is translated as socially beneficial and in which it is
associated with cases where the purpose of the defendant’s work is different from the purpose
of the plaintiff’s work currently contend. Some scholars and judges favor neither. When I
summarized this debate, I suggested that there is a fourth possibility. The term “transformative”
could be translated as creative. This was the interpretation I offered many years ago in an essay
on fair use, and I continue to think it’s the best one. A defendant’s work should be treated as
transformative if and only if it’s creative – somewhat more specifically, if it either constitutes or
facilitates creative engagement with intellectual products. All of the cases that fall within the
green ellipse in Figure 116 involved uses that fit this definition. All consequently should’ve been
deemed transformative, which would likely have led to findings that they constituted fair uses.
To be sure, this proposed interpretation of transformativeness would not be a panacea.
Although it would increase the coherence and thus the predictability of the doctrine, it would
still call upon courts to make difficult decisions concerning degrees of creativity. This would be
especially problematic in the context of motion picture adaptations of novels or stories. How
creative would they have to be to escape liability if unauthorized? A guideline that might help
when addressing such questions would be that movies that retell in a different medium the
same story told in the original novel would be insufficiently creative to constitute fair uses,
whereas movies that told different stories would be deemed fair. So, for example, the Harry
Potter movies would require licenses, while Apocalypse Now would not, on the assumption that
Heart of Darkness was still in copyright. But one can readily imagine intermediate and thus
harder cases. In some, construing transformative as creative would help to reorient fair use but,
would leave many issues unresolved.
Acceptance of this suggestion would increase the set of circumstances in which
defendants could successfully invoke the fair use doctrine, but the theory I’ve outlined is not
always pushed in that direction. In particular, viewed from the perspective of the theory I have
sketched, consumptive as opposed to transformative uses of copyrighted materials do not merit
as much solicitude as the courts have sometimes given them. Recall Justice Blackmun’s
comment in the Betamax case.

The situations in which fair use is most commonly recognized are listed in section 107
itself. Fair use may be found when a work is used “for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching, … scholarship, or research.” … Each of these uses
reflects a common theme. Each is a productive use resulting in some added benefit to
the public beyond that produced by the first author’s work. The fair use doctrine, in
other words, permits works to be used for “socially laudable purposes”. I am aware of
no case in which the reproduction of a copyrighted work for the sole benefit of the user
has been held to be fair use.

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 I am much of his mind. While the productive – in other words, creative – uses of
copyrighted materials deserve lots of scope, consumptive uses – in other words, uses for the
sole benefit of the user – do not. Adoption of Blackmun’s position would lead to another
heretical result. The declaration in the Betamax case that time shifting broadcast TV shows and
films is a fair use might well have been wrong. But hold on. Wouldn’t adoption of Blackmun’s
position have doomed VCRs? No. It probably instead would have resulted in a voluntary royalty
system. Purchasers of VCRs would have paid a premium, which in turn would have been paid to
the owners of the copyrights in the taped shows and films. This would have caused an increase
in the cost of VCRs, and that cost might well have reduced somewhat the pace at which this
technology spread, first in the US population and then globally. But from the standpoint of the
cultural theory offered here, that would not have been so terrible.
A final comment about fair use. At the end of the preceding lecture, I suggested that the
US version of the fair use doctrine suffers from a fundamental defect. It sets forth a set of four
factors that judges must consider but does not indicate why those factors matter. The judges
called upon to apply the doctrine thus must decide for themselves what the goal of the
copyright system is and then construe the factors to advance that goal. Application of the
doctrine is thus very hard to predict in advance. Adoption of the approach outlined in this
lecture could address that defect. If lawmakers were willing to articulate a vision of the sort
offered here and tie fair use to it, the result would be to reduce considerably the notorious
uncertainty of this dimension of copyright law.
Let’s now move on to the sensitive subject of moral rights. When set against the backdrop
of cultural theory, one aspect of moral rights is suspect – the right of integrity. As you know, the
right of integrity, when fully implemented, protects artists and authors from the destruction or
mutilation of their works. The result inevitably is to curb the interests of the people we used to
call consumers to remix their creations. Artists’ interest in self-expression of course deserves
considerable respect and protection, but perhaps not as much as some jurisdictions, particularly
in continental Europe, currently afford them. In some contexts, the artists’ interests may have to
be tempered by legal recognition of the equally important interests of consumers in self-
expression and the overall cultural importance of semiotic democracy.
With respect to unique or limited edition works, perhaps preservation of the current
regime is, on balance, sensible. No one should be permitted to melt down or desecrate one of
the few castings of Rodin’s Thinker. But when copies of a work are not scarce, modification and
remixing should be freer. An example would be colorization of black and white movies. So long
as copies of the original film remain available, we should tolerate, even encourage, the creation
and dissemination of colorized versions.
Other dimensions of moral rights, however, stand up much better to scrutiny from the
standpoint of cultural theory. The right of attribution, for example, seems closely tied to the
fundamental human need for self-expression, the ability to project one’s identity into the world
and to be recognized by others. Requiring recognition of that sort would not materially impair
the opportunities for remixing and secondary creativity. One doctrinal adjustment that could

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accommodate this insight would be to add to the US fair use calculus a requirement like that
currently in the United Kingdom’s fair dealing system, namely a duty to give credit where credit
is due.
Libraries contribute importantly to public education, defined expansively, as was
suggested in the previous segment of this lecture. Thus, we should be skeptical of aspects or
applications of copyright law that make it harder for libraries to operate. An example would be
public lending rights which exist in Europe but as yet nowhere else. Such rights give copyright
owners the ability to collect fees from libraries. If the libraries are able easily to pass along the
cost of those fees to governments, which in turn pay for them out of general tax revenues, then
the net result may not be bad. Indeed, it may give rise indirectly and inadvertently to a form of
governmental funding for education. But in most developing countries, governments would not
be able to absorb these costs, and thus the adoption of public lending rights would seriously
burden libraries and likely force some of them to curtail their operations. That would be plainly
inconsistent with the cultural theory and should be resisted.
The functions traditionally assumed by libraries are increasingly being assumed by other
organizations. An example is Google, which sought in its ill-fated Google Print Library Project to
make all books published in the world widely available in digital form. This was a highly
commendable ambition. To be sure, there were opposing considerations, most obviously the
interests of the authors and publishers being appropriately compensated. The best way of
reconciling these goals was far from obvious, but one maneuver was promising. Oren Bracha
proposed that we accept in this particular setting an opt-out rather than an opt-in rule. In other
words, Google or other organizations should be permitted to digitize books and make the digital
versions publicly available unless and until the copyright owners object. Shifting the burden to
the copyright owners would have huge social benefits. Most importantly, it would enable
widespread distribution of so-called orphan works, works that may still be in copyright but
whose owners cannot be readily identified. Opening up all such works for public use unless and
until the owners made themselves known and objected would do much to facilitate the
dissemination of knowledge critical to a good society, and the burden on copyright owners
would be slight. This brings us to formalities. In lecture number six, I suggested that many
scholars now believe that the modern trend of abolishing formalities as preconditions to the
acquisition or enforcement of copyrights is regrettable. The cultural theory sketched here
suggests some of the reasons why. By granting copyrights automatically to creative works, we
needlessly limit the scope of the public domain, and by failing to require compliance with a
comprehensive registration system, we needlessly frustrate many potential licensing deals that
would enable socially beneficial activities.
Cultural theory can also lend some support to the shaky arguments I discussed at the end
of lecture number eight in favor of compulsory licenses. Specifically, two kinds of compulsory
licenses look somewhat better when viewed from this angle – those that enable modifications of
copyrighted works provided that the modifiers pay a governmentally-set fee, and those that give
a break to educational activities, such as public broadcasting. The former, such as the cover

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license in section 115, had the effect of increasing the diversity of cultural products available to
the public. Think of the richness of the menu of renditions of classic musical compositions that
the cover license has enabled. The latter, of course, facilitate education broadly conceived and
an informed citizenry.
A few minutes ago, I mentioned an example of differential pricing, specifically in the
context of educational discounts for software. I now want to return to this issue and address it
more broadly. Differential pricing of copies of copyrighted works is a very complicated subject
when viewed from any angle. Assessed from the standpoint of cultural theory, it offers some
intriguing possibilities but also poses some dangers. The principal opportunity is that differential
pricing can have the beneficial effect of equalizing access to entertainment and informational
products across income classes and countries and thus promotes the kind of distributive justice
that figures importantly in cultural theory. This possibility is suggested by the facts of the
Kirtsaeng case, which as you know is currently before the United States Supreme Court. Supap
Kirtsaeng is a student who financed his education in large part by persuading his relatives living
in his native Thailand to purchase inexpensive copies of textbooks that had been manufactured
and sold in Thailand and ship them to Mr. Kirtsaeng, who was then studying at Cornell University
in upstate New York. The large differential between the price at which the books were being
sold in Thailand and the retail price in the United States enabled Mr. Kirtsaeng to make a healthy
profit selling the books on eBay for somewhat less than the US list price. The issue currently
before the Supreme Court is whether John Wiley, the owner of the copyrights in the books,
should be able to stop this practice.
Admiration for Mr. Kirtsaeng’s entrepreneurial spirit and unease concerning the
magnitude of the damage award to which he is exposed if he loses suggests the answer should
be no. But consider what will happen if Kirtsaeng prevails. Publishers, feeling generalizations of
his conduct, will almost certainly reduce the price differential between the US and poorer
countries, thus rendering arbitrage of the sort he engaged in less attractive. The publishers could
achieve this by lowering the US retail price, but for obvious reasons that’s unlikely. Instead, they
will probably raise prices in Thailand and other developing countries. The result is that the
residents of those countries will face higher financial hurdles when seeking educations.
Assuming that we wish to apply our cultural theory on a global scale this is an unattractive
outcome.
For similar reasons, we may wish to acquiesce in the technological protection measures
that help film studios engage in so-called region coding of DVDs and now Blu-ray discs. The
effect of those systems is that the disks sold in one region cannot be played on players that are
sold in a different region. One of the goals of such systems is to enable the studios to sell discs at
lower prices in poorer regions than in richer regions without fearing importation of the cheap
versions into the wealthier regions. From the standpoint of distributive justice, it seems a good
thing, not a bad one. But differential pricing is not an unalloyed good. Viewed from the
standpoint of cultural theory it has at least four potential drawbacks. First, it sometimes results
in a constriction, not expansion, of the set of people to whom the good at issue is provided. This

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all depends on the shape of the demand curves in the subdivided markets. Second, as Wendy
Gordon observes, differential pricing can increase what she calls the granularity of social life, the
sense that all of our conduct triggers microcharges. Third, as Yochai Benkler and Eric von Hippel
contend, differential pricing can corrode a culturally beneficial practice and spirit of altruistic
sharing – in other words, giving away your stuff for free. Last but not least, the dream that
currently bedazzles many copyright owners of slicing their markets ever more finely creates a
powerful incentive to collect extremely detailed information concerning the habits, incomes,
and wealth of those customers. The result is a serious risk to privacy, one of the conditions that,
as you know, figures in our vision of the good life. How can we balance these competing
considerations? No blanket solution is readily apparent. The set of rules governing differential
pricing that, all things considered, is most conducive to the good society unfortunately varies by
context.
This concludes our examination of the possible implications of the particular variant of
cultural theory that I have outlined here for the reform of copyright law proper. Next, I’ll
consider a few ways in which the same theory might be applied outside copyright law and then
consider some overall objections to this whole approach.

10.3. Supplements and Concerns

You will recall that when discussing welfare theory, I identified five ways in which a government
can seek to offset the under production of public goods, such as literature, art, and scientific
innovations. To review, those five strategies are – first, the government can provide the public
good itself, as it does with respect to navigation, AIDS, and space research. Second, the
government can select and subsidize private innovators, as it does with respect to much
research involving health related sciences. Third, the government can offer prizes to successful
innovators, an increasingly popular approach. Fourth, the government can adopt laws that
reinforce innovator’s self-help strategies, such laws include protections for trade secrets, and
the kind of anti-circumvention rules I mentioned a minute ago and that we will examine in more
detail next week. Fifth, and not least, the government can protect producers against competition
in the reproduction, distribution, and performance of their works.
As you know by now, copyright law is an example of the fifth approach. The topic for
today is cultural theory, not welfare theory, but the same five options are relevant when we cast
about for ways to advance the kinds of society commended by cultural theory. Some might be
more efficacious than reforming copyright law itself. For example, if we believe that this set of
cultural products being produced today is too thin to sustain the kind of culture and the set of
opportunities for artists that we want, we could, as we’ve done in the previous segment of this
lecture, tried to tune the copyright system. Or instead, we could supplement the incentives
created by copyright protection with government subsidies for the type of work at issue. Several
European countries already do this with respect to cinema. European national governments and
some regional governments offer grants to filmmakers, typically new filmmakers or filmmakers
pursuing unconventional projects, that supplement the revenues they can make by selling or

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exhibiting copies of their films. Where does the money come from? Typically from taxes, either
general tax revenues or taxes on other forms of entertainment. The result is increased diversity
in the films available to consumers. Whether the net result is unbalance attractive is perhaps a
good test of the merits of this approach.
An even more radical possibility is the one I considered briefly in lecture number four. If
we despaired of relying on the copyright system to compensate fairly the creators of musical
compositions and films, we might consider replacing the copyright system altogether with
respect to online distribution of sound recordings and films with an alternative compensation
system. The gist of such a system, you’ll recall, is that fees would be collected, directly or
indirectly, from businesses that capitalize upon consumers’ demand for digital recordings, but
currently pay nothing to the creators of those recordings. Such businesses include Internet
service providers, manufacturers of consumer electronic equipment, and media related
application programs.
The funds collected in this manner would then be distributed to the creators. The
formulas by which they were distributed would likely vary by country. In the United States,
where suspicion of government is intense, the money would likely be parceled out among
copyright owners in proportion to the relative popularity of their works. In Europe, as Philippe
Aigrain has argued, relative popularity would likely be alloyed with other criteria when
determining how the money is divided. Once such a system were in place, online distribution of
movies and recorded music would be legalized.
Viewed from the standpoint of cultural theory, such a system would have two main
advantages over our current regime. First, it not only would provide consumers lawful access to
many more cultural products at low cost, it would free them legally to modify and redistribute
those artifacts, thus enhancing semiotic democracy. No longer would YouTube’s copyright
sniffing software suppress mash-ups that happen to contain snippets of other people’s material.
Incidentally, YouTube’s software has balked at some of the lectures in this series, forcing us to
appeal those rejections on the grounds that the snippets that I employ are shielded by fair use.
Whether such appeals, however well founded, will continue to work remains to be seen. Back to
main story. Second, by enabling artists to earn good incomes by providing their works directly to
the public, such an alternative compensation system would sharply increase access to the
variant of the good life associated with the creation of art. As we’ve seen, an alternative
compensation system would not be perfect. Its disadvantages are cataloged below, but it would
have great strengths.

