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Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age
No full textWhen first written into the Constitution, intellectual property aimed to facilitate progress of science and the useful arts by granting rights to authors and inventors. Today, when rapid technological evolution accompanies growing wealth inequality and political and social divisiveness, the constitutional goal of progress may pertain to more basic, human values, redirecting IP\u27s emphasis to the commonweal instead of private interests. Against Progress considers contemporary debates about intellectual property law as concerning the relationship between the constitutional mandate of progress and fundamental values, such as equality, privacy, and distributive justice, that are increasingly challenged in today\u27s internet age. Following a legal analysis of various intellectual property court cases, Jessica Silbey examines the experiences of everyday creators and innovators navigating ownership, sharing, and sustainability within the internet eco-system and current IP laws. Crucially, the book encourages refiguring the substance of progress and the function of intellectual property in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1130/thumbnail.jp
Digital Photographers: Trust, Truth, and Copyright in the Digital Age
No full textDigital photographic technology has made us all into photographers and photographic audiences. But it has imperilled professional photographers as trustworthy digital-age storytellers. This chapter describes three years of field research and interviews with photographers. It focuses on three themes: (1) the value of labour and skill; (2) qualitative standards for photographic images and the development of professionalism among photographers; and (3) the problem of distorted or out-of-context photographs, which undermines the integrity of the photographer\u27s work. The values to which photographers are professionally devoted, such as truth, fairness, and respecting skill, will resonate with ordinary working people who have experienced the joy and pain of the digital age. Broadly, the story photographers tell about threats today to the vitality and independence of professional photography is also a story about erosion of longstanding norms undergirding democracies and our struggles with technological \u27progress\u27 for sustainable twenty-first-century professional lives
Four Privacy Stories and Two Hard Cases, a Comment on Skinner-Thompson\u27s Privacy at the Margins
Get PDFScott Skinner-Thompson\u27s new book, Privacy at the Margins, is what I would call a fourth-generation study of privacy law. Privacy\u27s contours and justifications have been debated over the course of the twentieth century, first to establish it as a matter deserving legal protection (roughly the first half of the twentieth century), 2 then to iterate its various common law and constitutional variations (starting in the 1960s), 3 and since the computer and internet revolution of the 1990s, to reevaluate privacy\u27s growing importance but waning presence in the digitally-networked age.4 The third-generation of privacy scholarship has been a fast-growing area in the past two decades, combining the study of tort-based privacy scholarship with information and data privacy concerns endemic in the internet age. And it set the stage for a fourth-generation of privacy scholarship, which considers the intersection of privacy law and equality along the dimensions of gender, race, sexual orientation, and economic class.5
As an example of third-generation privacy scholarship on which Scott-Skinner Thompson\u27s book builds, consider the recently published Why Privacy Matters, by Neil Richards. Richards begins his new book with the sentence Privacy is dead. 6 This is a set-up, because, as the book\u27s title indicates, Richards argues forcefully that privacy matters a lot. Privacy promotes identity formation, intellectual freedom and democracy, and it protects us as consumers and employees in the lopsided power asymmetries caused by the industrial econom[ies] of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.\u27 Despite starting the book with a false prophecy, Richards gets to the truth and the brunt of his argument when he writes in the first sentence of Part 1 ( How to Think About Privacy ) that Privacy is everywhere you look. \u27 Richards, a leading scholar in privacy law and regulation, demonstrates in this set-up and straight-forward reveal the conflicting and complex narratives of privacy in contemporary culture that make it both a ubiquitous and contentious subject of study and conversation
New Copyright Stories: Clearing the Way for Fair Wages and Equitable Working Conditions in American Theater and other Creative Industries
Get PDFWe need some new intellectual property stories. By stories, I don’t mean entertaining fictions. I mean instead accounts or explanations that make sense of the world as it is lived by everyday people. Most of our relevant intellectual property laws were forged in the mid-twentieth century and have failed to keep pace with the transformations in creative and innovative practices of the twentyfirst. Being out-of-sync or failing to recognize broader existing stakeholders means laws are poorly aligned with on-the-ground realities and are out-of-touch with values and interests of the people laws serve. The Article at the center of this Symposium by Brent Salter and Professor Catherine Fisk is a thoroughly scathing critique of just this disconnect, between a triad of legal regimes (antitrust, labor law, and copyright) and the practices and needs of freelance dramatists that drive American theater.Their Article identifies core assumptions about this triad of legal regimes, and it explains how these assumptions constrain the just applications of these laws to freelance writers’ work. By uncovering these assumptions and demonstrating their contingencies and fragility, the authors lead us to, but do not fully rehearse, new foundations on which a fair labor system of dramaturgs’ work would be built. This review essay proposes some of these new foundations as anchors for new IP stories that explain how, for example, copyright functions in fact for playwrights and other writers. These new stories could liberate the freelancers from the false constraints derived from the interaction of current copyright law, labor law, and antitrust law. Because I study and write about intellectual property law and am not a labor law or antitrust scholar, this short response essay will propose new stories specifically for copyright law. But the essay’s focus doesn’t preclude similar narrative and rhetorical work in the other fields
Beate Sjåfjell and Irene Lynch Fanon (eds.), Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) 337 pp.
