By far the most important takeaway from today’s Supreme Court decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank is the Court’s acknowledgment that “many computer-implemented claims are formally addressed to patent-eligible subject matter.” Despite failing to alleviate the profound confusion caused by its recent §101 analysis in cases like Bilski, Myriad, Mayo, and plenty of earlier cases going all the way back to Benson, the Court once and for all put to rest the absurd notion that computer-implemented inventions are not patentable under §101. Read more
Category: Internet
Taking a Whack at the DMCA: The Problem of Continuous Re-Posting
By Steven Tjoe
On Thursday March 13, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) notice and takedown system. Among the witnesses testifying at the hearing was CPIP Fellow Professor Sean O’Connor (Washington University School of Law), who offered his insights on Section 512 from his unique position as a law professor, former musician, and counsel to web businesses. Read more
Improving the DMCA's Notice and Takedown System
In conjunction with today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the DMCA, CPIP Senior Scholar Prof. Mark Schultz published a critique of the notice and takedown system this morning on AEI’s TechPolicyDaily Blog.
In his critique, Prof. Schultz discusses CPIP’s policy brief by Prof. Read more
Crowdfunding's Impact on Start-Up IP Strategy
The Failure of the DMCA Notice and Takedown System
Today, CPIP released an important new policy brief, The Failure of the DMCA Notice and Takedown System: A Twentieth Century Solution to a Twenty-First Century Problem, by Professor Bruce Boyden of Marquette University Law School. Professor Boyden argues that the DMCA notice and takedown system is outdated and not up to the task of reducing the availability of infringing copies of creative works. Read more
The Internet Does Not Reset the Copyright-Free Speech Balance
Today, CPIP released an important new policy brief, “The Internet Does Not Reset the Copyright-Free Speech Balance,” by Sean O’Connor, Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle. Professor O’Connor argues that “the First Amendment and copyright law maintain the same complementary relationship in cyberspace that they have in regular space.” Read more
How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing
[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]
Today’s public policy debates frame copyright policy solely in terms of a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” Read more