Advantages

1. For consumers
a. Large cost savings – they would pay less under this system than under
the current combination of business models
b. Unlimited access to recorded media

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 c. The set of cultural products available to them would be larger and more
diverse – reason: the diminished power of intermediaries would enable
a larger and more diverse set of artists to reach consumers directly and
thus earn sufficient revenue to cover costs
d. Increased opportunities for creative reuse of cultural products –
semiotic democracy
2. For creators
a. Opportunities to distribute works directly to consumers – reduced
dependence on major intermediaries
b. Increased income
3. For suppliers of devices and services – increased taxes offset by increased
demand
4. For public
a. Decreased litigation
b. Decreased law-breaking – avoid prolonged, culturally corrosive “war on
piracy” closely analogous to the current “war on drugs”

Disadvantages

1. Cross-subsidies
a. Result: distortions in consumer behavior, deadweight losses, and
unfairness
b. Vary substantially with the method of taxation
c. Mitigate with Ramsey pricing (Benkler)
2. Moral rights concerns
a. Classic moral rights (rights of Integrity and rights of Attribution)
b. Increased opportunities for creative reuse of digital copies threaten
both
c. Possible responses:
i. Give artists the option to retain or relinquish rights of integrity –
perhaps use financial incentives to increase their willingness to
give up these rights, or a higher payout rate
ii. Recognize that, with respect to cultural products distributed in
multiple copies, rights of integrity are obsolete; by contrast,

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 rights of attribution should enjoy increased protection (cf.
Tushnet)
3. Discretionary Governmental Power
a. Potential for inefficiency or corruption – cf. some collecting societies
b. Risk that officials would abuse their authority
c. Rent-seeking – lobbyists would seek to shape the distribution formula
4. Leakage across national boundaries – the more broadly this system were
adopted, the less serious would be this concern

One of the most difficult issues currently confronting lawmakers throughout the world is
how, if at all, to shield so-called “traditional knowledge” against unauthorized uses. Roughly
speaking, the term traditional knowledge refers to cultural products developed over long
periods of time, typically by the members of indigenous groups. Examples include traditional
music, dances, fabrics, costumes, folklore, and religious icons. Such things do not fit well the
template of copyright law. In part because the authors of such things are usually collective, hard
to identify, and long dead. In addition, the concerns of the groups who object to the non-
permissive use of traditional cultural expressions (sometimes abbreviated as TCEs) are usually
quite different from the combination of economic and personhood interests implicated by most
copyrighted works. If copyright law doesn’t work well in this setting, what would work better?
That’s far from clear. Countries continue to experiment with a wide variety of models. Various
insight into those possible ways of dealing with traditional knowledge might be derived from the
cultural theory we have outlined here. Unfortunately, those insights conflict. Cultural theory is
thus arguably helpful in identifying some things we should strive to achieve or protect, but not
particularly helpful in telling us how to do so. Here are some of the competing considerations.
▪ The use or performance of TCEs is one of the ways in which some communities
define and sustain themselves. Because preservation of communities is one of the
things commended by cultural theory, we should strive if possible to protect these
practices from corrosion or dissipation.
▪ Protecting TCEs from appropriation by persons or firms outside the indigenous
groups that created and sustained them would also promote cultural diversity by
helping to resist the trend towards global cultural homogenization.
▪ Allowing indigenous groups to charge, or otherwise be compensated for uses of
their TCEs, would also provide them a source of funds that would mitigate their
impoverishment and promote distributive justice. Note however, that this third
consideration is in some tension with the first and second, which seemed to
presume that the TCEs would not spread.
On the other side of the ledger, protections for traditional knowledge are hard to
reconcile with the value of semiotic democracy – the merit of enabling all persons, both

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members of and outsiders to the indigenous groups, to refashion cultural artifacts of all sorts.
Such protections are also hard to reconcile with the value of autonomy, of enabling all persons
to choose for themselves the cultural forms through which they will define themselves. More
broadly, the impulse to protect TCEs against unauthorized used or modification, seems rooted in
a static conception of identity that diverges from the more dynamic conception of identity that
figures in the conception of the good life offered here. So what’s the right approach? It’s very
hard to say. That question seems best left to the seminars that will accompany this lecture
series.
All copyright theories have weaknesses, sore points. The theory I’ve outlined today is no
exception in this regard. Cultural theory has two main weaknesses, both of which are likely
apparent by now. The first is commonly referred to as the perils of paternalism, or as it’s
sometimes called parentalism. Whichever term you prefer, it means efforts by governments to
limit people’s freedom or otherwise channel their behavior, not to protect the interests of
others, but for their own good. Legal rules of this sort are not unknown. Familiar examples are
rules requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, rules forbidding people to sell organs, bans on
self-enslavement, prohibitions on the use of certain drugs, and the non-waivable character of
the implied warranty of habitability in landlord tenant law. Nevertheless, such efforts are
hazardous and controversial.
The reason why the specter of paternalism arises in the present context is that the vision
of the good life, upon which this variant of cultural theory is founded, does not align exactly with
what most people currently subjectively desire. Thus, to the extent the theory commends
modifications of copyright law that will afford people more access to a life of the sort, and seeks
to stimulate their appreciation of such a life, it does not defer entirely to people’s own
assessment of their best interests, but instead pushes them in directions they might not be
inclined to go, for their own good.
Three factors mitigate the troubling implications of that admission. The first, is that the
gap between the vision outlined in the first segment of this lecture and people’s subjective
desires is not as large as one might think. The findings of the group of scholars sometimes
known as the Princeton Group concerning the ways in which people assess their own wellbeing
are reassuring. In particular, the so-called day reconstruction method, pioneered by this group
and applied to the members of many classes and to the residents of many countries, reveals that
people take more pleasure in some of the things commended by the good life, such as intimacy
and friendship, and less pleasure in consumption and the trappings of status than has
traditionally been assumed. Second, none of the possible reforms I’ve outlined force people to
do anything. You’re not coercive. Instead, they’re designed to alter incentives in an effort to
invite or nudge, to use the term popularized by Thaler and Sunstein, people into better lives.
Third, it’s not the case that adoption of these proposals would introduce paternalism into
copyright law for the first time. As we’ve seen, extent copyright law already contains some even
more coercive rules that constrain people’s freedom for their own good. The clearest examples
are the non-waivable termination rights in sections 203 and 304 of the US statute, which I

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discussed in lecture number six. Why are those rights non-waivable? Because we wish to
prevent artists from signing away their entitlements foolishly. In other words, we disable them
from acting in ways that we think are not in their own best interests.
These three factors in combination may assuage our unease somewhat, but not entirely.
Two arguments against initiatives of this general sort remain worrisome. The first is the
fundamental argument made by liberal political theorists and leaders that governments ought to
remain neutral concerning alternative theories of the good. The second is a prudential
consideration. Even if paternalistic rules are not objectionable in principle, it’s foolhardy to
entrust government officials with the power to override people’s own conceptions of their best
interests.
This brings us to the second of the two major sore points about cultural theory. It would
increase the degree to which the shape of our culture is determined by government officials.
The risks associated with that strategy are familiar. Bureaucrats are not famous for wisdom. The
persons and firms who stand to gain or lose from the decisions of the bureaucrats would
dissipate scarce social assets trying to persuade those bureaucrats to take one tack or another.
In the worst-case scenario, the officials’ decisions might be corrupt, either in the strong sense of
being purchased by the affected parties, or the softer sense of being motivated by a desire to
please the parties upon whose favor, and donations, the officials depend.
These risks can be reduced by carefully selecting the officials in whose hands power is
placed or by instituting checks on their authority, but they cannot be eliminated altogether.
Whether they are fatal to this enterprise, I leave to you.

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SUPPLEMENTS TO COPYRIGHT

11.1. Secondary Liability

The topic for today is supplements to copyright. Included in that topic are two main clusters of
legal rules – the doctrine of secondary liability and the rules recently adopted by many countries
that reinforce so-called technological protection measures. As usual, I’ll be focusing on the law in
the United States, but I will also mention how the issues addressed today are implicated by
multilateral treaties and how countries other than the United States handle them.
If copyright law were always obeyed, either because people voluntarily complied with its
provisions or because they were perfectly enforced, the rules we consider today would almost
certainly not exist. But as I’m sure you know, copyright law is not always obeyed. Indeed,
broadly speaking, the frequency of disobedience seems to be increasing. Some level of
disobedience is not necessarily terrible. We tolerate moderate levels of illegality in lots of fields.
For example, violations of speed limits and of rules prohibiting the possession of certain drugs
are common and have not, as yet, proven socially catastrophic. Indeed, in the context of
copyright law, some degree of disobedience may be affirmatively beneficial. Infringement
provides a mechanism by which people who could not afford the prices at which copies of
copyrighted works are sold can gain access to those works. Because, as you know, copyrighted
works are non-rivalrous, no one is injured when poor people gain access to copyrighted works
for free. If people who could and otherwise would pay for access to the works begin to obtain
them illegally for free, then the copyright owners do, of course, forfeit revenue. But so long as
the levels of illegality remain moderate, the resultant leakage is tolerable and, as I say, arguably
socially beneficial. If the leakage becomes too severe, however, then copyright owners begin to
suffer serious injuries, and all of the various values advanced by copyright are imperiled.
Lawmakers in such circumstances feel pressure to address the problem in some way. How? One
obvious answer is to increase the civil and criminal penalties for engaging in copyright
infringement. By making illegal conduct more costly, lawmakers could reduce its incident. We’ll
consider strategies of this sort next week in the last lecture in this series when we discuss
remedies. For now, I’ll note only that increasing penalties is not always efficacious and can have
some serious side effects.

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 In this lecture, we’ll consider two other ways in which lawmakers have attempted to curb
copyright infringement and to reduce the associated leakage of the system. The first of those
strategies consist of bringing pressure to bear on third parties, specifically parties who do not
themselves violate any of the exclusive rights enjoyed by copyright owners, but who enable or
encourage violations by others. The basic idea is that, if we can force the third parties to
withdraw their support for the infringers, or, better yet, induce those third parties to act
affirmatively to curb infringement, we can increase the levels of compliance with the law. Before
plunging into the details that currently implement this broad strategy, we should pause to
consider the theories underlying this approach as a whole.
There are two general approaches used to justify and shape this strategy. The first is
simple but important. Encouraging illegality is widely seen as immoral. The person who
encourages lawbreaking may not be as blameworthy as the person who engages in it, but it’s
still blameworthy to some extent and thus rightly subject to legal penalties. As we’ve seen, two
of the general theories of copyright, the fairness theory and the personality theory, are founded
at least in part on moral considerations. Viewed the lenses of those theories, authors and artists
deserve either rewards for their labor or continuing control over projections of their
personalities. Conduct that fails to respect their rights is immoral. Encouraging conduct that fails
to respect authors’ and artists’ rights is, thus, also immoral. Perhaps to a lesser degree but
immoral nonetheless, and thus properly subject to legal penalties. Sentiments of this sort, as
we’ll see, color many judicial opinions in this field.
The second approach is more complicated and less intuitive. It’s associated with the
welfare theory of copyright and more broadly with the utilitarian approach to law in general of
which the welfare theory of copyright is one branch. This second approach is sometimes called
gatekeeper theory. That term was invented by Professor Reinier Kraakman who pioneered this
argument. In a seminal article, Kraakman points out that in a diverse array of contexts, the law
enlists third parties to frustrate or penalize recalcitrant primary wrongdoers. Examples include
the liability sometimes imposed on bartenders or social hosts when their drunk customers or
guests cause injuries to themselves or others, penalties imposed on accountants when their
clients engage in fraud, and penalties employed on employers who hire illegal immigrants. In
other words, employers who facilitate the unlawful behavior of the immigrants themselves.
Kraakman offers the following analytical framework to guide determinations of when it makes
sense to employ this general technique.

Successful gatekeeping is likely to require:

1) serious misconduct that practicable penalties cannot deter;

2) missing or inadequate private gatekeeping incentives;

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 3) gatekeepers who can and will prevent misconduct reliably, regardless of the
preferences and market alternatives of wrongdoers; and

4) gatekeepers whom legal rules can induce to detect misconduct at reasonable cost.

For subtle application of this framework, to override the problems, many but not all of
which involve securities regulation, I encourage you to consult Kraakman’s article, which is
available in the spring 1986 issue of the Journal of Law Economics and Organization. Our concern
here is, of course, not the general theory of gatekeeper liability but with copyright law. As
applied to copyright, Kraakman’s guidelines would suggest that penalties should be imposed on
third parties in hopes of suppressing infringing behavior by others only if:

1. Otherwise the incidence of copyright infringement would be unacceptably high

because direct infringers cannot be controlled by socially acceptable sanctions.
2. The third parties, left to their own devices, would not intervene to curb
infringement and indeed might foster it.
3. The third parties we might target are in a position to effectively suppress
infringement. In other words, the direct infringers cannot engage in unlawful
behavior without their aid.
4. The social and economic costs of penalizing the third parties are not
unacceptably high.

In many of the contexts I’ll be discussing this lecture, the first two requirements are
probably met. The third and fourth, however, are not so invariably satisfied. When assessing the
imposition of secondary liability in a particular context or case, you should ask yourself, if we
penalize this particular third party, will the incidents of direct infringement diminish? Or will the
direction infringers just find some other enabler? And what are the social costs of imposing
secondary liability in this setting? This last question will be especially salient when dealing with
so-called dual use technologies – in other words, technologies that can be and are used both to
facilitate illegal behavior and to facilitate lawful and socially beneficial behavior. When
considering the use of secondary liability to suppress such technologies, you should consider
carefully whether the social benefits of blocking the bad uses exceed the social harms of
blocking the good uses. If not, then the use of secondary liability reduces rather than enhances
net social welfare.
So, to review: deployments of secondary liability in copyright law can and frequently are
evaluated or justified from one of two perspectives – the immorality of helping someone to
violate the rights of others, and the possible, though not inevitable, net benefits to social welfare
of enlisting gatekeepers to control otherwise resistant forms of misconduct. With those two
perspectives in mind, let’s turn to the law.

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 In the United States, the liability of third parties for facilitating the infringing behavior of
others is managed by two offsetting sets of rules. The first set consists of doctrines of
contributory and vicarious liability. The second consists of a set of statutory “safe harbors,”
which are embodied in Section 512 of the statute, that immunize organizations that otherwise
might be liable either for direct infringement or more likely for contributory or vicarious
infringement. This doctrinal structure should by now be familiar to you. The doctrines of
contributory and vicarious infringement give copyright owners a reasonably generous set of
rights. Section 512 then carves out of those rights some specific exceptions and limitations. This
pattern, I hope you see, resembles the relationship between Section 106 on one hand and
Sections 107 through 122 on the other. Broad grants of rights subsequently qualified by
exceptions.
The history behind this particular incarnation of the structure is unusual, but the structure
itself is typical of copyright law. I will first briefly outline the main features of these supposed
sets of rules and then examine a few of the cases in which courts have struggled to apply them.

17 USC § 106

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the
exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or
other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work
publicly;

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes,
and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion
picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and

(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means
of a digital audio transmission.

The doctrines of contributory and vicarious infringement were developed by the courts
with little or no guidance from the legislature. Sometimes these doctrines are said to be rooted
in the language of Section 106 of the statute, which, as you can see above, gives copyright
owners the exclusive right to “do or to authorize” any of the things we have considered in the

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past four lectures. Third parties who encourage copyright infringement might be said to be
“authorizing” the infringing behavior, which, as you can see, Section 106 forbids. But this is a
pretty thin read on which to rest a massive doctrinal edifice. It’s more accurate and honest to
acknowledge that the courts have developed these doctrines on their own, and that the
copyright statute does not meaningfully guide them.
The two doctrines are close cousins but have different origins. Contributory infringement
emerged from general tort law. It’s said to implement the general principle that one who
directly contributes to a tort should be held responsible along with the tortfeasor himself or
herself. The role played by the moral principle I mentioned a few minutes ago should be
apparent in this principle. By contrast, vicarious infringement is an outgrowth of the law of
respondeat superior, the branch of the law of agency that governs the responsibility of
employers for the misconduct of their employees. In the early 20th Century, the courts extended
the respondeat superior principal well beyond employment relations to govern a variety of
relationships in which defendants did not themselves engage in copyright infringement but had
economic interests that were intertwined with those of parties who did engage in copyright
infringement. By the middle of the 20th Century, the two doctrines had evolved to contain the
following requirements. To hold a defendant liable for contributory infringement, a plaintiff
must show three things.

1. That someone had engaged in or was engaging in direct infringement;

2. That the defendant had actual or constructive knowledge of that infringement;
and
3. That the defendant materially contributed to that infringement.

By contrast, to hold a defendant liable for vicarious infringement a plaintiff must show
three somewhat different things.

1. That someone had engaged in or was engaging in direct infringement;

2. That the defendant benefited financially from that infringement; and
3. That the defendant had the right and ability to supervise the direct infringement
– in other words, to stop it and failed to do so.

Note that while actual or constructive knowledge is essential to contributory

infringement, it’s not necessary for vicarious infringement. In that sense, vicarious infringement
partakes more of the principle of strict liability than its contributory infringement cousin.
The classic illustration of these two doctrines was distilled from a set of cases in the early
th
20 century that involved dance halls (refer to Figure 117). Suppose that a musical group
without permission performs some copyrighted musical compositions in front of a public
audience. The playlist, in other words, the set of songs the group plays, had been selected by the
group’s manager. The owner of the hall in which the performance takes place keeps a portion of
the ticket prices paid by the members of the audience and makes no effort to prevent the group

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 Figure 117: Actions that a copyright owner can take against parties for publicly
performing their work in a dance hall without permission

from playing the songs without permission. Under these circumstances, the owners of the
copyrights in the songs would have three causes of action. A claim against the group for direct
infringement, namely, as you know by now, a violation of the public performance right
embodied in Section 106(4). A claim against the manager for contributory infringement because,
although the manager himself did not publicly perform any compositions, he plainly knew of the
band’s plan and encouraged it. And finally, a claim against the owner of the hall for vicarious
infringement, because even if the owner did not know of the band’s plan, he is profiting from
the band’s behavior and he failed to exercise his clear power to stop them.
All of this is straightforward, I hope. Now, let’s consider a few modern cases where the
application of these principles is less clear-cut.
A prosaic but influential case was decided by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in
1996. The defendant, Cherry Auction, was the operator of this flea market, located in Fresno,
California. A flea market, otherwise known as a swap meet, is a marketplace where a large
number of independent vendors sell merchandise, typically inexpensive or used merchandise, to
customers who come hunting for bargains. In this instance, the vendors, as is typical, paid
modest rental fees to Cherry Auction. Cherry Auction provided those vendors booth space,
operated the parking facilities, and advertised the marketplace. In addition to collecting fees for
the vendors, Cherry Auction collected entrance fees from the customers. Finally, Cherry Auction
reserved the right to exclude any vendor for any reason. The plaintiff, Fonovisa, Incorporated,
owns the copyrights in a large number of Latino sound recordings. Fonovisa complained several
times at Cherry Auction that some of the vendors in the flea market were selling pirated copies
of Fonovisa’s recordings, to no avail. Finally, Fonovisa brought suit against the flea market.

