Imagine sending a magazine article to 10 friends-making photocopies, putting them in envelopes, adding postage, and mailing them. Now consider how much easier it is to send that article to those 10 friends as an attachment to e-mail. Or to post the article on your own site on the World Wide Web. The ease of modifying or copying digitized material and the proliferation of computer networking have raised fundamental questions about copyright and patentâ€"intellectual property protections rooted in the U.S. Constitution. Hailed for quick and convenient access to a world of material, the Internet also poses serious economic issues for those who create and market that material. If people can so easily send music on the Internet for free, for example, who will pay for music? This book presents the multiple facets of digitized intellectual property, defining terms, identifying key issues, and exploring alternatives. It follows the complex threads of law, business, incentives to creators, the American tradition of access to information, the international context, and the nature of human behavior. Technology is explored for its ability to transfer content and its potential to protect intellectual property rights. The book proposes research and policy recommendations as well as principles for policymaking.

A debate on the theory of intellectual property, the

In addition to adding Jay Dratler, one of America's leading authorities on licensing intellectual property, and Barbara Wrigley, a practitioner with many years experience in the field, to the list of co-authors, the Second Edition of Licensing Intellectual Property in the Information Age (formerly Licensing Intellectual Property in the Digital Age) has been largely redone. Keeping the same basic structure, each chapter has been updated with the most current developments in licensing law. Chapter 2 now works as a much more efficient introduction to intellectual property. Additionally, with the inclusion of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act in Chapter 8 and an entirely new chapter on Biotechnology, the book is now the most up-to-date and authoritative textbook available. The book emphasizes application in actual situations, with chapters designed to simulate the work flow a lawyer is likely to face in the negotiation, formation, and enforcement of an intellectual property license. The Problem Supplement is a unique addition to this book (see the link below). It contains two types of exercises. The first is a continuous series of problems based on factual scenarios involving a fictitious sports car manufacturer, Contair Corp. These exercises are called "Problems." They are numbered consecutively and keyed to the chapter of the casebook for which they should be assigned. A second set of exercises is entirely separate and does not involve the ongoing Contair hypothetical. These are called "Exercises" and are keyed to the chapter of the casebook to which they are relevant. Additional exercises, such as those involving the distinctiveness of trademarks, are included in Chapter 2 of the Casebook (Overview of Intellectual Property Law), but are not included in the supplement, because they are review exercises and are unlikely to change. To access the On-line Problem Supplement for Licensing Intellectual Property in the Information Age, Second Edition, click here.

Origins and early development; Modern systems and principles of copyright; International agreements and structure; Representative national copyright system; Challenges to copyright: new technologies and media; Policies for the information age.

A movement emerges to challenge the tightening of intellectual property law around the world. At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online.

This book explores the economic analysis of intellectual property law, with a special emphasis on the Law and Economics of informational goods in light of the past decade’s technological revolution. In recent years there has been massive growth in the Law and Economics literature focusing on intellectual property, on both normative and positive levels of analysis. The economic approach to intellectual property is often described as a monolithic, coherent approach that may differ only as it is applied to a particular case. Yet the growing literature of Law and Economics in intellectual property does not speak in one voice. The economic discourse used in legal scholarship and in policy-making encompasses several strands, each reflecting a fundamentally different approach to the economics of informational works, and each grounded in a different ideology or methodological paradigm. This book delineates the various economic approaches taken and analyzes their tenets. It maps the fundamental concepts and the theoretical foundation of current economic analysis of intellectual property law, in order to fully understand the ramifications of using economic analysis of law in policy making. In so doing, one begins to appreciate the limitations of the current frameworks in confronting the challenges of the information revolution. The book addresses the fundamental adjustments in the methodology and underlying assumptions that must be employed in order for the economic approach to remain a useful analytical framework for addressing IPR in the information age.

This study analyzes the pros and cons of e×tending intellectual property rights in the information age. The author argues that the Internet, through its emphasis on information e×change, inherently challenges the concept of intellectual property rights developed in the 18th century.