LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
New Scholarship: Epstein on Copyright and Property
Posted by Steven Wu on Sunday, February 15 @ 23:58:43 EST Copyright
From Legal Theory Blog comes notice of a paper by Professor Richard Epstein entitled "Liberty versus Property? Cracks in the Foundation of Copyright Law." From the abstract:
The common classical view of liberty and property treats them as part of a coherent whole. The attack on property in the general literature often rests on the grounds that any system of property represents an unacceptable abridgment of personal liberty: property, said Proudhom, is theft. Similar arguments have been raised in connection with intellectual property, often by libertarians who accept the common heritage of liberty and property with tangible assets. This paper argues that the tension identified between liberty and property applies in both realms and can only be resolved by a unified technique that asks whether the creation of property rights creates Pareto improvements over a world in which all claims of liberty are accepted relative to those of property. That approach yields a place for both sorts of regimes and explains why IP rights are often less potent that rights in tangible land and chattels.
This is sort of a vague description of the paper. A few sentences from the conclusion gives a better idea of Epstein's argument:
In sum, when we look at the situation with respect to copyright, it seems clear that the peculiar nature of the rights in question justify rules that allow for limited duration and fair use, and perhaps some other restrictions. But as such they do not alter the basic tension that exists between liberty and property in the case of labor or natural resources. . . . Quite simply, any system of private property imposes heavy costs of exclusion. However, these costs can only be eliminated by adopting some system of collective ownership that for its part imposes heavy costs of governance. The only choice that we have is to pick the lesser of two evils.
Very interesting.
 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by Steven Wu


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
The PHP-Nuke engine on which LawMeme runs is copyright by PHP-Nuke, and is freely available under the GNU GPL.
Everything else is copyright copyright 2002-04 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php



Page Generation: 0.072 Seconds