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Because Cherry Auction was not itself copying or distributing Fonovisa’s works, Cherry was not
liable for direct copyright infringement. But if the facts were as Fonovisa alleged, then some of
the vendors were surely violating Section 106(3) and were not shielded by the first sale doctrine
embodied in section 109(a). If the reasons why the vendors were engaged in copyright
infringement are not clear to you, you should pause here to review the first segment of lecture
number eight. Fonovisa contended that Cherry Auction was secondarily liable for the vendors’
unlawful behavior, both under the doctrine of contributory infringement and under the doctrine
of vicarious infringement. The trial court was unpersuaded and dismissed the suit for failure to
state a claim upon which relief could be granted. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
reversed and remanded the case. In the opinion explaining its decision, the Ninth Circuit clarified
and arguably expanded both secondary liability doctrines. With respect to contributory
infringement, the court ruled that Fonovisa had sufficiently alleged knowledge of the infringing
sales on the part of Cherry Auction. More importantly and controversially, the court ruled that
“material contribution” of the sort required by the doctrine of contributory infringement could
be established by showing that the defendant “provided the site and facilities for known
infringing activity”. With respect to vicarious infringement, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Cherry
Auction controlled the flea market site and had unconstrained authority to expel any vendor. It,
thus, plainly had the right and ability to supervise the infringing activity. More importantly and
controversially, the court ruled that the “financial interest” required to establish vicarious
liability could be established by showing that the infringing behavior “enhanced the
attractiveness of the defendant’s venue to potential customers” – in other words, that the
infringing conduct acted as a draw, pulling customers toward the defendant’s site and thus
enabling the defendant to earn more money. It should be apparent that this is an expansive
interpretation. Taken literally, it would encompass many kinds of behavior in which the financial
benefit to the defendant is more indirect than the sort enjoyed by the dance hall owners.
This concludes our examination of the basic principles of secondary liability. Next, we’ll
examine a set of recent cases that have applied or modified those principles in context in which
defendants supplied goods or services that are sometimes used for infringing purposes and
sometimes for non-infringement purposes.

11.2. Dual-Use Technologies

The cases we’ve considered thus far involved defendants who operate sites – dance halls, flea
markets, and so forth – in which third parties engaged in copyright infringement. Somewhat
different, and more difficult, are cases in which the defendant sells a product, or provides a
service, that its customers sometimes employ in ways that violate the copyright laws and
sometimes employ in ways that do not. As I mentioned earlier, such cases have come to be
known as “dual use technology cases.” There have been four major cases of this sort in the
United States:
▪ The Sony (US S. Ct. 1984), or Betamax case, which I discussed in connection with the fair
use doctrine in lecture number nine;

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 ▪ A set of rulings concerning the Napster file sharing service (CA9 2001);
▪ A decision by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit involving one of the
successors to Napster, known as Aimster (CA7 2003); and
▪ A second decision by the Supreme Court in the Grokster case (US S. Ct. 2005).
I’ll briefly describe the facts and holdings of these decisions.
In the Sony case, as you already know, the defendant prevailed. In all three of the file
sharing cases, by contrast, the defendants lost. However, the ways in which they lost varied
considerably. Put differently, the courts adjusted and then readjusted the law of secondary
liability to address the changing structure of the file sharing systems. A charitable interpretation
of this sequence of cases would depict it as an illustration of the flexibility and wisdom of
common law adjudication. An uncharitable interpretation would see it as a manifestation of
what is sometimes called result orientation – in other words, a determination by the courts to
suppress a social practice they saw as pathological, and a willingness to contort the law to
achieve that end. Which is the more apt interpretation, I leave to you.
The basic facts of the Betamax case, as you’ll recall, are that the film studios licensed
television networks to broadcast their films to viewers with the expectations that the viewers
would watch the embedded ads, and then buy some of the products promoted by those ads.
The advertisers in turn would pay the TV networks fees, some of which the networks paid to the
studios in the form of license fees. This longstanding business model was disrupted by Sony
when it began manufacturing and selling VCRs, which, among other things, enabled the viewers
to avoid watching the embedded advertisements, thus endangering the flows of revenue
through the system. Because the viewers were using their
machines to make verbatim copies of the studios’ films, the Holdings of Sony
studios might have brought suit against the viewers, but the 1. The manufacturer of a device
impracticability of that approach prompted the studios, that can be used to violate the
instead, to bring suit against Sony, the manufacturer of the
copyright laws is liable for
devices the viewers were employing. In the end, as you
contributory infringement, if
know, the studios lost in the Supreme Court – barely. The
two interlocking rulings that enabled Sony to escape and only if the device is not

liability are set forth on the right. The second ruling we capable of substantial
discussed in lecture number nine. Our concern here is with noninfringing uses.
the first ruling. The key phrase in it comes at the end: 2. Timeshifting copyrighted
“capable of substantial non-infringing uses.” Using the first programs is a fair use.
letters of those words as an abbreviation, this dimension of
the Sony decision might be called the COSNU defense.
This standard for secondary liability, which the court adapted from a loosely analogous
aspect of patent law, is quite generous to defendants. Taken literally it means that the
manufacturer and distributive of a dual use technology does not need to show that his product
is often used for legal purposes, or even that it is ever used for legal purposes, but merely that it
is capable of being used for substantial legal purposes. Sony of course, easily passed that test

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because as we’ve seen, time shifting, which the Supreme Court for the reasons we’ve already
considered determined to be lawful, was the most common use of VCRS. But the way in which
the court phrased the COSNU defense seemed to offer an escape hatch to defendants whose
products were much less often employed legally.
The relationship between the COSNU defense announced and applied in the Betamax
case, and the overall doctrine of secondary liability, is not entirely clear, but it appears that the
way in which the defense engages with the standard requirements is by negating the element of
knowledge, which as you know, is one of the requirements of contributory infringement. More
specifically, the fact that a device is capable of substantial non-infringing uses prevents the
plaintiff, in the court’s words, from showing that the defendant “has sold equipment with
constructive knowledge of the fact that its customers may use that equipment to make
unauthorized copies of copyrighted material.” Now in theory the studios could have overcome
that impediment if they could have shown that Sony had actual knowledge that a particular
customer was using her machine illegally. For example, that a particular customer was using her
machine for librarying, which even the majority of the Supreme Court seemed to assume did not
qualify as a fair use. The studios did not make such a showing, and probably could not have done
so. But this possibility, as we will see, played a role in some later cases.
Another ambiguity in the Betamax opinion concerns whether the COSNU defense applies
only to claims of contributory infringement, or also to claims of vicarious infringement. Almost
all the court’s opinion focuses on contributory infringement, but in one cryptic footnote,
specifically footnote number 17, the court observed that “the lines between contributory
infringement and vicarious liability are not clearly drawn. And that recent analysis of
respondent’s unprecedented contributory infringement claim necessarily entails consideration
of arguments and case law which might also be forwarded under other labels.” The court
thereby left open the possibility that its ruling applied to vicarious liability as well. Again, this
possibility didn’t much matter in the Betamax case itself, because in any event, the studios could
not show that Sony had the right and ability to supervise the ways in which its customers used
its machines and so could not establish vicarious liability, even if the COSNU defense were
inapplicable to such claims. But it would make a difference in some subsequent cases.
So, that’s where things stood as of 1984. For the next 15 years, the COSNU defense,
announced in the Betamax case, stood as a powerful bulwark for firms developing products and
services that were sometimes used to engage in copyright infringement. What destabilized this
doctrinal structure was the rise of file sharing. The next three cases in the sequence struggled to
reconcile file sharing with the Betamax framework. The first, and arguably most famous of the
three file sharing cases, was Napster. I’ve mentioned the Napster system and the associated
legal controversy before. Here’s a somewhat more detailed description of the facts.
Napster consisted of a website and an application program that together enabled music
fans to exchange copies of sound recordings (refer to Figure 118). The Napster website, which
was www.napster.com, contained a directory listing all of the recordings that could be found on
the hard drives of all of its members’ computers, and an index to those recordings. A music fan

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 Figure 118: How Napster’s MusicShare software functioned

who wished to join the community and gain access to those recordings, would first log into the
website and download from it a free piece of software known as MusicShare. After installing the
software on his computer, the user would sign up by selecting a unique username, typically
fictitious, and a password. He would then create on his computer a “user library” into which he
would copy any recordings, typically in the form of MP3 files, that he wanted to share with other
users. He would then log into the Napster system. His software would talk to the software on
Napster’s servers. One result of that conversation is that a list of the files on his computer would
appear in the Napster directory. The files themselves would not be copied onto the servers of
Napster’s site, just their names. That’s the significance of the hollow circles in the diagram in
Figure 118.
Other users would be doing the same thing. Suppose one of the subscribers, say user
number two, wanted to find some recordings by Eric Clapton. She would submit a search
request using Clapton’s name. If any of Clapton’s recordings appeared in the index, the software
would identify which of the libraries of currently logged in subscribers contained those
recordings, and provide that information to the application on user number two’s computer.
That information would enable her computer to connect directly to one of those host
computers, here belonging to user number one, download a copy of the file directly from the
host computer, and save it on user number two’s hard drive. The fact that the two users’
computers were in direct contact explains the name peer to peer copying. User number two
could then either play the file directly from her computer or, if she had a CD burner and the

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appropriate software, she could convert the MP3 file to a WAV file and copy it onto a CD, which
could then be played on any CD player.
Now if only a few people engaged in this practice the owners of the copyrights and the
compositions and recordings most likely would have tolerated it, just as they had tolerated the
longstanding practice of teenagers making so-called mixed tapes for their friends. But the
system grew extraordinarily fast. By October of 2000, roughly a year after its launch, it had 32
million subscribers. Four months later it had 80 million. Nor was it limited to the United States;
indeed, the percentage of people with internet access who used Napster was higher in Canada,
Argentina, Spain, and Brazil, than it was in the United States. Copyright owners, unsurprisingly,
became increasingly concerned. Soon after the launch of the service, the Napster executives
contacted the record companies and sought to obtain licenses to distribute their works. The
record companies considered such an arrangement. Indeed Bertelsmann, the German parent
company of one of the record companies, extended a loan of $80 million to Napster, and tried to
persuade the other record companies to license their catalogs to Napster. But in the end, the
record companies decided to litigate rather than negotiate.
As in the Betamax case, the companies could have brought suit against Napster’s
subscribers, who are actually engaged in copying their works and distributing unauthorized
copies. But again, the impracticability of that option prompted the copyright owners to pursue
Napster instead. Because Napster was not itself copying recordings or distributing copies, the
owners did not have a good claim for direct infringement. But they could and did contend that
Napster was secondarily liable for the conduct of its subscribers. Judge Patel of the district court
found in favor of the owners. Napster appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which ruled, in brief, that
use of the Napster system to sample songs is not a fair use. Because Napster is capable of a
substantial non-infringing use, the owners of the system lack the constructive knowledge of
infringing uses necessary to support contributory liability. Note here the impact of the Betamax
ruling. So far things look good for Napster. But its luck would not hold. Next the Court of Appeals
ruled that because the Napster operators can ascertain whether a particular recording has been
copied illegally, they have timely actual knowledge of specific acts of infringement necessary to
support contributory liability. Remember that this was an option left open by the Betamax case
that the Ninth Circuit in Napster seized it. Finally, for the same reason, the court of appeals ruled
that the Napster operators have the “supervisory control” over the conduct of its subscribers
necessary to support vicarious infringement.
Death came swiftly. By the summer 2002 the Napster system had been closed and the
company filed for bankruptcy. Critics of the record companies argue that by suing Napster, they
made a catastrophic strategic mistake. Had they agreed to license the Napster service they
might have been able to collaborate in the construction of a lawful music subscription system,
from which they could have earned a great deal and avoided alienating millions of consumers.
By instead adopting a confrontational posture, the record companies delayed for roughly a
decade the emergence of such services. By then the recording industry had shrunk by half: in the
US its gross revenues in 1999 were around $13 billion; today they’re around $7 billion. Global

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revenues have shrunk at a corresponding pace: today they are around $16 billion. This collapse
could’ve been avoided if the companies had embraced peer to peer technology, instead of trying
to suppress it. The record companies, of course, disagree with this assessment. Capitulation to
Napster, they argue, would have led to an even faster decline in the industry, as other
unauthorized and thus free services sprang up and drew customers away. Perhaps. It’s unlikely
we’ll ever be able to resolve this controversy.
So back to our story. Napster’s demise did indeed open the way for follow on similar
services. One of them was Aimster, so named because it piggybacked on AOL’s instant
messaging service. It was similar to Napster in many ways, but differed in one: encryption
prevented the operators of the Aimster system from knowing the contents of the files its
subscribers shared. Nevertheless, the intentions of the Aimster creators were reasonably clear
from the fact that they provided users online tutorials showing them how to use the system to
exchange sound recordings, most of which would likely be subject to copyright protection. Like
its ancestors, Aimster attracted subscribers with extraordinary speed. It was launched on August
8, 2000. Within three days 20,000 people had signed up. By early 2001 it had 2.5 million
registered users, and by the end of April 2001, the number had grown to 4.2 million. The
purpose of the encryption included in Aimster’s design was, of course, to avoid the kind of
“actual knowledge” of infringing behavior that had doomed Napster. In the judgment of the
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, this was too clever by half. In the court’s judgment,
Aimster was plainly liable for contributory infringement. The court brushed aside the COSNU
defense that had saved Sony on a ground that the defendants had failed to present evidence of
any lawful uses of their system. The court next ruled that the defendant’s strategy of see no evil
could not save them. In its words, “willful blindness” is the equivalent of actual knowledge.
Finally, material contribution was established by the defendant’s active encouragement of
infringing uses of the system. Interestingly, the court was less sure that the defendants were
liable for vicarious infringement. But no matter, contributory infringement was sufficient.
The holdings in the Aimster case were relatively unsurprising. Much more eye opening
were some statements made by the court in dictum, suggesting doubts concerning the pillars on
which the Betamax ruling had rested. Judge Posner writing for the court, expressed his
disagreement with the Betamax formulation on two fronts. First, he contended that to trigger
the COSNU defense a defendant must demonstrate that its product has substantial non-
infringing uses, not merely that it is capable of substantial non-infringing uses. Adoption of this
suggestion would entail converting the doctrine from a COSNU defense to a POSNU defense.
Second, he argued that even if the defendant makes such a showing, if the infringing uses are
substantial, the defendant must also show that it would have been “disproportionately costly”
to design its product so as to eliminate or reduce the infringing uses. These principles were not
necessary to the Aimster opinion, but they boded ill for the developers of dual use technologies.
The last of major file sharing cases involved the Grokster service. It differed from its
predecessors, somewhat, in structure. Specifically, the FastTrack technology that it, along with
some other companies employed, was decentralized. Not quite as decentralized as Nutella, a

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 Figure 119: Grokster’s software functioned using FastTrack technology, which uses supernodes

popular system developed by a renegade programmer at AOL, but more so than either Napster
or Aimster. In brief, a FastTrack user interested in exchanging files would locate, with the aid of a
central server, one of the set of computers connected to the Internet that functioned as so-
called supernodes, coordinating search requests among clusters of users. Once engaged in the
system, the user could submit a request, let’s say for a particular Clapton recording. If a copy of
the requested recording were located on one of the connected users’ computers, it would be
delivered to the requesting party with no further involvement by Grokster. Partly because of the
structure, the system was used reasonably often for non-infringing purposes, such as
distributing movie trailers, sharing the works of Shakespeare, and locating computer software
for which distribution is permitted, as well as for exchanging recordings unlawfully.
These circumstances prompted the district court judge who first heard the copyright
owners suit again Grokster to deny liability. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also ruled
in favor of Grokster, reasoning that the existence of legitimate uses of the system means that
the defendants could not be charged with constructive knowledge of unlawful uses, just as Sony
could not be charged with constructive knowledge of unlawful uses of its VCRs. Grokster did not
learn of specific illegal uses of its technology until it was too late to stop them, and unlike
Fonovisa, the defendants were not supplying the site and facilities for illegality, and had no
affirmative duty to alter their software to prevent illegality. For all these reasons, in the

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judgment of the Ninth Circuit, defendants were not liable for contributory infringement. With
respect to vicarious infringement, the plaintiffs had failed to establish, said the Ninth Circuit, the
necessary right and ability of the defendants to supervise the direct infringers. These arguments,
as I hope you see, are reasonably straightforward applications of the law as it existed at the
time. The Ninth Circuit was not tilting the table in favor of the defendant’s. But the copyright
owners and their supporters contended that this is where the current law leads. The law must
be wrong, and should be modified. They asked the Supreme Court to revisit the Betamax case
and to adjust the pertinent standard. How exactly? Various possible reforms were proposed. The
copyright owners themselves contended that the COSNU defense, announced in Sony, should
not apply when “the primary or principle use of a product or service is infringing.” The Solicitor
General offered a different approach. Secondary liability should be imposed “if the defendant’s
product is overwhelmingly used for infringing purposes, and the viability of the defendant’s
business depends on the revenue and consumer interest generated by such infringement.” One
group of economists argued instead that secondary liability should be imposed if the defendant
“could eliminate or greatly reduce the level of infringement without significantly cutting down
the quantity and quality of lawful uses.” You should hear, here, an echo of Judge Posner’s
proposal in Aimster. The most radical approach was offered by another group of economists.
Lower courts could should consider all economic variables in particular cases when deciding
whether to impose secondary liability.
Other parties argued, instead, that the Betamax COSNU defense should be preserved
because:
▪ Tighter standards for contributory vicarious infringement would endanger some
socially valuable dual use technologies;
▪ The unpredictability of all of the proposed alternatives to COSNU, when combined
with the threat of statutory damages, a topic we’ll examine next week, would chill
innovation; and
▪ The entertainment industry could be saved, they argued, through less radical
forms of therapy.
In the end, the Supreme Court split the difference. It left the Sony COSNU defense intact,
but it added to the set of forms of secondary liability a new doctrine, adapted from other
sources, which it referred to as “inducement.” The key sentence in the Supreme Court’s opinion
announcing this rule is set forth below.

