Online research in philosophy

This paper lays out the case for understanding and applying copyright's fair use doctrine in terms of social practices that exist side-by-side with arms' length market transactions. It argues that the goal of fair use is, has been, and should be to promote the same creative ends that copyright as a whole serves, but that copyright and fair use should do so by recognizing that in certain contexts, creative expression emerges from social dynamics that not only do not depend on market exchange, but even thrive outside of it. A claim of fair use ought to succeed, then, if the claimant is acting in the context of a recognized social practice. The text of Copyright Act and the Supreme Court's fair use jurisprudence are consistent with such a modestly flexible and contextual approach.

This paper describes the French initiative in materials research against both a national and an international background, in an attempt to disentangle the local circumstances, which prompted this governmental initiative, and to characterize the specific profile of materials research in France. In presenting a biography of the interdisciplinary program in materials research (PIRMAT), we argue that: i) the PIRMAT denotes a failure of the French science policy in materials research; ii) the leadership of the CNRS led to a specific style of research, quite different from the engineering approach of Materials Science and Engineering, and characteristic of a French style in materials research.

Although much separates them musically, George Harrison and Michael Bolton share a common legal fate. Both have been held liable in copyright infringement cases in which a court articulated theories of liability based on subconscious infringement. This Article discusses how decisions in the Bolton, Harrison, and other copyright infringement cases reflect a common failing. Such decisions highlight the incomplete nature of the theories of creativity and creation processes in copyright doctrine.After discussing current approaches to questions of creation, this Article suggests ways in which copyright theory can better incorporate a contextualized understanding of creativity and creation processes. Creativity in copyright is frequently characterized as not involving copying, which is typically thought to be antithetical to both originality and creativity. This stigmatization of copying, however, means that copyright theory cannot adequately account for the reality of not infrequent similarities between works that are a result of copying both ideas and expression in the creation of new works. This missing theoretical link has significant implications for copyright in practice. The lack of legal analysis of the full range of creativity and processes of creation is also a major reason why copyright theory often has such difficulty delineating what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate copying of existing works.

This revised version of the author’s 1985 article “Contra Copyright” includes a new, introductory section explaining the background of the author’s path to copyright abolitionism. The main article surveys various libertarian debates on this issue, including the anti-intellectual property (IP) views of Benjamin Tucker and the pro-IP views of Lysander Spooner. [...].

This Article demonstrates that narrative has significant potential to influence explicitly the ways in which courts, litigants, and legislators think about the process of artistic creation and the voice of the author. It contends that the author's voice is one that has been submerged in the development of copyright law and that copyright law is therefore insufficiently sensitive to authorial perspectives about the creative process. It also argues that narrative, as a strategy for bringing attention to marginalized voices, can greatly assist in the reshaping of certain doctrines especially important to authors such as moral rights and copyright's joint authorship doctrine. This Article does not argue for a radical change of the normative standards under which our copyright law currently operates, nor does it urge that the narrative of the author should be emphasized over and above the other forces that have shaped our copyright law. It does contend, however, that copyright law needs to recognize more explicitly that the author's voice has been drowned out by other more dominant voices in our culture. This submergence has resulted in the marginalization of the author's honor, dignity, and spirit in important applications of copyright law.

The growing trend of required ethics instruction in the business school curriculum has created a need for relevant teaching materials. In response to this need the Journal of Business Ethics is introducing a new case section. This section provides a forum for publishing and accessing a range of materials that can be used in teaching business ethics. This article discusses how business ethics cases can facilitate the development of deductive, inductive and critical reasoning skills.

Some business schools have integrated business ethics issues into their core functional courses rather than simply offering a separate ethics course. To accommodate such a strategy, functional faculty members usually teach ethical issues, a task for which they are rarely trained. However, learning materials are available: some core course textbooks provide additional coverage of ethics, and case studies (and accompanying teaching notes for instructors) are also available which cover ethical issues.This paper reports on an analysis of these materials. We find that a sample of the leading textbooks provides only very superficial coverage of ethical issues. Cases provide a wide range of issues suitable for class discussion, but their teaching notes in many cases provide little guidance for instructors unfamiliar with teaching ethics. Thus there remains a need for teaching resources for business faculty new to teaching ethics.

Copyright scholars are almost universally unaware of Jewish copyright law, a rich body of copyright doctrine and jurisprudence that developed in parallel with Anglo-American and Continental European copyright laws and printers' privileges. Jewish copyright law traces its origins to a dispute adjudicated some 150 years before modern copyright law is typically said to have emerged with the Statute of Anne of 1709. This Article examines that dispute, the case of Maharam of Padua v. Giustiniani. Remarkably, the ruling in that dispute reaches some of the same fundamental issues that animate copyright jurisprudence today: Is copyright a property right or a limited regulatory prerogative? What is copyright's rationale? What is its scope? Which law should be applied to a copyright dispute in which the litigants reside under different legal regimes? How can copyright be enforced against an infringer who is beyond the applicable legal authority's reach? I begin with the factual and historical background to the dispute. I then analyze the rabbinic judge's reasoning and decision. I close with a brief description of the dispute's tragic postscript.

This study is based on analysis of copyright policies and 26 interviews with science and engineering faculty at three research universities on the topic of copyright beliefs, values, and practices, with emphasis on copyright of instructional materials, courseware, tools, and texts. Given that research universities now emphasize increasing external revenue flows through marketing of intellectual property, we expected copyright to follow the path of patents and lead to institutional emphasis of policies and practices that enhanced universities’ intellectual property portfolios, accompanied by an increase in copyrighting by professors. Although this pattern occurred with regard to institutions, professors offered a more varied pattern, with some fully participating in commercialization of copyright and embracing entrepreneurial values, while others resisted or subverted commercial activity in favor of traditional science and engineering values.

Philosophers have given relatively little attention to the ethical issues surrounding the nature of intellectual property in spite of the fact that for the past ten years the public policy debate over "fair use" of copyrighted materials in higher education has been heating up. This neglect is especially striking since copyright ethics are at stake in so many aspects of academic life: the photocopying of materials for classroom use and scholarly work, access to electronic texts, and the cost and availability of single-source information technology such as Dialogue, library card catalogues, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a variety of other print and electronic resources. Of course, the ethics of copyright are not only an issue for those of us in the business of education: recent allegations of copyright infringement by Texaco, which regularly photocopied articles from scientific and technical journals for its employees, suggests that questions about copyright ethics may arise regularly for every corporation and business. While the current lawsuit against Kinko's Copies(1) and Texaco may settle some public policy questions in the short run, the legal discourse on fair use depends upon competing ethical intuitions which are not likely to be resolved soon.