Transformation in Property and Copyright

77 Pages Posted: 8 Oct 2010 Last revised: 21 Mar 2012

See all articles by Christopher M. Newman

Christopher M. Newman

George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School

Date Written: October 6, 2010

Abstract

Copyright requires us to distinguish between two different ways of transforming a “work of authorship”: “derivative works” and “transformative fair uses.” The absence of a clear line results in a tendency to assign all value arising proximately from a work to copyright owners. Many people blame this expansionist tendency on a “propertarian” understanding of copyright, and argue that the solution is to abandon any notion of copyright as property. I agree that current copyright doctrine often gives excessively broad scope to the exclusive rights of copyright owners, but argue that this may be a result of copyright not being “propertarian” enough. Property is an attempt to coordinate resource use through a system of in rem rights whose content can be understood by third parties without reference to the subjective use preferences of others. Traditional property law dealing with the transformation of mundane objects uses objective, socially intelligible tests of identity to determine when an owner’s rights in a thing have been extinguished, thus preventing owners from asserting subjective use preferences as a means of extracting value from transformed objects created by others.

Far from implying “absolutist” authorial rights, an in rem approach to copyright requires that we place clear boundaries around the identity of the “work of authorship.” This means moving away from the notion that disembodied fragments of “protected expression” can be owned separately from the “work of authorship” of which they are a part. I show how this might be done, proposing to define a “work of authorship” in terms of a coherent expressive experience designed by an author. Putative “copies” that are not tailored to facilitate beneficial use of the work as conceived by the author, but rather to communicate second-order information, or to give rise to expressive experiences radically discontinuous from the ones the author designed, therefore fall outside the author’s right to exclude altogether. Such a “propertarian” approach could be both clearer and more protective of free speech than current doctrine, because limits on the scope of the author’s rights would be defined intrinsically, obviating the need to resort to fair use doctrine with its value-laden weighing of social worth.

Keywords: Blackstone, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, IP, Neil Netanel, Shyamkrishna Balganesh, accession, adaptive, consumptive, elements, essence, free riding, in rem, intellectual, interaction, non-possessory uses, ownership, possessory,potential market, recast, reproduction, substantial similarity, theory

JEL Classification: D23, K11, O34

Suggested Citation

Newman, Christopher M., Transformation in Property and Copyright (October 6, 2010). Villanova Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 251-325, 2011, George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 10-51, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1688585 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1688585

Christopher M. Newman (Contact Author)

George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School ( email )

3301 Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22201
United States

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