[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe
copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster
infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

The question immediately arises: how does a plaintiff go about proving inducement of this
sort? The court’s answer by offering evidence of “purposeful, culpable expression and conduct.”

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What kinds of evidence will suffice? Not that the defendant knew that his product or service was
sometimes used for unlawful purposes – that was not enough to give rise to liability in the
Betamax case, as we saw, and it’s still not enough. Nor is it sufficient for plaintiff to offer
evidence the defendant is providing customers generic product support. Something more is
essential in order to demonstrate inducement.
In its opinion, the Supreme Court identified four sorts of relevant evidence: advertising
illegal uses, targeting customers known to engage in illegal uses, failure to adopt infringement
reducing technologies, and commercial sense of the enterprise that depends on illegal uses. The
last two types of evidence, though relevant, will not be enough on their own to succeed, it
seems. A plaintiff needs some evidence of the first two types, advertising unlawful uses, or
targeting kinds of consumers known to be engaging in infringement, such as reaching out to
former Napster subscribers who are now looking for a substitute file sharing service.
Like most Supreme Court opinions, the Grokster ruling contained some ambiguities. For
instance, in one crucial sentence the court indicated that liability under the inducement theory
arises when the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe. The
two verbs in that sentence are different. The former suggests a subjective standard, under which
the crucial variable is the defendant’s state of mind; evidence pertaining to the defendant’s
intention would thus be relevant. The latter, by contrast, suggests an objective standard, under
which only the defendant’s conduct would be germane. These and other ambiguities are tacitly
left to the lower courts to work out, but the principal implications of the Grokster ruling are clear
enough. If you actively promote unlawful uses of your product or service, you’re in trouble.
Ironically this standard, had it been in place in the late 1970s, might have led to a different result
in the Betamax case. As you’ll recall, Sony sponsored some advertisements that seemed to tout
the use of its VCRs for librarying, not just time shifting, and librarying is an activity that the
Supreme Court subsequently seemed to assume was unlawful. This appears to be the kind of
active promotion of illegality that the court in Grokster condemns.
Whatever the merits of the Grokster approach, evaluating conduct in the past, it is likely
to have diminishing force in the future. Why? Because attentive potential defendants will be
sure not to advertise or otherwise promote the unlawful uses of their products and services, and
to avoid mentioning such things in their internal correspondence. In short, the inducement rule
is likely to catch the unsophisticated creators of startups, not sophisticated actors with good
lawyers. That’s not an optimal legal standard.
Thus far we’ve been examining the expansion in recent years of the judge made doctrines
of secondary liability. But there’s another force to be reckoned with. An economically and
politically important group of businesses that are potentially vulnerable to liability under these
expanding rules, have sought and obtained qualified immunity, specifically in 1998, as part of
the so-called Digital Millennium Copyright Act, commonly abbreviated as DMCA, a group of
companies that provide a variety of internet based services persuaded Congress to grant them
protection against copyright liability – both direct and secondary liability – provided that they

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complied with some reasonably precise requirements. The complex rules giving these
enterprises protection are now embodied in section 512 of the copyright statute.

17 USC § 512: Statutory Safe Harbors

(a) ISPs (passive intermediaries) exempt

(b) No liability for passive caching

I OSPs (store information for mass distribution to others) exempt if comply with notice
and takedown

(d) Search engines (information location tools) exempt if comply with notice and
takedown

(f) Penalties for abusive notice and takedowns

(i) Duty to terminate repeat infringers and to “accommodate ... standard technical
measures” used by copyright owners

(m) No duty to monitor

The details of section 512 are much too intricate to examine in this lecture. What I will do
in the remainder of this segment of the lecture is to sketch the basic principles underlying this
portion of the statute, and to describe the most important of the judicial opinions that thus far
has construed section 512. A subset of the components of 512 are set forth above. Internet
service providers, meaning passive intermediaries who simply carry packets of information from
one party to another, are not liable for copyright infringement, provided that they do not select
the stuff that is sent, or who it is sent to, or modify it en route. This should not be surprising. The
Postal Service is also not liable if some of the letters it carries contain unlawful material. Things
less obvious when we shift from ISPs to so-called OSPs, online service providers, which are
defined in section 512(k)(1)(b) as providers of online services or network access or the operators
of facilities therefore. To qualify for the section 512 safe harbor, such entities must abide by the
requirements set forth in 512(i) – in brief, adopting, announcing, and abiding by a policy for
terminating people who repeatedly abuse their services, and accommodating reasonable
technological protection measures adopted by the copyright owners.
If an OSP qualifies, it enjoys immunity with respect to various activities, including,
unsurprisingly, passive caching of the material that turns out to be infringing. The most
controversial of the activities for which OSPs may secure immunity concerns not carrying
packets from one person to another, or caching it for faster retrieval, but rather storing material
sent to them by one person, and making that material accessible to lots of other people. In 1998,

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this practice was not terribly common, but it is now ubiquitous. OSPs who do this are free of
liability if they:

1. Publicly identify an agent the copyright owners can contact to tell them that
specific works are being stored on their systems unlawfully;
2. Abide by a detailed set of procedures for removing such material from their
systems, or resolving disagreements between the copyright owners and the
posters concerning their legality;
3. Lack the kind of specific knowledge of illegality spelled out in section 512I(1)(a);
and
4. Lack the kind of financial interest spelled out in section 512I(1)(b).

The clauses pertaining to knowledge and financial interest should sound roughly familiar
to you. They pertain to the same kinds of concerns that have long figured in the doctrines of
contributory infringement and vicarious infringement, respectively. But those concepts take
here an unusual form, and serve an unusual role. If an OSP are accused of storing and
distributing infringing stuff and can show that he lacks both of these things, he’s home free. If he
cannot, he’s not necessarily liable, but must run the gauntlet of the doctrines of direct and
secondary liability we’ve considered in the last four weeks. So, much hinges on how exactly
these requirements are construed.
The case that to date has examined these requirements most detail is Viacom versus
YouTube. The basic facts are likely familiar to most of you. YouTube was founded in 2005 by
three former employees of PayPal. The purpose of the initial version of YouTube was not entirely
clear, but its principal function soon became to enable people to post video clips, and make
them available for the world to watch. It grew extremely rapidly. By 2007, YouTube was the
dominant site of its kind, and its lead over its rivals continued to increase. YouTube’s success was
attributable in part to the sophistication and convenience of its technology, and in part to the
support it received from Google, which purchased the company in November of 2006 in a stock
for stock transaction worth roughly $1.5 billion. Last, but not least, YouTube flourished in part
because it was willing, particularly in the early years, to host videos consisting of or containing
commercial copyrighted material, which lots of users wanted to see. The owners of the
copyrights in those materials reacted in various ways to the rise of YouTube. Some shrugged.
Some negotiated licenses with YouTube or Google, permitting them to host their content. And
finally, a few brought law suits.
Included in this last group was Viacom, the entertainment giant that owned the copyrights
in many television shows, episodes of which were uploaded to YouTube without permission by
fans, and then watched by other fans. The numbers were large. In 2007, when it initiated the
lawsuit, Viacom identified 63,497 clips then hosted on YouTube that, Viacom contended,
contained its copyrighted material. YouTube acknowledged that some of the videos on its site
contained copyrighted material and promptly removed the 63,000 clips identified by Viacom.

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But having done so, YouTube asserted that it bore no further legal responsibility. Having
complied with the so-called notice and takedown procedures, that as we’ve seen are mandated
by section 512, YouTube contended that it was entitled to the benefit of the safe harbor of
section 512I, and thus could not be liable for direct or secondary copyright infringement.
Viacom, as you might expect, disagreed. Here’s a statement released by Mike Fricklas, Viacom’s
general counsel, summarizing the company’s stance.

From “Our Case Against YouTube” by Mike Fricklas in the Washington Post, March
24, 2007:

YouTube has described itself as the place to go for video. It is far more than the kind of
passive Web host or e-mail service the DMCA protects – it is an entertainment
destination. The public at large is not attracted to YouTube’s storage facility or
technical functionality – people are attracted to the entertainment value of what’s on
the site.

And YouTube reaps financial benefits from that attraction through selling the traffic to
advertisers. While an e-mail provider is paid to facilitate and manage the exchange of
e-mail traffic, and competes in that fashion, YouTube lures consumers and competes by
having great content – a resoundingly substantial part of which it did not create or pay
for.

Does YouTube have “knowledge” of copyrighted material on its site? Does it have the
“right and ability to control” the content? Yes and yes. If the public knows what’s there,
then YouTube’s management surely does. YouTube’s own terms of use give it clear
rights, notably the right to take anything down. YouTube actively monitors its content.
For example, its managers remove pornography and hate content and, as was recently
reported, claim they can detect and remove “spam.” Without knowledge and control,
how could YouTube create “channels” and “featured videos” sections on its site?
YouTube has even offered to find infringing content for copyright owners – but only if
they do a licensing deal first.

Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others’
copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every
copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning
number of sites. That’s hardly a workable or equitable solution. And it would tend to
disadvantage ventures such as the one recently announced by NBC Universal and News
Corp. that are built on respect for copyright. Under the law, the obligation is right
where it belongs: on the people who derive a benefit from the creative works and are in
the position to keep infringement out of their businesses.

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 This paragraph succinctly states the arguments that Viacom hoped to use to deny
YouTube the benefit of section 512I. As you’ll recall, that provision does not apply when a
defendant either has actual knowledge of infringing material on its site, or receives a financial
benefit directly attributable to infringement, which the defendant has the right and ability to
control. Fricklas, as you can see, contends that YouTube fails to satisfy both of those
requirements, either of which is fatal to its 512I defense.
This paragraph, aimed more at a general, public audience, explains why, in Viacom’s
opinion, it’s fair to require sites like YouTube to purge their systems of infringing material, rather
than to require copyright owners constantly to monitor such sites.
So, those are the arguments. The district court sided with YouTube on all contested issues,
and granted its summary judgment motion. In 2012, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
reversed. The interpretations of the key provisions of section 512 adopted by the Court of
Appeals were, as we will see, highly favorable to OSPs like YouTube, but not quite as favorable as
the interpretations that had been adopted by the district court. Thus, the Court of Appeals
remanded the case for reconsideration in light of its clarified rules. Here, then, are the key
portions of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.
First, the court ruled that the disqualification contained in 512I(1)(A)(i) is triggered only by
actual “subjective” knowledge of specific infringing material on the dependent’s site, or willful
blindness of the sort that doomed Napster. The disqualification contained in 512(c)(1)(A)(ii), the
so-called red flag provision, is triggered only by actual subjective knowledge of facts that would
have made infringement objectively obvious to a reasonable person. Merely being aware that
there’s lots of infringing material on one’s site is not enough to trigger either of those provisions.
However, the court ruled, Viacom had pointed to a few instances in which internal
correspondence by YouTube executives suggested that they were aware of specific infringing
files on their site, from which a jury might infer the requisite level of knowledge.
Next, the Court of Appeals ruled that the disqualification contained in 512I(1)(B) is
triggered only by proof of somewhat greater control over the infringing behavior than is
required for ordinary vicarious infringement. Otherwise, the court pointed out, the safe harbor
of 512(c) wouldn’t be of much value, because would give defendants immunity only from
conduct that would not trigger vicarious liability anyway.
So, what sort of additional control would cause a forfeiture of the safe harbor protection?
Not merely the ability to block access to material posted on its service, but perhaps the sort of
“purposeful, culpable expression and conduct” that, as we saw, the Supreme Court in Grokster
suggested would give rise to liability for inducement.
Uncertain on the score, the Court of Appeals suggested that the district court think about
it further.
Finally, the Court of Appeals construed 512I itself, broadly interpreting it to apply to all
software functions performed by sites like YouTube “for the purpose of facilitating access to user
stored material.”

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 Figure 120: The state of the law governing OSPs after the Viacom decision

The state of the law governing OSPs after the Viacom decision, might be depicted
graphically as is shown in Figure 120. As you now know, OSPs are potentially liable not just for
direct copyright infringement, but also for any of the forms of secondary infringement:
contributory, vicarious, and, post-Grokster, inducement. Section 512I not only gives greater
specificity to the limits of those doctrine, but also, more importantly, allows OSPs to engage in
some kinds of conduct that, in the absence of 512, would give rise to liability. In particular,
hosting material without enough specific or red flag knowledge that particular pieces are
infringing to trigger the disqualifications of 512I(1)(A), and without the tight level of control
necessary to trigger the disqualification of 512(c)(1)(B).
Exactly what kinds of conduct fall into the zones identified by the arrows in this diagram
will have to be worked out in subsequent litigation. But this seems to be the structure that OSPs
must and may now rely upon, at least if the Second Circuit approach holds.
This concludes our discussion of secondary liability and the especially troublesome issues
presented by so-called dual use technologies. In the next section, we’ll turn to a very different
topic: technological protection measures.

11.3. Tech Protection Measures

The story of how most countries in the world came to adopt legal reinforcements for
technological protection measures (TPMs) is very long and complicated. In this last segment of
the lecture, I’ll provide you an abridged version of the story. If you’d like more detail you might
consult chapter three of my book, Promises to Keep, from which this abridged version will be
distilled.

