>I have a student looking for articles or books arguing against
>copyright, trademark, and patent protection. We have searched
>Legal-Trac and our own catalog without much success. Are there
>specific legal scholars that advocate a public domain approach?
>Any leads appreciated.
In addition to the sources that Sheldon Halpern has mentioned, the following sources argue for no copyright or for a sharply reduced scope of copyright protection, based largely on the idea that copyright law reflects an outmoded Romantic notion of the author as genius: David Lange, At Play in the Field of the Word: Copyright and the Construction of Authorship in the Post-Literate Millennium, 55 Law & Contemporary Problems 139 (1992); Peter Jaszi, On the Author Effect: Contemporary Copyright and Collective Creativity, 10 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment L. J. 293 (1992); Jessica Litman, The Public Domain, 39 Emory L.J. 965 (1990). A broader attack on the ideological foundations of copyright and certain aspects of unfair competition law, based in a Marxist approach to cultural studies, is Jane Gaines, Contested Culture; The Image, the Voice, and the Law (1991). Articles questioning the economic foundations of copyright include: Stephen Breyer (now Supreme Court Justice), The Uneasy Case for Copyright, 84 Harv. L. Rev. 281 (1970) and an article in Hamline Law Review, the cite of which I don't have at hand at the moment, entitled something like A Non-Posnerian Economic Analysis of Copyright.
Neil Netanel
Assistant Professor
University of Texas School of Law
<nnetanel[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu>
Received on Mon Dec 05 1994 - 18:48:57 GMT
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