To: CLS Participants (Web only; e-mail alert)
From: Nicholas Johnson
Re: CLS/Reading Assignments for February 16, 2000
Note: (a) There will be a brief, short answer quiz at the beginning of the hour over this material. (b) I refer to "pages" to give you some sense of how long these reading assignments are. But because printing differs from one computer to another the assigned sections of documents are identified by their intra-document headings.
Many of you have requested that we include some material about copyright in our survey of "cyberspace law." So we'll begin that exploration February 16th. We will probably give it two evenings (four class hours) -- possibly more.
Copyright law as a separate course and area of study. As you well know, but I will remind you anyway, there are entire courses devoted to copyright law -- including those at our law school taught by outstanding professors. Thick casebooks, numerous statutory provisions, regulations and court opinions contribute to this body of law. There is also an interesting history of the evolution of copyright over centuries, and its role as a part of international/global law and regulation.
If a part of the reason you are taking this seminar is because you are thinking about the possibility of specializing in intellectual property law I would definitely recommend that you include a copyright law class while you're in law school.
Copyright: The Law.
1. We will be referring to Professor Stacey L. Dogan's contributions to Learning Cyberlaw in Cyberspace: Copyright in Cyberspace. Start with the page this link takes you to: the Introduction (1 page).
2. Then read Dogan's Section One. (2 pages)
3. Next check out the U.S. Copyright Office Web page. It has links to virtually anything you'd want to know as a beginning practitioner of copyright law.
4. Click on the Copyright Office's "Copyright Basics" and read from "What is Copyright?" through "How Long Copyright Endures" (i.e., read to "Transfer of Copyright") (9 pages).
5. If you have not been clicking on the sections of the Copyright Act as they were highlighted in what you've read so far go to either the Copyright Office statutory site (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader; pdf file only) for Chapter 1 of the Act, or the Cornell Law link to the Legal Information Institute (Copyright Chapter 1) -- or whatever other site is your favorite way of getting to the U.S. Code online -- and make sure you have read at least sections 102, 103, 106, 107 and 117.
Copyright: "Original Work of Authorship"
6. Read Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) (the link provided is from Professor Dogan's "Section Two," but you are of course free to find it elsewhere if you prefer) (5-plus pages).
7. Read Professor Dogan's "Comments, notes, and questions" following Feist (no direct link; scroll forward through the opinion to find it; 4 pages)
Copyright: Its Future on the Internet
8. Read John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," Wired 2.03, March 1994. (This is the Pinedale, Wyoming, cattle rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and helped found the eff (electronic frontier foundation) with Lotus developer Mitch Kapor. A mind stretching piece with which we begin our consideration of the role of copyright as cyberspace law. 16 pages.)
9. If you have time (it won't be part of the quiz, but will be discussed and part of the quiz next week if we don't get to it February 16 -- so you won't be wasting your time to read it now) read Eric Schlachter, "The Intellectual Property Renaissance in Cyberspace: Why Copyright Law Could be Unimportant on the Internet," 12 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 15. The text and endnotes are at two different locations. The link I've provided takes you to a page where you can click on text.html and note.html to get you to both. (18 pages text; 10 pages notes.)
All in all it should make for an interesting evening. See you then.