ACADEMIC ARTICLE SUMMARY
Author Autonomy and Atomism in Copyright Law
Article Source: Virginia Law Review, Vol. 96, No. 3, 2010
Publication Date:
Time to Read: 1 minute readWritten By:
Molly S. Van HouwelingTAP Scholar
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ARTICLE SUMMARY
Summary:
This paper looks at how copyright law and licensing affect creativity and authorship.
POLICY RELEVANCE
Policy Relevance:
New contract terms, organizations, and technology can help reduce the costs of creativity and innovation, which have increased because the copyrights protecting created works today are more numerous and complex than in the past.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Key Takeaways:
- New technology has made it possible for many people to create and publish works in a way that only better-funded firms could before.
- Copyright law has become broader and stronger in past decades, just as private property law was once changed to enclose common land.
- More people hold copyrights than ever before, more works are subject to copyright ownership, and the arrangements under which rights are distributed are more complex. Ownership of rights is fragmented, resulting in “copyright atomism.”
- Some suggest that when property rights are numerous and fragmented in this way, it raises the costs of trading and negotiating the rights, hampering creativity.
- Abandoning the requirement that copyrights be registered means that it can be very hard to identify the owner of a copyright.
- Technology can help ameliorate the consequences of atomism, by making information about copyright ownership more widely available.
- New licenses like the General Public License (GPL) enable many individuals to cooperate in creating software products without consolidating into dominant firms.
- New organizations like the Copyright Clearance Center can help coordinate copyright licensing without controlling every aspect of it.
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About Molly S. Van Houweling
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall) faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling's teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and constitutional law. She was a visiting professor at Boalt in 2004-05.
