‘Copyright Fiduciaries: Problems and Solutions’

Andrew Gilden and Eva E Subotnik, ‘Copyright’s Capacity Gap’, 57 UC Davis Law Review (forthcoming, 2023), available at SSRN (9 August 2023). In this forthcoming article, Andrew Gilden and Eva Subotnik begin an important conversation about an underexplored area of copyright law. Their focus is copyright law’s inconsistent treatment of mental capacity. Under copyright law, copyright authors can produce valuable copyrighted work but those same authors may lack the legal capacity to make decisions about if, when, or how to exploit that work. For example, children and people with mental illness or disability can be copyright authors, but they cannot license that work (or refuse to license it) without a legally competent surrogate. The authors explain that this inconsistency leads to injustices for which they offer reforms … (more)

[Jessica Silbey, JOTWELL, 18 October 2023]

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