Author(s): Pamela Samuelson
Year: 2012
Abstract:
Copyright
law has taken quite a beating in the legal literature in the past
decade or so. Complaints have been legion that copyright industry groups
and corporate copyright owners have sought and too often obtained
extremely strong and overly long copyright protections that interfere
with downstream creative endeavors as well as with legitimate consumer
expectations. Two recent contributions to this literature are William
Patry’s How to Fix Copyright and Jason Mazzone’s Copyfraud and Other
Abuses of Intellectual Property Law.
Although Patry and Mazzone
agree on the need for reforms to counteract or deter overreaching by
copyright owners, they make substantially different recommendations
about how copyright ills should be cured. Patry is mainly concerned with
articulating principles that should be used to recraft copyright law,
whereas Mazzone mainly wants to sanction those who claim copyright in
public domain materials and those who attempt to thwart the exercise of
fair and other lawful uses of copyrighted works.
Each book
makes powerful arguments and offers important insights, which are
discussed in Parts I and II of this Review. Admirable though these
books’ contributions are, their agendas for reform are incomplete. Part
III considers substantive reform proposals beyond those recommended in
Patry’s and Mazzone’s respective books, as well as several modes and
venues through which copyright reform can happen. It observes that some
reforms are already happening through private ordering and the evolution
of social norms, although the scale of these reforms remains modest.
The most promising way to work toward more comprehensive copyright
reform would be for an entity such as the American Law Institute (ALI)
to develop a project to articulate principles for a well-balanced and
public-spirited copyright regime, as ALI has done for numerous other
legal regimes.
Keywords: Copyright, Intellectual Property Law
Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2152672