The Maine lobster fishery is a successful example of a managed natural resource commons. To ensure an ongoing supply of lobsters in the face of threats to the fishery from unregulated over-fishing, over a period of years Maine lobster fishermen crafted a set of formal and informal rules to determine… Read More »
In 2006, thousands of soccer fans showed up to the World Cup game between the Netherlands and the Ivory Coast wearing pants in the colors of the Dutch national team. The pants had been given out as promotional gifts by a beer company. FIFA, the governing body of international soccer,… Read More »
I.
The Conceptual Counteroffensive Against Private Property
This basic theory of property rights identifies three central components of private ownership: the rights to possess, use, and dispose of property. Taken together, these elements facilitate the creation of complex voluntary arrangements to coordinate the activities of multiple actors. The operational… Read More »
The dominant theoretical frame for conceptualizing uses of copyrighted works is the First Amendment’s protection for free speech. Despite numerous calls for greater First Amendment scrutiny in copyright cases, there has been an almost unrelenting rejection of independent First Amendment review in copyright cases. Even when free speech values are… Read More »
About half, probably more, of all patented inventions in the United States are never commercially exploited. Many of these undeveloped inventions are commercially worthless ab initio, such as the anti-eating face mask, beer bottle mini-umbrella, and weed-cutting golf club.
Yet, for several reasons, the patent “underdevelopment” problem arguably applies to… Read More »
This article is a response to an earlier posted piece by Jeanne C. Fromer: Claiming Intellectual Property.
Claiming intellectual property is an act of communication, but as with all communication not everything can be spelled out with exactitude all the time—far from it. By drawing out an additional distinction between… Read More »
By writing a series of James Bond novels, Ian Fleming qualified for American copyright protection, pursuant to which works created by others without license and found by courts to be substantially similar to the novels would generally infringe his copyright. Imagine instead that Fleming would have had to draft a… Read More »