No full textBeate Sjåfjell and Irene Lynch Fanon are to be commended for this ambitious collection of thought-provoking and timely writings by women about the role of gender in corporate cultures and the power of women to catalyse change in the business community. Starting from the premise that regulation is never neutral, Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change presents a compelling case for bringing a gender perspective to regulatory reforms intended to promote sustainable business practices. The collection considers how women influence corporate sustainability and is instructive for readers interested in gender-based approaches to existing and emerging business and human rights issues
Are People in Federal Territories Part of “We the People of the United States”?
Get PDFIn 1820, a unanimous Supreme Court proclaimed: “The United States is the name given to our great republic, which is composed of states and territories.” While that key point is simple, and perhaps even obvious, the constitutional implications of such a construction of “the United States” as including federal territories are potentially far reaching. In particular, the Constitution’s Preamble announces that the Constitution is authored by “We the People of the United States” and that the document is designed to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” to the author and its “Posterity.” If inhabitants of federal territory are among “We the People of the United States,” then federal actors owe them (and their “Posterity”) the same fiduciary duties owed to people in the States. There is no definitive answer as a matter of original meaning as to the scope of “We the People of the United States,” but the presumptive meaning of “the United States” in 1788 included federal territory, so the presumptive meaning of “the People of the United States” would similarly include people in federal territory. While there are strong textual and contextual arguments for excluding territorial inhabitants from “We the People,” there are also countervailing textual and contextual arguments for their inclusion. In the end, the answer may depend on something beyond the reach of interpretative theory: How strong is the presumption in favor of inclusion that can be drawn from pre-1788 understandings and practices? If territorial inhabitants are indeed among “We the People of the United States,” then federal action towards the territories must conform to fiduciary norms, including the key norm of impartiality with respect to multiple beneficiaries, which would require very strong reasons for disfavoring territorial inhabitants in comparison to state inhabitants
How big technology systems are slowing innovation
No full textThe great IT revolution is no longer promoting economic dynamism. It\u27s preventing it
Federal Administrative Law, 9th ed.
No full textThis casebook emphasizes current doctrine and its historical evolution in exploring the four basic foundations of federal administrative law: separation of powers, statutorily and constitutionally required procedures for agency adjudication and rulemaking, scope of judicial review of agency action, and the availability and timing of judicial review. The book concentrates on federal rather than state administrative law, on the belief that an understanding of federal law can be translated into other settings if so desired. This edition of the book maintains the straightforward organization and don’t-hide-the-ball presentation that has characterized the book since its inception. The Ninth Edition contains four new principal cases and numerous new notes and note cases, including a new framework for the materials on separation of powers. The book prominently continues, from the prior edition, to expand materials on statutory interpretation to accommodate the increasing inclusion of Administrative Law in the first-year curriculum.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1220/thumbnail.jp
When Desperate Patients Go to Court for Unproven Treatments - The Battle for Hospital Independence
Get PDFAs the Covid-19 pandemic wears on, patients have asked courts to compel hospitals to administer unproven therapies, with mixed legal results. Although talk radio hosts, politicians, and social media users have promoted various treatment approaches, they have given particular attention to ivermectin. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ivermectin for use in humans for treating onchocerciasis (river blindness), intestinal strongyloidiasis, certain other parasitic worms, head lice, and skin conditions such as rosacea. Although this approval facilitates legal offlabel use for prophylaxis against or treatment of other conditions, both the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cautioned against using ivermectin for Covid-19, citing adverse gastrointestinal and neurologic effects. In addition, a Cochrane review concluded that “overall, the reliable evidence available does not support the use of ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19 outside of well-designed randomized trials.