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 In the early 1990’s, entertainment companies, dismayed by the increasing frequency with
which digital copies of their products were being copied and redistributed, and by the apparent
inability of the law to halt this behavior, began to experiment with encryption as an alternative
way of preventing, or at least discouraging, unauthorized uses their products. Examples of such
experiments included the content scramble system (CSS), which is used to inhibit reproduction
of the copies of audiovisual works housed on DVDs; the secure digital music initiative (SDMI),
which was supposed to provide even stronger protection for sound recordings; and the Real
Audio and Real Video formats, developed by the firm Real Networks, that enabled users of those
formats to turn on or off of a virtual switch, which controlled whether persons to whom
formatted works were streamed could make copies of these works. As the entertainment
companies soon discovered, this strategy was at best imperfect. Every time they deployed one
of these technologies someone, surprisingly often a teenager, would crack it. Once the
technological wrappers had been removed, the naked digital files could be re-distributed
promiscuously.
So, the entertainment companies began to look to the law 1. Government provides the
for aid. To understand the nature of the strategy it may help to good
turn, once again, to copyright theory. You’ll recall that the premise 2. Government selects and
of the welfare theory of copyright, and of intellectual property in
subsidizes private innovators
general, is that intellectual products are public goods that will be
3. Government issues prizes to
produced at suboptimal levels unless the government intervenes in
some way to stimulate their creation and dissemination. Over the successful private producers

centuries, governments had used five different techniques to 4. Legal reinforcement of self-
provide the necessary stimulus. The five options, with which you help strategies
should now be familiar, are listed on the right. Until this point in 5. Government protects
the lecture, we have been overwhelmingly concerned with the fifth
producers against
option, the essence of which is that the government protects
competition
authors and artists against competition – in other words, forbids
competitors to make, distribute, or perform copies of their works without permission. That, as
you well know, is the fundamental principle of copyright law, at least as seen through the lens of
welfare theory. When the entertainment companies sought the assistance of the law in
buttressing their shaky encryption systems, they were in effect stepping outside the zone of
copyright law and relying on an altogether different approach. In particular, they were
employing a variant of strategy number four. They were relying upon a self-help approach,
specifically technological protections for copies of their works, and soliciting legal reinforcement
for that strategy. In this respect, their approach was analogous to trade secret law. In that
context as well, companies rely on self-help, specifically efforts to keep their innovations secret,
but then turn to the law for aid when economic espionage or faithless employees cause that
secrecy to fail. In short, the entertainment companies’ new approach was not really an example
of copyright law at all, even though, as you’ll see, they plugged the statutory reforms they
sought into the copyright statute in the United States. In truth, this approach is a different

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animal altogether and had quite different strengths and weaknesses. For that reason, it’s
sometimes referred to as paracopyright.
Back to our story. The law in the United States as it existed in the mid-1990’s failed to
provide the entertainment companies the aid they sought. To be sure, the federal statutes
contained a few specialized provisions that forbade circumvention of particular encryption
systems – for example, it was illegal to manufacture or distribute devices designed to
descramble the signals provided by cable television systems or digital satellite systems – but
there was no provision forbidding encryption circumvention in general. Judge-made law was
even more unhelpful. For example, in the case of Volt Corporation vs. Quaid Software, the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the creation and sale of a software program designed to
circumvent the copy controls on a diskette did not make the creator of such a program liable for
contributory copyright infringement, because the program had a substantial non-infringing use,
mainly enabling the making of archival copies. And as I explained in lecture number nine, in the
Sega enterprises case the Ninth Circuit had refused to find a game manufacturer liable when it
circumvented Sega’s lockout mechanism preventing unlicensed game developers from building
games compatible with its Genesis console.
So, existing law was unhelpful the companies therefore sought new law. The path to the
reforms they wanted proved circuitous. First, they plead their case to the Information
Infrastructure Task Force (IITF), the group appointed by President Clinton to articulate and
implement the administration’s vision for the National Information Infrastructure. The crucial
subcommittee within the IITF was the working group on intellectual property rights, chaired by
Bruce Lehman, a former copyright industry lobbyist who had recently been appointed the
commissioner of patents and trademarks. Lehman and the IITF proved receptive. In their
preliminary report, known as the “green paper,” and again in their final report, known as the
“white paper,” they recommended the adoption of a “prohibition on devices, products,
components, and services that defeat technological methods of preventing unauthorized use of
copyrighted materials,” ignoring the objections of some vigorous critics of this proposal.
Surprisingly, however, Congress was more attentive to the critics’ arguments and, moreover,
was distracted by an upcoming election, and as a result failed to adopt the administration’s
recommendation. So, Mr. Lehman cleverly pursued an alternative approach. Instead of
continuing to pound on Congress’s door, he turned to treaty making. In 1996, in his capacity as
the United States delegate to the World Intellectual Property Organization, Lehman pressed for
adoption of a new treaty that would embody the critical provisions of the now rejected
argument in the white paper. He didn’t get all that he wanted, but he was able to secure –
specifically in Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty – a moderate version of the provisions
that he had originally sought.

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 WIPO Copyright Treaty (1996), article 11

Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies
against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors
in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty or the Berne Convention
and that restrict acts, in respect of their works, which are not 302uthorized by the
authors concerned or permitted by law.

Lehman then returned to the United States and approached Congress with a new
argument. Congress, he argued, needed to modify federal law in the United States to fulfill the
obligations to which the United States would soon be subject under the new treaty. There
ensued a protracted hard fought battle among the relevant interest groups, a battle chronicled
by Pam Samuelson. Lehman and his allies eventually emerged bloody but victorious, specifically
as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). They obtained two new provisions now
embodied in sections 1201 and 1202 of the copyright statute. Of the two provisions, 1201 is the
more important. The critical language is below.

17 USC § 1201

(a)(1)(A): No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls

access to a work protected under this title

(a)(2): No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise
traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological

measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a
technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this
title; or

I is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that
person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively
controls access to a work protected under this title.

Section 1201(a)(1)(A) effectively controls access to copyrighted work. Section 1201(a)(2)

provides that no person shall manufacture or import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise

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traffic in any technology product service device component or part thereof that is primarily
designed or produced for the purpose of such circumvention. Finally, section 1201(b) contains a
similar ban on the production or distribution of technology primarily designed to circumvent
technologies that effectively protect the exclusive rights of a copyright owner – the exclusive
rights to reproduce the work adapted, performed publicly, and so forth. Parties injured by
violations of these rules can bring civil lawsuit to halt the practices and collect damages. In
addition, willful violation of the rules for commercial advantage or personal gain subjects the
offender to substantial criminal penalties.
As you undoubtedly noticed, there are some important ambiguities in these provisions.
What exactly does “circumvent” mean? For example, if I give my password to a friend who then
uses it to gain access to a copyrighted recording or program, have I or has she circumvented the
technological protection system that requires that password? What does it mean to “effectively
control access” to a copyrighted work? What activities other than manufacturing and
distributing are encompassed by the ban on trafficking in circumvention technologies? Some of
these ambiguities are addressed, though not with great clarity, by definitions contained in other
parts of the statute.
The prohibitions contained in 1201(a) and Exceptions
1201(b) are tempered, as you can see on the right, by
▪ Libraries may circumvent in order to
a list of exceptions, some of which are also vague. For
decide whether to buy
example, technologies that are not primarily designed
for circumvention, have a more limited commercially ▪ Police may circumvent to conduct an
significant purpose other than convention, and are investigation
not marketed for circumvention, are exempt. ▪ 1201(f): Reverse Engineering for
Nonprofit libraries, archives, and educational Interoperability
institutions are sometimes permitted to engage in
▪ 1201(g): Encryption research
circumvention in order to decide whether to acquire
▪ 1201(h): Protecting Minors from
copyrighted work. Circumvention activities for the
Pornography
purpose of reverse engineering to achieve
interoperability among computer programs, security ▪ Special Exemptions created by Copyright
testing, encryption research, and controlling minors Office – applicable only to circumvention
access to pornography are all privileged. Finally, every of access controls
three years the librarian of Congress is required to ▪ MDY Industries, 629 F.3d 928 (9th Cir.
promulgate regulations exempting from the anti-circumvention provision persons who would
2010)
otherwise be adversely affected in their ability to make non-infringing uses. The most recent
round of regulations in 2010 generated some intriguing safe harbors.
In culmination, the importance of the issues addressed by these statutory provisions and
the ambiguity of several of their dimensions have generated a great deal of litigation. The
principal cases are listed on the righthand side of the next page. (If you follow the links in the
mind map, you will find summaries of their facts and holdings and copies of the opinions
themselves.) In the first and arguably most important wave of these cases, the copyright owners

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that had pressed for these statutes and that Principal cases dealing with the issue of tech
stood to benefit most from expensive protection measures
interpretations of them prevailed decisively.
▪ Streambox (WD WA 2000)
In later cases, however, the courts have
▪ Corley
rejected especially aggressive applications of
the provisions. A very rough generalization ▪ Felten
concerning the pattern of outcomes in these ▪ Elcomsoft (2002)
cases is that the more they have to do with ▪ IMS (SDNY 2004)
the kinds of entertainment products that ▪ Lexmark, 387 F.3d 522 (CA6 2004)
initially provoked the statute – music, films,
▪ Chamberlain, 381 F.3d 1178 (CAFC 2004)
games, and so forth – the more likely the
▪ STK, 421 F.3d 1307 (CAFC 2005)
courts are to find that the behavior of the
defendants were unlawful. By contrast, in ▪ Blizzard, 422 F.3d 630 (CA8 2005)

cases where the plaintiffs have sought to rely ▪ RealNetworks, 641 F. Supp. 2d 913 (N.D.
on these statutory provisions to support Cal. 2009)
business models unrelated to traditional ▪ MDY Industries, 629 F.3d 928 (9th Cir.
entertainment products, the courts have been much less sympathetic. That’s a crude guideline,
2010)
to be sure, but for better or worse it has some explanatory force.
By way of illustration, I’ll describe two of the cases. Here’s the first. In 1999, John
Johansen, a 15-year-old Norwegian, reverse engineered a licensed DVD player and used the
information he obtained to write a short program designed to descramble a signal that had been
scrambled by the CSS security system – the system that is designed to prevent ripping DVD’s.
Johansen’s program, which he called DCSS, was relatively simple. The original version consisted
of 60 lines of computer code. It has since been reduced to seven. Although Johansen’s original
purpose apparently was the relatively benign goal of developing a DVD player that could operate
on the Linux operating system, his creation enabled many other less innocent uses of the video
recordings distributed on DVD’s. Once descrambled, they could be stored, compressed,
reproduced and redistributed. Copies of DCSS spread quickly over the internet. Within a month,
many websites offered user-friendly downloadable versions the program in both source code
and object code. The major film studios, seeking to stop or at least slow the spread of what they
regarded as an infection, invoked the DMCA to demand that the operators of those websites
remove the program from their servers. Some of those operators, including Eric Corely, the
editor of a print magazine boldly named 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and an accompanying
website refused to comply. In response, the studios brought suit, accusing Corley and others of
“trafficking in circumvention technology.” Judge Lewis Kaplan found that the defendants had
indeed violated Section 1201(a)(2), the ban on trafficking in technology designed to circumvent
restrictions on access to copyrighted works. In his judgment, none of the statutory exemptions
were applicable. He then rejected the defendant’s argument that the statute so construed
would violate the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of speech. In his final ruling, Kaplan

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ordered the defendants to remove the program for their servers, and more controversially, to
disable all hyperlinks to other websites where copies of the program could be found.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed, like Judge Kaplan, the Court of
Appeals found all of the exemptions inapplicable, nor did the statute, even when thus broadly
construed, violate the First Amendment. The court conceded that the anti-trafficking provisions
in general and as applied in this case, did restrict speech, but that restriction it ruled is content
neutral, advances a substantial government purpose unrelated to the suppression of expression,
mainly assisting copyright owners and preventing unwanted access to their property, and
burdened speech no more than necessary to achieve that end. And thus, it’s constitutional.
The ruling in the Corley case seems to have had little effect on the distribution of DCSS.
While the case was ongoing, hackers and Corley sympathizers continued to distribute the
program in a wide variety of formats – on t-shirts, in the form of a haiku, set to music, and so
forth. On the other hand, the ready availability of DCSS on the internet still today does not seem
to have adversely affected the use or profitability of commercial DVD’s. The revenues generated
by which are tracked by the yellow sectors of the graph in Figure 121. As you can see, the ready
availability of DCSS starting in 1999 certainly did not prevent the DVD format from conquering
the home video market. Perhaps copyright owners’ anxiety was unfounded. In any event, the
Corley case has proved highly influential. Its crucial features include a lenient interpretation of
the requirements that technological protection measures effectively control access to a
copyrighted work, an expansive interpretation of the prohibition on trafficking in circumvention
technology, rejection of the position that TPMs must accommodate the privileges traditionally

Figure 121: US consumer home entertainment rental and sell-through spending (2010)

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enjoyed by users under the fair use doctrine, and last but not least, the declaration that despite
these interpretations, the statute does not run afoul of the federal constitution.
An example of a decision that took a more skeptical view of TPMs and invocations of the
law to reinforce them is Chamberlain, decided by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in
2004. Chamberlain manufactures and sells garage door openers, devices that enable
homeowners to avoid the inconvenience of getting out of their cars to open their garages when
they returned home. A homeowner need only press a button on the remote control and the
machine will cause the door open. Chamberlain’s system incorporated a copyrighted “rolling
code” computer program that constantly changed the transmitter signal needed to open the
garage door. Now, as you know, with some frequency homeowners lose or break the remote
controls necessary to run their systems. The defendant in this case, Skylink, catered to such
consumers, offering them replacement generic remote controls capable of opening
Chamberlain’s doors, as well as those of other garage door opening companies. Chamberlain
was unhappy, primarily it seems because Skylink was undercutting Chamberlain’s ability to sell
its own replacement remote controls. So, Chamberlain brought a DMCA suit against Skylink,
contending that Skylink’s products “circumvent the security inherent in rolling codes” and
therefore that “Skylink is in violation of the anti-trafficking clause of the DMCA’s anti-
circumvention provisions, specifically 1201(a)(2).” Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
eventually rejected this claim ruling broadly that 1201 prohibits only forms of access that bare a
reasonable relationship to the protections of the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright
owners. As David Nimmer, the son of Melville Nimmer and a notable copyright scholar in his
own right, points out, it’s very difficult to derive such a limitation on the scope of 1201 from the
language of the statute or from the legislative history. And, indeed, the Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit, in the more recent MDY case, refused to follow the Federal Circuit in restricting
the reach of the statute in this fashion. But MDY involved video games, not garage door openers.
Though the statute itself makes no reference to the nature of the device in which the
copyrighted work guarded by the TPM is embedded and thus, as Nimmer argues, the distinction
between Chamberlain and MDY is hard to justify on the basis of statutory interpretation, it’s
neither surprising, nor terribly troubling, that the courts are more protective of entertainment
products, where unauthorized reproduction is arguably pernicious, than they are of more
industrial products, where we have long thought competition is socially beneficial.
So, that’s where things currently stand in the United States. The legal reinforcement of
TPMs is by no means limited to the US. 90 countries currently are signatories to the WIPO
Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty that, as we’ve seen,
impose on member countries duties to adopt and enforce rules of this general sort. How have
other countries sought to implement the principle? The responses, as you might expect, vary
considerably. As my colleague Urs Gasser points out, the language of the relevant treaty
provisions leave member countries considerable discretion on several fronts. Most importantly,
the treaties leave countries free to decide whether to buttress only TPMs that reinforce the kind
of exclusive rights enjoyed by copyright owners, namely the rights of production, distribution,

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public performance, and so forth, or also TPMs that limit user’s ability to gain access to
copyrighted works.
The countries are also free, if they could figure out how to do so, not to penalize
circumventions of TPMs for the purpose of exercising one of the privileges recognized by the
copyright system, such as the privilege of engaging in fair uses. On the latter issue, the European
Union has adopted an approach very different from the United States. You’ll recall that in the US
the DMCA contains a list of specific exemptions to the coverage of Section 1201 plus an
administrative mechanism enabling the Librarian of Congress periodically for three years to add
additional exceptions. That list is widely considered to be very narrow, enabling copyright
owners in the United States to use TPMs to curtail lots of activities that they would be unable to
forbid by invoking the regular rights under the copyright statute itself. The EU, by contrast,
requires member countries to create mechanisms to ensure the TPMs do not interfere with the
privileges that consumers enjoy under copyright law, unless the rights holders develop and
implement such mechanisms voluntarily. Gasser points out the countries within the EU have
sought to accommodate that obligation differently. Greece and Lithuania, for example, have set
up mediation systems in hopes of reconciling TPMs with the traditional privileges of users. The
United Kingdom has set up a special administrative mechanism that purports to enable
aggrieved users to challenge TPMs that constrain their freedom to make lawful uses of
copyrighted materials. And Ireland permits aggrieved users to appeal directly to the Irish High
Court. Whether any of these mechanisms is effective is far from clear, but they at least purport
to tilt the scales more toward consumers than does the United States.
During the past 15 years, controversy over legal reinforcement of TPMs has been intense.
My guess, for what it’s worth, is that in the future the controversy will gradually fade. The
reason is not because countries will converge upon a solution to this issue that satisfies all
parties – that’s extremely unlikely. The reason, rather, is that TPMs and their legal supplements
are designed primarily to protect business models that rely upon distributing copies of
copyrighted works to consumers. Increasingly, nowadays, the businesses that have traditionally
depended on copyright law are shifting to cloud-based business models that do not depend
upon providing consumers copies of works. As a result, for better or worse, technological shields
enveloping such copies will become less important. At the same time, alternative practical and
legal mechanisms for preserving the traditional privileges of consumers will become more
important.

