1,720,956 research outputs found
Infringement Episodes
No full textFor decades, copyright scholars have waged a spirited campaign against statutory damages. Our remedial system, critics say, is an incoherent mess. The core problem is that copyright holders can recover a separate award of statutory damages for every infringed work. As a result, damages can rapidly add up in any case involving multiple works. Because the number of statutory awards is tethered to the number of works, even trivial claims can lead to crippling damages. Commentators, policymakers, and judges have criticized this system as arbitrary and overbroad. And yet it endures. This Article argues that copyright’s per-work scheme has obscured, and at times eclipsed, a more compelling paradigm of copyright damages—one that attends more closely to the defendant’s course of conduct. This new approach would allow courts to examine whether the defendant’s actions arose out of, and were rooted in, a single infringement episode. By infringement episode, I mean a chain of infringing acts that together constitute a larger factual event. When the defendant’s conduct is traceable to a single episode, courts should issue only a single statutory award—no matter how many works are at stake. This framework, in short, would substitute rigidity for flexibility. It would displace copyright’s one-award-per-work scheme and instead introduce a contextual inquiry into the defendant’s course of conduct. Doing so can mitigate the risk of outlandish awards, encourage courts to properly calibrate damages, and infuse a degree of much-needed pragmatism into our system
Infringement Episodes
Get PDFFor decades, copyright scholars have waged a spirited campaign against statutory damages. Our remedial system, critics say, is an incoherent mess. The core problem is that copyright holders can recover a separate award of statutory damages for every infringed work. As a result, damages can rapidly add up in any case involving multiple works. Because the number of statutory awards is tethered to the number of works, even trivial claims can lead to crippling damages. Commentators, policymakers, and judges have criticized this system as arbitrary and overbroad. And yet it endures. This Article argues that copyright’s per-work scheme has obscured, and at times eclipsed, a more compelling paradigm of copyright damages—one that attends more closely to the defendant’s course of conduct. This new approach would allow courts to examine whether the defendant’s actions arose out of, and were rooted in, a single infringement episode. By infringement episode, I mean a chain of infringing acts that together constitute a larger factual event. When the defendant’s conduct is traceable to a single episode, courts should issue only a single statutory award—no matter how many works are at stake. This framework, in short, would substitute rigidity for flexibility. It would displace copyright’s one-award-per-work scheme and instead introduce a contextual inquiry into the defendant’s course of conduct. Doing so can mitigate the risk of outlandish awards, encourage courts to properly calibrate damages, and infuse a degree of much-needed pragmatism into our system
Fairness, Copyright, and Video Games: Hate the Game, Not the Player
Get PDFCreative communities often rely on social norms to regulate the production of creative content. Yet while an emerging body of literature has focused on isolated accounts of social norms operating in discrete, small-scale creative industries, no research to date has explored the social norms that pervade the world’s largest content microcosm—the sprawling video game community.
Now a veritable global phenomenon, the video game industry has recently grown to eclipse the music and motion picture industries. But despite its meteoric rise, the video game industry has provoked little attention from copyright scholars. This Article is the first to explore the shifting role of copyright law in the gaming community, where game developers are increasingly using a complex amalgam of legal and nonlegal tools to regulate creative output. Based on an in-depth analysis of the extralegal norms that govern creative content in the video game industry, this Article distills a richly detailed account of the relationship between video game creators and consumers. It maps the intricate web of interests underpinning the relationship between game developers and consumers; identifies a rich cadre of fairness-driven social norms that permeate the gaming community; and considers the implications of these findings for copyright law. The Article ultimately concludes that strong copyright protection is largely (though not entirely) inessential in areas where norms of fairness drive the production of creative content
The Copyright Wasteland
Get PDFThe Copyright Act grants certain exclusive rights to authors of creative works. But many of these exclusive rights are notoriously underspecified. And while a rich body of case law grapples with one copyright entitlement—the right to reproduce the copyrighted work— courts rarely engage in earnest with other exclusive rights. As a result, courts appear to have only a rudimentary understanding of the precise scope of copyright law. Because courts focus almost singularly on questions of reproduction, other exclusive rights fall by the wayside. This Article contends, counterintuitively, that the problem is traceable to a much-maligned feature of our copyright system: statutory damages. The Copyright Act allows plaintiffs to recover damages without proof of actual harm. But in practice, critics say, statutory damages often prove excessive, punitive, or otherwise arbitrary. Recent studies show that plaintiffs leverage the specter of statutory damages to obtain favorable settlements on the basis of borderline claims. This Article argues that statutory damages also frustrate the development of substantive copyright law. Statutory damages are awarded per infringed work, no matter how many different rights had been violated in that work. Once courts find an infringement of any right—usually, the right of reproduction—they have little incentive to consider additional violations. If the defendant is found to have reproduced the plaintiff’s work, little else matters. Courts thus gloss over certain exclusive rights and dwell instead on questions of reproduction. The result is a doctrinal wasteland—a vast sphere of little-explored exclusive rights. This Article spotlights the problem, considers its implications, and forges a path toward mending copyright’s doctrinal wasteland
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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