How to Solve the Copyright Conundrum

In the Fall 2016 edition of the Penn Law Journal, ALI member Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School, is interviewed about reforms to the U.S. copyright system. 

From the article:

Balganesh suggests a copyright system that accommodates different rules for different forms of creativity. “Struggling individual artists, literary novelists, software programmers, and Hollywood studios do not all think and act alike when they create. And yet, current copyright law assumes that they do — and should!” In other words, Balganesh proposes what he calls a “more nuanced and context-sensitive doctrinal mechanism” that balances the needs of creators, users, litigants, on a case-by-case basis.

Professor Balganesh believes that “[c]ourts should play a much, much more central role in crafting the copyright system than they do currently, and they should do this by relying on the knowledge that they have from a variety of other areas, that they have developed and controlled for ages now, such as tort law, contract law, the law of unjust enrichment and property law, all areas where courts have been the primary gatekeepers, so to speak, of the area.”

Professor Balganesh serves as an Adviser on the Copyright Law Project.

Read the full article in the Fall 2016 edition of the Penn Law Journal. (Article begins on page 18.)

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