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REMEDIES

12.1. Equitable Relief

There are three types of remedy for copyright infringement – equitable, legal, and criminal. The
first two types are available to the prevailing plaintiffs in civil suits. In other words, a copyright
owner who, in a civil lawsuit, successfully demonstrates that a defendant has engaged in
copyright infringement may attain either or both equitable or legal remedies. In addition, a
person who engages in some types of copyright infringement may be prosecuted by the
government and, if convicted, subjected to criminal sanctions. The three segments of this lecture
will examine these three types of remedy in sequence.
The primary form of equitable relief consists of injunctions. Injunctions are orders by
courts directing someone to do something or, more commonly, to stop doing something. In
copyright suits, by far the most common type of injunction is an instruction to the defendant to
cease engaging in the behavior that a court has deemed to be infringing. Statutory authority for
the issuance of such injunctions is contained in section 502 of the copyright statute.

17 USC § 502

(a) Any court having jurisdiction of a civil action arising under this title may, subject to
the provisions of section 1498 of title 28, grant temporary and final injunctions on such
terms as it may deem reasonable to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright.

(b) Any such injunction may be served anywhere in the United States on the person
enjoined; it shall be operative throughout the United States and shall be enforceable,
by proceedings in contempt or otherwise, by any United States court having jurisdiction
of that person. The clerk of the court granting the injunction shall, when requested by
any other court in which enforcement of the injunction is sought, transmit promptly to
the other court a certified copy of all the papers in the case on file in such clerk’s office.

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 As you can see, section 502 provides that “any court having jurisdiction of a civil action
arising under this title may grant temporary and final injunctions on such terms as it may deem
reasonable to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright.” Note the reference to
“temporary and final injunctions.” Those adjectives allude to the fact that there are, in the
American legal system, two species of injections – permanent injunctions and so-called
preliminary injunctions.
Permanent injunctions, as their name suggests, are typically issued at the conclusion of a
copyright infringement suit. Preliminary injunctions, as their name suggests, are issued by a
court before the conclusion of the suit – often long before the conclusion of the suit – when it
becomes apparent that the defendant will likely in the end lose, and that allowing the
defendant’s behavior to continue in the meantime would cause the plaintiff serious injury. The
principals governing when it’s appropriate for courts to issue either of these two types of
injunction are set forth below.

To obtain a permanent injunction, plaintiff must show

(a) the plaintiff has suffered an irreparable injury;
(b) monetary damages are inadequate to compensate for that injury;
(c) the balance of hardships favors the plaintiff; and
(d) the public interest would not be disserved by a permanent injunction.

To obtain a preliminary injunction, plaintiff must show

(a) the plaintiff is likely to suffer an irreparable injury;
(b) monetary damages will be inadequate to compensate for that injury;
(c) the balance of hardships favors the plaintiff;
(d) the public interest would not be disserved by an injunction; and
I likelihood of success on the merits.

These principles were not developed in the context of copyright infringement lawsuits.
Rather, they were developed by the courts – specifically by the federal courts – to govern
equitable relief in general.
As you can see, the traditional rule was that a plaintiff, in order to obtain a permanent
injunction, must show – first, that she has suffered an irreparable injury; second, that the
monetary damages would be inadequate to compensate her for that injury; third, that she
would suffer more serious hardship if an injunction were denied than would the defendant if an
injunction were granted; and finally, that the public interest would not be disserved by the
issuance of an injunction.
The traditional rules governing preliminary injunctions were slightly different. To obtain
one of these, a plaintiff was obliged to show – first, that she is likely to suffer an irreparable
injury if the defendant’s conduct continues; second, that monetary damages would be

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inadequate to compensate her for that injury; third, that the balance of hardships, again, tilts in
her favor; fourth, that the public interest would not be disturbed; and last but not least, that she
is likely, at the conclusion of the lawsuit, to succeed in demonstrating the illegality of the
defendant’s behavior. This last factor has the effect of making judicial decisions concerning the
availability of preliminary injunctive relief into provisional assessments of the merits of the
plaintiff’s claims. Although technically only provisional, in practice such judgments often
terminate controversies.
As I say, these principles have long governed the availability of injunctive relief in general.
By contrast, in copyright lawsuits, until quite recently, different standards obtained. Specifically,
courts in copyright suits were more likely to grant either preliminary or permanent injunctions
than in most other kinds of controversies. Courts typically
took the position that a demonstration by the plaintiff that Three famous cases where courts
she is likely to succeed on the merits of a copyright suggested injunctions should not be
infringement suit gives rise to a presumption of irreparable granted
harm sufficient to warrant issuance of a preliminary or
▪ Abend (CA9 1988)
permanent injunction. As a result, granting injunctions to
▪ Campbell (US 1994) (dictum)
prevailing plaintiffs was routine. To be sure, it was not
– courts might refuse to
automatic. On occasions, courts would deny injunctions in
special circumstances. The three most famous instances in enjoin parodies that exceed
which courts suggested that injunctions should not the scope of fair use
invariably be granted are listed on the right. ▪ Tasini (US 2001) –
You may recall that in the case of Stewart versus discourage grants of
Abend, the author of a short story granted a license to
injunctive relief that would
make a motion picture based on that story – a license that
frustrate the “goals of
eventually ended up in the hands of James Stewart and
Alfred Hitchcock – and resulted, in their hands, in the copyright law”

creation of the movie Rear Window. Unfortunately, both

for the author and for the movie makers, the author of the short story died before the end of his
first 28-year copyright term and thus, he was unable to renew the copyright. Instead, his
executor renewed the copyright, and then assigned it to a third party who promptly brought suit
against Hitchcock and his company, seeking to enjoin future performances of Rear Window
unless and until the defendants obtained a new license. You’ll recall that the Supreme Court
eventually sided with the plaintiff – the assignee of the renewal term. However, the Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit took the position that the plaintiff was not necessarily entitled to
an injunction. Instead, in view of the good faith reliance by the filmmakers on the original
license, a reasonable monetary award would be more appropriate than an injunction.
Another special circumstance was identified by the United States Supreme Court in the
Campbell case, which I discussed in lecture number nine. You’ll recall that the Supreme Court in
that case took the position that the defendant who, without permission, prepares a parody of a
copyrighted work is likely to prevail under the fair use doctrine. However, Justice Souter, writing

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for the court, suggested that parodist would not always succeed. After taking into account all
four of the fair use factors, a court might conclude that a particular parody should not be
deemed a fair use. In such circumstances, however, Souter suggested, in dictum, that the
defendant might be permitted to continue to distribute his or her parody, provided he or she
paid the plaintiff an appropriate damage award.
Finally, in the Tasini case, the Supreme Court suggested, again in dictum, that injunctive
relief could be denied when it’s issuance would frustrate “the goals of copyright law.” The
upshot, in short, is that courts occasionally rejected plaintiffs’ requests for injunctions. In the
overwhelming majority of cases, however, prevailing plaintiffs were deemed to be entitled to
injunctive relief.
In 2006, the Supreme Court decided a case that changed this landscape fundamentally.
Until that date, most federal courts had dealt with patent infringement suits in much the same
way they dealt with copyright infringement suits – granting injunctive relief nearly automatically
to prevailing plaintiffs. The Supreme Court, in eBay vs MercExchange, declared that that practice
could not be justified on the basis of the language of the patent statute. Henceforth, the court
ruled that traditional rules, which I summarized a minute ago, should be employed to determine
whether injunctive relief was appropriate in patent cases. In particular, a plaintiff would have to
establish, among other things, that the balance of hardships tilted in her favor and that the
issuance of an injunction would not undermine the public interest. The opinion of the Supreme
Court in the eBay case did not provide much guidance concerning what adherence to those rules
would produce. However, two concurring opinions in the case did so. Chief Justice Roberts, in an
opinion joined by justices Scalia and Ginsburg, suggested that in the future federal courts, when
applying the traditional rules governing equitable relief to patent disputes, should continue to
be somewhat more favorably disposed to the issuance of injunctions than in non-patent cases in
light of the traditional practice of granting such injunctions nearly automatically. By contrast,
Justice Kennedy, in an opinion joined by justices Stevens, Souter and Breyer, identified three
circumstances in which, in their judgment, court should be especially reluctant to issue
injunctions – when the plaintiff is a so-called non-practicing entity, sometimes referred to as a
patent troll; when the patent at issue covers one component of a complex product, and thus
issuance of an injunction would give the patentee disproportionate bargaining power when
negotiating for a subsequent license; and when the patent at issue pertains to a method of
doing business, a context in which patent protection, they believed, is especially problematic.
Although, as you can see, Justice Kennedy was only speaking for four justices, his opinion has
proven to be influential in patent law.
In the eBay decision, the Supreme Court intimated that the issuance of injunctions in
copyright cases should be governed by the same principles that henceforth would govern the
issuance injunctions in patent cases. As one might expect, given that clear signal, most district
courts in copyright cases subsequently adopted the eBay approach. But a few continued to
adhere to the traditional practice, which, as we’ve seen, strongly favored plaintiffs. In 2010 and
2011, the influential Courts of Appeals in the Second and Ninth Circuits removed any remaining

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doubt concerning the applicability of eBay to copyright. In the Salinger and Perfect 10 cases,
those courts ruled decisively that permanent and preliminary injunctions could be granted in
copyright cases only upon satisfaction of the traditional multi-factor tests.
So, that’s where things stand today. The net result is that it is significantly harder
nowadays to obtain an injunction than it was seven years ago. This shift likely seems to you quite
technical, and it is. But its impact is fundamental. In the growing percentage of cases in which
prevailing copyright plaintiffs are denied injunctive relief and are granted only damages, the
courts are, in effect, creating compulsory licensing regimes forcing, in other words, copyright
owners to accept a governmentally determined license fee in return for allowing defendants to
continue to engage in conduct forbidden by copyright law. Plaintiffs who would prefer to charge
more, or to deny permission altogether, have no choice but to accept the amount of money
selected by the court and to tolerate the continuation of the defendant’s behavior.
Twice, earlier in this lecture series, we have discussed the merits and demerits of
compulsory licensing systems. First, from the perspective of welfare theory, and then in the
context of public performance rights. At the time, we were primarily concerned with compulsory
licensing systems that had been created by statute. As we saw, such statutory regimes now
govern several uses of copyrighted works – for example, covers of copyrighted songs,
retransmissions of signals by cable television or satellite systems, juke boxes, derivative works
based upon the restored foreign copyrights, and so forth. But judicially created compulsory
licenses implicate many of the same concerns that arise in connection with statutory compulsory
licenses. I hope that you can see how the eBay decision has had the effect of sharply increasing
the set of such judicial compulsory licenses. Whether that impact will be socially and culturally
beneficial remains to be seen.

12.2. Damages
The plaintiffs in most copyright infringement suits are interested in money in addition to, or
sometimes instead of, the kind of injunctive relief considered in the previous segment of this
lecture. In the United States, such plaintiffs are able to rely on three different principles when
seeking financial recoveries. First, they could obtain “actual damages”. In other words, enough
money to compensate them for the injuries they have sustained. Second, they can recover
profits made by the defendants attributable to the defendant’s infringing behavior so long as
those profits are not duplicative of the actual damages sustained by the plaintiffs. Last, but not
least, instead of either actual damages or lost profits, plaintiffs may recover so-called statutory
damages – sums of money that bear no necessary relationship to either the magnitude of the
injuries the plaintiff sustained or to the profits wrongfully earned by the defendants.
The first two of these forms of recovery, actual damages and defendant’s profits, are
conventional. Although the methods by which they are calculated in US courts are somewhat
unusual, these two types of monetary recovery may be found in the copyright systems of most
countries in the world and indeed are often granted to the victims of many other kinds of
unlawful behavior, both in the United States and elsewhere. The third form of recovery, by

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contrast, is unusual. Relatively few countries currently recognize so-called statutory damages
and there’s considerable controversy over whether they should.
I’ll now spend some time describing how these three types of financial recovery work.
When I’m done, I’ll step back from the trees and consider the ongoing debate concerning which
dimensions of this forest make sense and which do not.

17 USC § 504(b)

Actual Damages and Profits. — The copyright owner is entitled to recover … any profits
of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account
in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer’s profits, the copyright
owner is required to present proof only of the infringer’s gross revenue, and the
infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit
attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.

The statutory authority for the first approach is contained in section 504(b) of the statute.
As you can see above, that provision entitles a copyright owner to recover “the actual damages
suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement.” The purpose of this provision is to enable
a successful plaintiff to recoup all of the money she lost because of the defendant’s
infringement. The most clear-cut example consists of profits the plaintiff would have earned had
the defendant not encroached upon her copyright unlawfully. The conventional way of proving
such lost profits by the plaintiff is to introduce evidence of the volume of sales at the plaintiff
likely would have enjoyed in the absence of the defendant’s behavior combined with evidence
concerning the profit the plaintiff would likely have earned on each of those sales. A less well
established variant of this approach permits the plaintiff to recoup losses she sustained if she
was forced to reduce the price of authorized copies of her work in order to compete with the
infringing defendant. This component of actual damages certainly makes sense as a matter of
theory, but case law support for it is thin.
A recent addition to the set of types of actual damages is the so-called value of use theory.
The idea underlying this variant is that a plaintiff should be able to recover from a defendant an
amount of money equivalent to the license fee that the defendant would have paid to the
plaintiff in order to obtain permission to engage in the conduct at issue. Somewhat more
specifically, this variant permits a plaintiff to recover from the defendant the amount that a
willing licensee would have paid a willing licensor for the right to engage in that conduct. In
determining that amount, courts take into account such factors as the customs prevailing in the
industry in question, the terms on which the plaintiff herself had previously granted licenses to
other parties to engage in similar activities, and perhaps special circumstances that would have
prompted the plaintiff to demand unusually high or low licensees.

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 As I say, this so-called value of use theory is a relatively recent innovation. It was
pioneered by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Deltak case in 1985. The Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit, which, as you know, enjoys disproportionate influence in
copyright law, initially rejected this basis of liability. But in 2001, in the case of Davis versus The
Gap, the Second Circuit embraced it. A year later, the Ninth Circuit did as well. Nevertheless, the
argument remains highly controversial. Critics contend that it fails to take into account the
likelihood that if the defendant had been aware of the illegality of his activity, he might not have
engaged in it at all and thus would not have paid the plaintiff any license fees. In short, the critics
argue, this theory gives the plaintiff a windfall.
Finally, some courts have been willing to allow plaintiffs to recover under the heading of
actual damages sums of money necessary to compensate them for what might be described as
indirect or collateral injuries. Included in this grab bag are such things as money the plaintiff was
forced to spend in order to modify her own product to compete with the defendant’s infringing
product, loss of goodwill because of the presence in the market of the defendant’s infringing
product misled consumers into thinking that the plaintiff’s version was not unique, and ancillary
revenue that the plaintiff may have lost because the defendant failed to give her appropriate
credit for her creations.
Either the plaintiff or the defendant may insist that these issues be resolved by a jury
rather than by the trial judge. The way in which burdens of proof are allocated at trial is that the
plaintiff bears the initial burden of showing a reasonable probability that there’s a causal
connection between the defendant’s infringing activities and the plaintiff’s injuries. The
defendant then has an opportunity to rebut those assertions. If he fails to do so, the plaintiff is
entitled to recover.
The statutory basis of the plaintiff’s a right to recover the defendant’s profits is also
contained in section 504(b). As you can see, that provision indicates that a copyright owner is
entitled to recover “any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are
not taken into account in computing actual damages.” The last clause in this sentence prevents a
plaintiff from using this device to achieve a double recovery. In other words, any profit the
defendant reaped that derived from sales diverted from the plaintiff must be excluded from the
plaintiff’s recovery under this theory, because they’ve already been taken into account under
the heading of actual damages. As a practical matter, this exclusion means that the opportunity
to recover a defendant’s profits is most beneficial to plaintiffs in two situations. First, where
there are more than two competitors in the relevant market and thus that the defendant’s
profits were diverted not just from the plaintiff, but also from a third party. Second, where the
defendant has a much larger business than the plaintiff and thus was able to sell many more
products than the plaintiff could have done.
Burdens of proof under this heading are allocated as follows. The plaintiff must introduce
evidence of the defendant’s gross revenues. The statute, as you can see, does not require the
plaintiff to show that the revenue at issue is attributable to the defendant’s unlawful behavior.
But the courts have added that important qualification to the plaintiff’s burden.

