Copyright, Literally

Copyright, Literally

Journal article

1 online resource

The Copyright Act is a statute, or so it would appear. Because it is a statute, one might think that the usual rules of statutory construction apply when litigation requires a court to define the scope of the exclusive rights that the Copyright Act grants a copyright owner. Yet, for the Copyright Act, the rules of statutory construction seldom seem to apply. Despite repeated protestations that copyright's proper scope is a policy question for Congress, not the courts, courts have, in practice, long treated the Copyright Act as if it merely codified some general common law proscription on copying or plagiarism writ large. For copyright, as for statutes more generally, the usual approach seems to have been for a court to ask, “What should this statute be?” rather than “What do the words on the paper say?”. Where the copying or reuse at issue offended a court's sense of fairness or otherwise struck a court as improper or unjust, the court would hold the conduct infringing even where the statutory language did not reach the conduct at issue.

Crossref

AIPLA Quarterly Journal, Fall 2023, Volume 51, Issue 4, p. 479.

[New York, NY] : Thomson Reuters, 2024.

English

https://1.next.westlaw.com/Copyright

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