The Patry Copyright Blog

Copyright lawyers should cheer the appointment of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. In 2004, Judge Alito was the author of the en ban...

There has, of late, been some excellent work by academic non-lawyers that throws different lights on the origins of intellectual property ri...

In a wonderful, but lamentably forgotten book, "Exemptions and Fair Use in Copyright" (1978) (still in print and available at amaz...

Line drawing is inherent in law, and even though it is frequently arbitrary, this doesn't mean it shouldn't be done; of necessity, w...

Here's an article from the October 23, 2005 New Jersey Star-Ledger. I confess to being baffled by it. It seems to misunderstand the issu...

The 1976 Act was the first of our copyright statutes to provide a definition of "copy" and of "fixed." Why did the 1976 ...

The last three blogs touched on some issues that have been troubling me: how we regard exceptions to exclusive rights, like fair use (and fo...

Wikipedia makes the following distinction between teleology and philosophical naturalism: "Philosophical naturalism and teleology inves...

When speaking of "copyright," one might think that "copy" would be a clear concept. In the past, the word was hyphenated...

Unlike Athena, the doctrine of fair use didn't spring forth fully formed out of Zeus's head. Instead, it was gradually patched toget...

Rule 8(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires (on pain of waiver) that enumerated defenses be affirmatively pled: accord and sa...

Choice of law is a complex and increasingly important area. In 1998, I was appointed by the Second Circuit as its own expert in the first ap...

The intersection of state and federal law with respect to copyright has long been problematic, even though the grant itself is entirely fede...

Since 1956, the television show " The Price is Right " has aired. On September 28, Judge John Koeltl of the SDNY issued a very fin...

There are many types of copyright history. All judicial opinions have one, going back to the parties' disputes, inability to resolve the...

First it was Google; now its Amazon.com that literary authors are kvetching about. An article in Thursday's (September 29) Wall Street ...

The concept of originality is of obvious central importance in copyright law, but does it mean the same thing everywhere? On March 4, 2004, ...

One of my favorite blogs, Corante, had a posting about cease-and-desist letters sent by the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority and BART in t...

Albrecht Dürer may lay claim to the most aggressive copyright notice ever used, declaring in 1511 in a colophon to the Life of the Virgin : ...

The saying "Less is More" was popularized by architect Mies van der Rohe (but found in an 1855 poem by Robert Browning), and sco...