The Patry Copyright Blog

Two fair use decisions were issued in the Southern District of New York on November 1st. The first involved Jeff Koons appropriating yet ag...

A recent decision from a federal court in Arizona, Coogan v. Avnet, Inc ., 2005 WL 2789311 (D. Az. October 24, 2005), raises the pesky issue...

I am vexed by an antiquarian problem involving unpublished works in England that perhaps someone can solve. In 1911, the English Parliament ...

There are two events coming up this month in New York City that may be of interest, and in which I am participating. The first is on Novembe...

Here is a delightful story from Today's NY Times Arts section by Edward Wyatt that raises some interesting copyright questions (I have p...

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...