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 So, what kinds of revenues count under this standard? The principal examples are those I
just mentioned. Namely, revenues earned by the defendant from sales of an infringing product.
What about revenues he earned from sales of related non-infringing products that were boosted
in some way by sales of the infringing products? These are recoverable in theory, but difficult to
prove. Occasionally courts have also been willing to count under this heading revenues
generated by advertisements created and distributed by the defendants that contain infringing
material. Usually, however, such recoveries are denied because the plaintiff is unable to
establish a causal connection between the advertisements at issue and the defendant’s
enhanced sales. Finally, revenue attributable to the enhancement of a defendant’s goodwill
caused by his sales of infringing products are, again, recoverable in theory, but almost never
provable in practice.
Of course, the defendant’s gross revenue overstates the magnitude of his illicit gain. To
determine his profit, we must deduct from his revenues the associated costs. For obvious
reasons, the burden to introduce evidence concerning the magnitude of those costs is borne by
the defendant, not the plaintiff. What kinds of expenditures may fairly be counted as costs? In
answering that question, courts typically look to generally accepted accounting principles. An
interesting nuance under this heading is that a defendant is permitted to deduct income taxes
unless his infringement was willful. Intriguing issues arise when the defendant’s product consists
of a combination of infringing material and non-infringing original material contributed by the
defendant. Under such circumstances, the defendant is permitted to introduce evidence
showing what portion of the revenue generated by the composite product is properly
attributable to his own non-infringing contribution, and thus not properly payable to the
plaintiff. Delicate and difficult questions lurk here concerning what features of products matter
to consumers.
Remember for example, the controversy between the photographer Art Rogers and Jeff
Koons arising out of Koons’ use of this photograph as the reference work for this sculpture. As
you’ll recall, Koons’ effort to excuse this behavior on the basis of the Fair Use Doctrine failed.
Rogers was thus entitled to damages. Included in the sum to which Rogers was entitled was the
profit that Koons earned as a result of his infringement. Koons made a lot of money by selling
copies of his sculpture. Specifically, three of the four copies he made were sold to collectors for
a total sum of $367,000. A substantial portion of that sum represented profit. Koons argued,
plausibly, that much of the profit was attributable to his own creative contributions, not to the
value he derived from Rogers photos. He also argued that some of that profit derived from a
third source, specifically from Koons’ artistic reputation. Koons is something of a star in the art
world. The large amounts that collectors pay for his works are attributable, in large part, to the
fact that Koons made them, not to their final form. In this particular case, Koons contended that
Rogers did not deserve to share in that reputational premium. The Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit agreed. Here’s the pertinent language.

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 On the subject of apportioning profits, the copyright law requires that Koons have the
opportunity to establish those elements of profit attributable to factors other than the
copyrighted work. These elements may include Koons’ own notoriety and his related
ability to command high prices for his work. To the extent that Koons is able to prove
that the profits at issue derive solely from his own position in the art world, he should
be allowed to retain them.

We come finally to the controversial topic of statutory damages. Here’s how they work.
Section 504I provides that at any point before final judgment in a copyright case, the plaintiff
may renounce the recovery of actual damages and defendant’s profits and instead opt to
recover an amount of money set by a jury or the judge. How much money? The pertinent
statutory provision sets forth some broad ranges, but gives the decision maker lots of discretion
in picking a point within those ranges. The currently applicable ranges are shown in Figure 122.
The default, as you can see, is between $750 per infringed copyrighted work and $30,000 per
infringed work. If the defendant’s conduct was willful, meaning that the defendant knew that his
conduct violated the copyright statute, then the range is between $750 and $150,000. A lower
range, as you can see, applies if the defendant’s
behavior was innocent, meaning that “the
infringer was not aware and had no reason to
believe that his or her acts constituted an
infringement of copyright.” In other words,
innocence in this sense has both a subjective
and an objective component. To qualify for the
lower range, it’s not enough that a defendant
was unaware of the illegality of his actions; it’s
also necessary that his misimpression had been Figure 122: Ranges of statutory damages

reasonable.
Who picks the amount of statutory damages within these broad ranges? Congress, as you
can see from the text of the statute, clearly contemplated that “the court,” meaning the trial
judge, would make that determination. But the United States Supreme Court in the Feltner case
determined that the Seventh Amendment provides a right to a jury trial in all issues pertinent to
an award of statutory damages under Section 504(a), including the amount of the award itself.
The upshot is that every time you see the word court in 504(c), you should replace it with the
word jury. What factors should the decision maker rely upon when setting that amount? The
only guideline the statute itself provides is that it should be the amount that the court considers
just. When, after Feltner, courts delegate this determination to juries, they usually instruct the
juries to pick the amount the juries consider just. Sometimes the judges suggest other factors
that the jury could consider when making their choice, such as evidence of how much the
plaintiff was actually harmed, the need to deter wrongdoing in the future, the nature of the

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plaintiff’s work, and so forth. But these are just suggestions. Within the ranges set by the
statute, the jury is largely in constraint.
If the defendant has infringed only one of the plaintiff’s copyrighted works, say a novel or
a musical composition, then as we’ve seen, the maximum amount of statutory damages the
plaintiff can recover is $150,000. But if the plaintiff has infringed two of the plaintiff’s works, the
amount doubles. If three, it triples, and so forth. The key variable, to repeat, is not the number
of occasions on which the defendant has engaged in an infringement. It’s the number of works
he has infringed. In some cases, that number is not obvious. For example, if I rip a CD containing
12 sound recordings, have I infringed one work or 12? For obvious reasons, it makes a big
difference. The general standard the courts use in such circumstances is that the individual
pieces are deemed distinct works if and only if they have independent economic value, and
applying that criterion, courts unavoidably exercise some discretion and often tacitly exercise
that discretion in an effort to do rough justice.
A crucial limitation on the availability of statutory damages is that with narrow exceptions,
they are only available if the plaintiff registered her work prior to the defendant’s infringement.
As you know from lecture number six, registration of a copyright is now optional in the US. But
registration gives a copyright owner some advantages. The availability of statutory damages in
case of infringement is perhaps the most important of those advantages.
In addition to damages of these three sorts, parties who prevail in copyright infringement
suits can sometimes recover their court costs and their attorney’s fees. These amounts are not
trivial. Attorney’s fees in particular can be very large. Indeed, anxiety about possible liability for
attorney’s fees is often the principal driver that motivates settlements of infringement suits.
That anxiety derives in part from the fact that both costs and attorney’s fees are more
commonly awarded in copyright cases than in most other types of suit in the United States. With
respect to both costs and fees, the trial court is empowered to make awards “in its discretion.”
The kinds of factors the courts look to when exercising that discretion include the strength of the
losing party’s substantive arguments – the stronger they were, the less likely will be the court to
award fees – the legitimacy of the reasons why the losing party litigated the case, the need to
deter abusive litigation by similarly situated parties in the future, conversely the importance of
not deterring legitimate efforts to defend legal rights or to resolve unsettled legal issues, and so
forth. The same standards are applied when assessing requests for costs and fees made by
prevailing defendants as when assessing such suggestions made by victorious plaintiffs.
An intriguing variation on these themes suggested by Judge Posner in the Gonzalez case is
that a judge should be more willing to award attorney’s fees, particularly when the defendant’s
behavior was willful, if the magnitude of the compensatory or statutory damages that the
plaintiff could collect is modest. And thus, unless the plaintiff could recover such fees, she might
be disinclined to assert her rights.
Finally, it should be emphasized that attorney’s fees, like statutory damages, are only
available to copyright owners who registered their works prior to the infringement. This
reinforces the incentive I mentioned to register one’s works.

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 Underlying this rather intricate combination of rules are five general themes or objectives.
Sometimes these themes reinforce one another, but sometimes they are in tension. When
considering how, if at all, this system of remedies should be modified, it’s helpful to bring these
objectives to the surface. When they conflict, it’s necessary to decide which is the more
important.
The first, and least surprising purpose, is to Purposes behind seeking damages
compensate copyright owners. In other words, to indemnify 1. Compensation
them against loss. A copyright owner who’s been injured by
2. Avoid unjust enrichment
a defendant’s infringement should be able to recoup from
3. Deterrence
the defendant all of her losses.
All four of the general theories of copyright law we 4. Punishment
have considered in this lecture series provide support for 5. Maintain the balance
this first objective. Viewed through the lens of either between private rights and
fairness or personality theory, the rights that the law the public interest
confers upon copyright owners are grounded in moral
considerations. The moral right to a fair return for one’s hard creative work, or the moral right to
protection of the fragile bond between oneself and one’s creations. Fidelity to those moral
considerations requires at a minimum that copyright owners not suffer uncompensated injuries
when their legal rights are abridged. Viewed through the lens of either welfare or cultural
theory, the rights that the law accords authors and artists are designed to induce them to
behave in ways that will advance some larger goal, generating and disseminating works that will
advance net social welfare, or will foster a rich and stimulating culture. Authors and artists will
not be so induced if they are exposed to uncompensated abridgments of their rights. So, as to
this first point, there’s not much controversy.
The second of the objectives is the prevention of unjust enrichment. We don’t want
infringers to profit from their wrongdoing even if copyright owners do not suffer thereby. This is
a very common sentiment. Not just in copyright law, but in other fields as well. It looms large in
contract law, for example. But despite its ubiquity, it’s harder to justify and harder to connect
convincingly to the general theories upon which copyright law rests. It seems connected to the
same intuition that prompts us to recoil or object when a murderer writes a book recounting his
crime and collects royalties from it.
The third goal helps reinforce the somewhat shaky foundations of the second –
deterrence. We want to craft remedies that discourage potential infringers from violating
copyright owners’ entitlements in the future. Litigation is enormously time consuming and
painful. A copyright owner forced to litigate can never be truly made whole. Thus, if possible, we
want to deter people from infringing their rights in the first instance. One way to do so is to
award and publicize monetary judgments that will make potential defendants think twice or
thrice.

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 The fourth ambition is punishment. Copyright infringement is wrong. We want to penalize
the people who engage in it. Not just to deter similar conduct in the future, but because the
infringers deserve it. Another word for this is retribution.
Finally, copyright law, as you know by now, aspires to create and maintain a delicate
balance between on one hand, the entitlements of creators, and on the other hand, the
interests of the public in making use of their creations. The primary expression of the latter is
the long list of statutory and judicial exceptions and limitations. Embedded in the copyright
statute, the most famous of which the United States is the Fair Use Doctrine. Against this back
drop, we want to craft a set of remedies that will maintain that balance. In particular, just as we
want to ensure that copyright owners have appropriate incentives to assert their rights, so we
want to ensure that users have appropriate incentives to assert their privileges. In this respect,
copyright infringement is fundamentally different from homicide say, or rape. In those contexts,
we’re not particularly concerned about over enforcement. If someone is not entirely sure what
constitutes manslaughter or sexual assault and his behavior is, to use the legal vernacular,
“chilled” a bit, we’re not troubled. That such people are prompted to steer well clear of a vague
line is not a serious problem. And copyright law, by contrast, chilling borderline behavior – in
other words, discouraging people from engaging in activities that approach but do not cross the
line of legality – is a serious problem. When setting and interpreting the rules governing damage
awards, we want to avoid it. By now, the reason why these goals sometimes conflict should be
clear. Goal number three, and even more so goal number four, sometimes counsel larger awards
than is optimal from the standpoint of goal number five.
The context in which these considerations are currently most salient is statutory damages.
Most countries in the world do not currently permit copyright owners to recover statutory
damages. A thorough analysis of the law of each nation in this regard can be found in a
forthcoming article by Pam Samuelson, Tara Wheatland, and Phil Hill. Phil, as I think you know, is
one of the teaching fellows in the edX course for which these lectures were in part prepared.
The authors of that study demonstrate that only 24 of the 177 member states in the World
Intellectual Property Organization currently allow recovery of statutory damages. And very few
of the countries that do have such regimes also have copyright based industries comparable in
size and health to those in the United States. The US is currently trying to change the state of
affairs. Its diplomatic representatives are using various levers to try to induce other nations to
adopt systems that resemble the system in force in the US. Why? Primarily because US based
organizations representing at least some copyright owners have asked them to do so.
Critics of this initiative make three arguments.
First, many countries, unlike the United States, regard punishment of offenders as an
inappropriate function of civil damage awards. Punishment, they believe, should be left to the
criminal law, to which we’ll return in the last segment of this lecture. The reason why this is
relevant is that over time, the US system of statutory damages has gradually taken on an ever
more punitive role. Originally adopted primarily as a mechanism to provide compensation for
copyright owners who have trouble proving the magnitude of the injuries they suffer, it now

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works in large part to penalize infringers. Many observers, especially outside the US, think that
that’s not a role for private lawsuits.
Second, the critics point out that the broad ranges of permissible awards under the US
system and the paucity of meaningful guidance concerning how awards should be set within
those ranges give judges and now juries too much discretion and result, consequently, in
unpredictable, even arbitrary awards. Uncertainty of this sort is especially threatening to the
delicate balance between private rights and the public interest.
Third, and finally, some critics point out that the statutory damage system generates
perverse results when applied in situations in which a defendant infringes a large number of
works, each of which has only modest economic value. Because as we’ve seen, copyright owners
are permitted to recover statutory damages for each work, the result is to enable them to
recover amounts that dwarf the injuries that the copyright owners actually suffer.
The context in which this unanticipated
24 sound recordings
problem has proven especially serious has been file
1. $222,000
sharing. The large majority of the individual
District Court grants new trial, after
defendants who’ve been sued by the record concluding that it has misinterpreted
companies for unlawfully copying and redistributing “distribution”
sound recordings through file sharing networks 2. $1,920,000
have settled the claims for modest amounts of District Courts reduces to $54,000

money. But the few defendants who have not 3. $1,500,000

District Courts reduces to $54,000;
settled have incurred enormous awards. Jammie
Eighth Circuit Court of Appeal grants
Thomas Rasset, for example, was found to have RIAA’s motion to reinstate $222,000
infringed the copyrights in 24 recordings, and after
Figure 123: Verdicts in the Thomas-Rassett
a series of three trials, ended up with a damage
case
award of $222,000. Joel Tenenbaum was found to
have willfully violated the copyrights in 30 recordings and ended up with a damage award of
$675,000. In both of those cases, the trial judges balked at the magnitude of the jury’s awards. In
both instances, the judges concluded that the awards were so large as to violate the federal
constitution. In both instances, however, the Court of Appeals reversed. Although the grounds
on which the two courts of appeals did so differed, in the Thomas-Rasset case, the Eighth Circuit
rejected the defendant’s constitutional argument on the following ground. “Applying the
Williams standard, we conclude that an award of $9,250 per each of the 24 works is not so
severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously
unreasonable.” Congress, exercising its wide latitude of discretion, set a statutory damages
range for willful copyright infringement of $750 to $150,000 per infringed work. The award here
is toward the lower end of this broad range. As in Williams, the interests of the public, the
numberless opportunities for committing the offense, and the need for securing uniform
adherence to federal law support the constitutionality of the award. In the Tenenbaum case, the
First Circuit concluded that the trial judge should have avoided the constitutional question.

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However, in so ruling, the First Circuit strongly intimated that like the Eighth Circuit, it believed
the Constitution had not been violated.
In both of these cases, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the Court of
Appeals decision. As a result, we do not yet have a conclusive answer concerning the
constitutionality of such applications of the statutory damage regime. And we’re not likely to get
a conclusive declaration in the near future. The net result is that the struggle over statutory
damages will continue in the political arena. Reformers in the United States will seek to curb
them. Skeptics in other countries will likely continue to resist them, or more modestly, to
discipline statutory damages with guidelines more precise than the vague standards used in the
US. By contrast, representatives of copyright based industries in the United States will continue
to defend statutory damages and argue for the adoption of the US model elsewhere. How this
struggle will end remains to be seen.

