The age of digital distribution exacerbates transaction costs in two distinct ways. First, the dissemination of large quantities of works requires permissions from myriad copyright holders. Second, new technologies lower the cost of content creation, resulting in millions of individual creators, rather than a discrete set of large industry repeat players. The potential of class actions to address this rising transaction cost problem has gone largely...
Copyright
In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., the Supreme Court resurrected a nineteenth-century copyright doctrine—the government edicts doctrine—and applied it to statutory annotations prepared by a legislative agency. While the substance of the decision has serious implications for due process and the rule of law, the Court’s treatment of the doctrine recognized an invigorated role for courts in the development of copyright law through...
This Article presents a revisionist account of the 1903 Supreme Court case Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographic Co. and the altogether decisive and damaging influence it has exerted on the making of modern American copyright law. Courts and commentators have long misunderstood Justice Holmes’s celebrated opinion for the majority in Bleistein...