Monthly Archives: March, 2025
Geiger and Iaia, ‘Copyright and Freedom of Artistic Expression’
ABSTRACT The relationship between copyright and freedom of artistic expression can take two opposite forms. It can be represented in terms of enhancement when the expressions of the human personality are protected against the free riders, thus jeopardizing the moral and material interests of creators. However, it can also turn to be viewed as a […]
Bohdan Widła, ‘Thou Shalt Not Conduct Research on Software? Text and Data Mining of Computer Programs in the Current EU Copyright Framework’
ABSTRACT The proliferation of generative AI has steered the discussion about text and data mining (TDM) in copyright law towards the problem of generative models. However, generative AI is not the only case for TDM. Mining data from computer programs can improve defect detection, discover design patterns, facilitate maintenance, summarize code in natural language or […]
‘Data, Value, and Power in the Digital Age’
Amanda Parsons and Salomé Viljoen, ‘Valuing Social Data’, 125 Columbia Law Review 993 (2024). The immense wealth being accumulated by US technology companies and their owners has been apparent for some time, and events during and since the last presidential election have put this reality firmly in the spotlight. Wealth is power, and innovative data […]
Christina Mulligan, ‘Data Property and Digital Sales’
ABSTRACT Copyright law fails utterly to develop a coherent concept of ‘digital sales’. Printed books and vinyl records are easily sold and resold, with the copyright holder’s permission or under the first sale doctrine. But a creator of digital copyrighted works who wants to analogously ‘sell’ their work to buyers faces what borders on an […]
Low and Tham, ‘Propertising Contract: Two Kinds of Property and Two Kinds of Transfer’
ABSTRACT How can a contractual debt – the classical thing in action in the common law – be both property (being a species of personal property) and not property (being an in personam, as opposed to an in rem, right)? This paper confronts the riddle that is the contractual thing in action’s classification as personal […]
Angelos, Bilek, Howarth and Merritt, ‘Langdell’s Subjects’
ABSTRACT When Christopher Columbus Langdell founded the law school curriculum that we teach, Jim Crow flourished. Women could not vote. The Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution to invalidate worker protections, but not racial apartheid. In that backwards era, more than 125 years ago, Langdell established our familiar first-year curriculum consisting of courses examining appellate cases […]
Eleni Katsampouka, ‘The Omissions Doctrine after Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police’
ABSTRACT In tort law, liability is generally not imposed for failing to confer a benefit on another person. This is commonly referred to as the omissions doctrine. In Tindall v Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, the UK Supreme Court elucidated the scope of this doctrine. Significantly, it endorsed for the first time the interference […]
Claire Ariane Hill, ‘The Rhetoric and Reality of Shareholder Profit Maximization’
ABSTRACT There is presently a heated debate as to what a corporation’s purpose should be. The debate is between proponents of shareholder profit maximization (SPM), the idea that companies should be run exclusively in the financial interests of their shareholders, and proponents of stakeholderism, the idea that in addition to shareholder financial interests, companies should […]
Adam Hofri-Winogradow, ‘“Equity has No Place Here”: Should Equitable Remedies be Available to Reverse Failed Tax Planning?’
ABSTRACT I discuss an odd use of equity: the granting of equitable remedies to assist authors of tax minimization plans where their plans result in unexpected tax liabilities. Canadian law has in the current century first taken a strikingly liberal approach to granting rescission and rectification to reverse the tax results of failed, mistake-based tax […]
Tim Dornis, ‘The European Patent Package – rights’ non-unity, choice-of-law enigma, and mysteries of gap filling’
ABSTRACT Choice of law and rights enforcement in international and cross-border patent cases has always been challenging. This is one reason why academics and practitioners have been keen to unify patent law, frantically welcoming the European Patent Package with the Unified Patent Court and the centrepiece of the system-the European patent with unitary effect. Yet […]