12.3. Criminal Penalties

I suggested, in the preceding segment of this lecture, that many people believe that retribution
and perhaps deterrence are inappropriate roles for private copyright infringement suits. Such
things, is commonly said, should be left to the criminal law. Why? In part because the
government, representing the people as a whole not individual parties, is the right party to
identify behavior worthy of punishment and to impose such punishments. A more subtle
explanation sometimes offered is that enforcement of criminal law, unlike enforcement of civil
law, is controlled by prosecutors who can and do exercise discretion in selecting, from among
the surplus of potentially punishable actions, those that truly merit prosecution. Arguably, in
short, there’s an important role for criminal sanctions in the law of copyright.
For better or worse until recently, the role that criminal law actually played was modest.
Although the United States first adopted criminal copyright penalties in 1897, until the late 20th
Century, they were rarely applicable to instances of copyright infringement and even more
rarely enforced. In the last 15 years, the tide has turned. Congress repeatedly has both
expanded the set of activities that are subject to criminal penalties and increased the magnitude
of those penalties. Prosecutions, relying on the strength and rules, have been increasing. Here
are a few manifestations of this trend.
In 1994, David LaMacchia, then an MIT
graduate student shown in Figure 124 with his
lawyer, set up an electronic bulletin board and
encouraged users to upload to it copies of
popular commercial software programs which
other users could then download to their own
computers. At the time, Section 505(a) of the
copyright statute was, in the court’s judgment,
the only applicable criminal provision, and it
required the government to prove that the Figure 124: David LaMacchia (right) with his lawyer

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defendant acted quote willfully and for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial
gain close quote. Because LaMacchia had not sought to profit in any way from his actions, he
escaped liability. In response, Congress adopted the so-called No Electronic Theft Act, which
closed what it saw as a loophole by adding, as an additional possible basis of liability, that the
defendant made multiple copies of copyrighted works worth more than $2,500. The relevant
provision has since been amended to make it even easier for the government. The current
version of Section 505(a) allows conviction upon a showing that the defendant reproduced or
distributed during any 180-day period one or more copies or phonorecords of one or more
copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000. These statutory
adjustments have since enabled the government to secure guilty pleas from defendants who
engaged in conduct similar to LaMacchia’s.
It should be emphasized that the pertinent The growth of criminal copyright
criminal penalties are not trivial. In addition to fines, ▪ 1997: No Electronic Theft Act
defendants convicted under 505(a) are potentially
▪ 1998: Digital Millennium
subject to substantial terms of imprisonment. Back to
Copyright Act (DCMA)
our list. As you know from the previous lecture, in 1998,
Congress adopted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ▪ 2004: Anti-Counterfeiting
which, among other things, added to the copyright Amendments Act
statute Section 1201, which imposes serious criminal ▪ 2005: Family Entertainment
sanctions on persons who circumvent technological and Copyright Act
protection measures or traffic in technology designed for
▪ 2008: Prioritizing Resources
such circumvention. In 2004, Congress adopted the Anti-
and Organization for
Counterfeiting Amendments Act, which criminalized
Intellectual Property Act (“Pro-
trafficking in false labels on copyrighted works. The
following year, it added the Family Entertainment and IP Act”)
Copyright Act, which penalized the recording of movies ▪ 2011: Anti-Counterfeiting
in theaters. Finally, in 2008, Congress adopted the Trade Agreement (ACTA)
Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual
Property Act, the Pro-IP Act for short, which converted to felonies most copyright related
offenses that previously had been misdemeanors and increased the resources of the Justice
Department for pursuing IP related crimes.
Since then, the United States has sought during trade negotiations to persuade other
nations to increase the levels of criminal copyright enforcement in their own jurisdictions. The
most important such initiative to date is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, in whose
negotiation the United States was a major participant. Article 23 of ACTA requires member
countries, among other things, to quote provide for criminal procedures and penalties to be
applied at least in cases of willful copyright or related rights piracy on a commercial scale. The
next clause in the provision attempts to grapple with the same issues addressed in the No
Electronic Theft Act “acts carried out on a commercial scale include, at least those carried out as
commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.”

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 As you know from lecture number one, ACTA has not yet entered into force and may
never do so. But if it does, it will extend the US trend toward increasingly expensive criminal
copyright liability to other member countries.
These legislative initiatives have been accompanied by an increasing in the frequency of
prosecution, both in the US and in other countries. Among the most high-profile cases was the
successful prosecution in Sweden of the four people who set up and ran the file sharing site
Pirate Bay, although the Swedish authorities seem to have had trouble enforcing the relatively
modest prison terms and fines imposed on those four defendants. Even more notorious are the
ongoing efforts of the US prosecutors to extradite and prosecute Kim Dotcom, the flamboyant
creator of the New Zealand-based site Megaupload. Before it was shut down, Megaupload was
definitely a for profit enterprise. Between 2005 and 2012, according to the indictment in the
case, Megaupload earned more than $150 million in paid subscriptions and more than $25
million in advertising fees. In 2010 alone, Mr. Dotcom himself earned more than $42 million.
Not all of these prosecutions have resulted in convictions. For example, Isamu Kaneko, the
Japanese developer of the Winny file sharing system, was ultimately acquitted on the ground
that the system, although most often used for illegal purposes, was capable of substantial non-
infringing uses. Note the echo of the Betamax CONSU defense here. But in most of these cases,
the government has ultimately prevailed.
One of the most recent prosecutions came painfully close to home. Aaron Swartz was a
brilliant young programmer and internet activist. Among many other things, he helped found the
social news site Reddit and helped Larry Lessig establish Creative Commons about which you
learned in lecture number six. Swartz believed deeply that information of all sorts should be
widely accessible. And that belief proved his undoing. In 2011, while he was a fellow at Harvard’s
Safra Center, Swartz surreptitiously downloaded a large number of journal articles from the
website of JSTOR, a massive nonprofit repository of such articles, to a laptop computer that he
placed in a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most likely, Swartz intended to
make the articles available to the public at large. But he never did so. His actions were detected,
and he was arrested. He subsequently returned to JSTOR all of the data he had downloaded.
JSTOR itself, the ostensible victim of Swartz’ misconduct, released a statement indicating that it
would not bring a civil copyright infringement suit against him and did not support a criminal
prosecution. Nevertheless, the United States Attorney in Boston pressed forward with the
prosecution. Swartz was indicted, not for violating Section 506(a), but for “wire fraud, computer
fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a
protected computer.” In a press release accompanying the indictment, the US Attorney
announced that “if convicted on these charges, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison to be
followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture, and a fine of up to $1
million.”
Swartz’s lawyer sought to negotiate a plea bargain. The prosecutors reportedly were
willing to accept a deal under which Swartz would serve only six months in jail but no less. The
lawyers failed to come to terms. A trial loomed. In January of this year, at the age of 26, Swartz

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committed suicide. Several forces and circumstances undoubtedly contributed to his decision to
end his life, but one of them, undoubtedly, was anxiety caused by the ongoing prosecution and
the prospect of a trial and likely conviction and imprisonment.
His suicide could and should have been avoided. To be sure, Swartz most likely had
committed a crime. Owen Kerr a specialist in this field, may well have been right when he wrote,
“All of the charges against Swartz were based on established case law. Indeed, once the decision
to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good
federal prosecutor would have charged.” But one of the crucial responsibilities of a prosecutor is
to decide not just when successful criminal prosecution is possible but when it is appropriate.
Prosecutors, as we’ve seen, have discretion not to bring charges at all, to bring lesser charges
than they might, or to accept lenient plea bargains. This is just the sort of case in which the
exercise of such discretion is warranted, even demanded. Swartz’s motives were altruistic, not
mercenary. He had no interest in making money. His goal was to make scholarship more widely
available. The contrast between his motives and those of all the other defendants I canvased a
few minutes ago is stark. JSTOR, the victim of his unlawful behavior, acknowledged that JSTOR
had not been harmed and sought no civil remedy.
Now, to repeat, Swartz was certainly not blameless. Arguably, his actions were misguided.
A colorable argument could be made that the uncontrolled dissemination of scholarly articles
that he sought to accomplish would have seriously disrupted the business of academic
publishing and thus threaten several the interest that this course has sought to highlight. A
better, more responsible way of making scholarship more widely available would have been
either to seek reform of the copyright statute or the rules that govern governmentally-funded
research, or as my colleague Stuart Shieber has done, to persuade professors or their
universities to insist that academic articles be posted on publicly available websites. In short, the
methods that Swartz chose to pursue his vision may well have been wrong. But there’s a big
difference between misguided idealism and the sort of self-serving piracy at which the criminal
statutes are primarily aimed. Perhaps some sort of criminal penalty was warranted in this case,
perhaps a deferred prosecution agreement which would have been effective in preventing
Swartz from engaging in similar conduct in the future – perhaps – but certainly not six months in
jail. In short, the prosecutors in this case failed to exercise their power wisely. I know and
respect one of those prosecutors. He’s not a cruel person. But he and his colleagues acted
irresponsibly, and the result was tragedy.
From that tragedy, at least two lessons can be drawn. First, criminal sanctions are both
formidable and dangerous. They have important social functions, but their power makes them
risky. The hazard that they will be imposed in appropriate circumstances is exacerbated by the
large and increasing diversity of the sets of circumstances, and the kinds of technologies
implicated by copyright law, and the kinds of activities that may constitute copyright
infringement. It’s impossible for legislators to anticipate all of those circumstances and to
differentiate them on the basis of the severity of the harms they threaten and consequently the

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severity of the sanctions they merit. It’s, thus, imperative that the people who control the
machinery, the criminal law exercise their power sensitively and wisely.
The second broader point is that the copyright system as a whole is an extraordinarily
complex and powerful machine. As I hope you now see, it affects myriad dimensions of the
global economy and culture. It seeks, simultaneously, to advance many different social goals and
to protect many different rights and freedoms, some of which are intention. Effectively
operating a machine this complex and important requires care and, again, wisdom. When tuned
intelligently and deployed thoughtfully, copyright has enormous and growing benefits. If it is out
of tune or deployed thoughtlessly, it can cause great harm. My ambition in this lecture series has
been to provide you the information and analytical tools you need not just to understand the
copyright system as it currently exists but to participate in the ongoing project of adopting that
machine to deal responsibly with changing social and cultural circumstances. I hope you have
found the lectures helpful in this regard. Thank you for your patience and attention.

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APPENDICES

A. SOURCES
Figure 4: Studio photograph of Oscar Wilde taken by Napoleon Sarony, the subject of Burrow-
Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony 111 U.S. 53 (1884), page 10
http://www.oscarwildeinamerica.org/sarony/sarony-photographs.html#item119

Figure 8: A maps showing the Berne Convention signatory countries (as of January 2016), page
36
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berne_Convention_signatories.svg

Figure 9: Berlin Hauptbahnhof, designed by Meinhard von Gerkan, page 36

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlinhbf.jpg
Figure 13: The Dickson-Edison Kinetoscope, page 47
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/edison/gallery/05.html

Figure 16: Buddhist monks from the Namgyal Monastery creating a sand mandala, page 55
http://www.namgyal.org/mandalas/background.cfm

Figure 19: Press release by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) welcoming
the introduction of the Performance Rights Act, page 60
http://www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=7BE7264B-5BC4-C823-777D-73D5B410805A

Figure 20: Press release by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) opposing the
introduction of the Performance Rights Act, page 61
http://www.nab.org/advocacy/issue.asp?id=1889

Figure 26: Brandir International, Inc. v. Cascade Pacific Lumber Co. – the Bandir ribbon rack,
page 73
http://www.ribbonrack.com

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Figure 27: Two of cheerleading uniforms offered by Varsity Brand, page 74
http://midsizeinsider.com/en-US/24/varsity-brands-boosts-the-business-of-
ch#.VndyYlqSUig (site now defunct)

Figure 28: Five of the cheerleading uniform registrations belonging to Varisty Brand, page 75
https://www.bg.law/u-s-supreme-court-issues-decision-in-star-athletica-l-l-c-v-varsity-
brands-inc-et-al

Figure 29: The Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind, page 77
http://daniel-libeskind.com

Figure 56: The Toyota Solera, page 110

http://www.youdontknowblog.com/wp-content/uploads/imgToyota-Solara2.jpg

Figure 59: The RMS Titanic, page 111

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110531_rmstitanic.html

Figure 60: A photo of the bow of the Titatnic wreck, page 112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Titanic_wreck_bow.jpg

Figure 61: Poster for the musical play “Rent” – Oregon version, page 113
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rentpostera.jpg

Figure 62: Poster for the musical play “Rent” – Jarkarta version, page 114
http://winminded.deviantart.com/art/Rent-Musical-in-Jakarta-poster-303978929

Figure 64: James Earl Reid's sculpture commemorating homelesness, page 123
http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/display5-05.htm

Figure 67: Copyright registrations (excluding renewals), 1910 – 2000, page 136
From Christopher Sprigman, “Reformalizing Copyright,” 57 Stan. L. Rev. 485, 499 (2004).

Figure 68: Rate of copyright renewals, 1910 – 2000, page 136

From Christopher Sprigman, “Reformalizing Copyright,” 57 Stan. L. Rev. 485, 499 (2004).

Figure 91: The mayor character in the TV show “Fun Stuff” contrasted with the mayor of
McDonaldland, page 176
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6ceznOrWv1r8rcv1o1_500.jpg

Figure 93: Prince’s “Love Symbol #2”, page 182

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 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/2000px-
Prince_logo.svg.png

Figure 94: Pickett's guitar design, page 182

https://princeology.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/symbol.jpeg

Figure 109: Mattel’s Barbie and photos from Forsythe’s series “Food Chain Barbie”, page 235
http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/image/Mattel/N4978_02?$null$ [Barbie]
http://web.archive.org/web/20041210175947/http://ncac.org/store/forsythesphotos.ht
m [Forsythe’s photos]

Figure 114: Implementation status of the 22 exceptions and limitations to copyright for
all 28 EU member states, page 249
http://copyrightexceptions.eu

Figure 121: US consumer home entertainment rental and sell-through spending (2010),
page 305
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/high-definition-smackdown/118789-npd-more-people-
buy-dvds-than-watch-netflix-streaming-3.html

Figure 124: David LaMacchia (right) with his lawyer, page 321
http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N68/lamacchia.00n.html

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B. DOCUMENT HISTORY

Version Date Description Author

1.0 2017/04/12 First release. Marc Pelteret
1.1 2018/01/08 Updated chapter 9.3. (new lecture video). Marc Pelteret
1.2 2018/02/07 Updated chapter 3.6. (new lecture video). Marc Pelteret

The following video lectures were used as the basis for this document.

Updated in
Lecture Title Lecture Date Document
Version
01.1 The Foundations of Copyright Law - Introduction 7 January 2016 1.0
01.2 The Foundations of Copyright Law - Originality 7 January 2016 1.0
01.3 The Foundations of Copyright Law - Idea-Expression 7 January 2016 1.0
Distinction
01.4 The Foundations of Copyright Law - Multilateral 7 January 2016 1.0
Treaties
02.1 Fairness and Personality Theories - Introduction 14 January 2013 1.0
02.2 Fairness and Personality Theories - Fairness 14 January 2013 1.0
02.3 Fairness and Personality Theories - Personality 14 January 2013 1.0
03.1 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Literature (and 4 November 2014 1.0
Software) (reformatted)
03.2 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Drama and 4 November 2014 1.0
choreography (reformatted)
03.3 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Music 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
03.4 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Audiovisual Works 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
03.5 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Fictional Characters 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
03.6 The Subject Matter of Copyright - Architectural Works 8 January 2018 1.2
04.1 Welfare Theory - The Utilitarian Framework 13 December 2013 1.0
04.2 Welfare Theory - The Incentive Theory of Copyright 13 December 2013 1.0
04.3 Welfare Theory - Applications and Assessment 13 December 2013 1.0
05.1 Authorship - Sole Authorship 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)

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05.2 Authorship - Joint Authorship 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
05.3 Authorship - Works for Hire 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
06.1 The Mechanics of Copyright - The Decline of Formalities 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
06.2 The Mechanics of Copyright - Duration 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
06.3 The Mechanics of Copyright - Protective Provisions 4 November 2014 1.0
(reformatted)
07.1 The Rights to Reproduce and Modify - Reproduction 19 February 2013 1.0
07.2 The Rights to Reproduce and Modify - Improper 19 February 2013 1.0
Approprian
07.3 The Rights to Reproduce and Modify - Derivative Works 19 February 2013 1.0
08.1 The Right to Distribute, Perform, & Display - 27 February 2014 1.0
Distribution
08.2 The Right to Distribute, Perform, & Display - 22 October 2014 1.0
Performances
08.3 Exceptions and Limitations 27 February 2014 1.0
09.1 Fair Use - The History of Fair Use 6 March 2013 1.0
09.2 Fair Use - Fair Use Today 6 March 2013 1.0
09.3 Fair Use - Other Approaches Uploaded on 27 1.1
March 2017
10.1 Cultural Theory - Premises 11 March 2013 1.0
10.2 Cultural Theory - Implications 11 March 2013 1.0
10.3 Cultural Theory - Supplements and Concerns 11 March 2013 1.0
11.1 Supplements to Copyright - Secondary Liability 29 March 2013 1.0
11.2 Supplements to Copyright - Dual-Use Technologies 29 March 2013 1.0
11.3 Technological Protection Measures 29 March 2013 1.0
12.1 Remedies - Equitable Relief 1 April 2013 1.0
12.2 Remedies - Damages 1 April 2013 1.0
12.3 Remedies - Criminal Penalties 1 April 2013 1.0

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