Property rights in things that cannot be possessed: copyright, patents, trademarks, and the licences that govern their use.
10 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Christopher
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · 1970
Holds that photographing a competitor's unpatented plant from a chartered airplane during construction is an improper means of discovering a trade…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig · 2004
Copyright expanded from a narrow commercial regulation into general control over derivative use, and the cost lands on the culture that follows.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Trademark Law: An Economic Perspective
Landes & Posner · 1987
Argues American trademark law exists to reduce consumers' search costs by letting marks reliably signal a consistent source, not to grant a monopoly…
+3 more at this level
9 works
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
Holds that photographing a competitor's unpatented plant from a chartered airplane during construction is an improper means of discovering a trade secret, even though no property was trespassed and no confidence was breached.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lawrence Lessig
Copyright expanded from a narrow commercial regulation into general control over derivative use, and the cost lands on the culture that follows.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Fritz Machlup
A US Senate Judiciary Committee study concluding that if a patent system did not exist it would be irresponsible to recommend instituting one, but since it has existed a long time, it would be equally irresponsible to abolish it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lawrence Rosen
Argues open-source licences work by using copyright law itself, rather than an exception to it, to enforce the freedoms to use, study, modify and redistribute software, and works through what each major licence family actually promises.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Supreme Court of the United States
Holds that a patent holder who wins an infringement suit is not automatically entitled to an injunction, and must instead satisfy the traditional four-factor equitable test used elsewhere in US law.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Landes & Posner
Argues American trademark law exists to reduce consumers' search costs by letting marks reliably signal a consistent source, not to grant a monopoly reward for creativity as patent and copyright do.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pierre N. Leval
Argues US copyright's fair use defence should turn on whether the new use is 'transformative' — adding new meaning or purpose — a test the Supreme Court later adopted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert P. Merges
Argues that when many firms hold overlapping, blocking patents in the same technology, private licensing institutions such as patent pools emerge to cut transaction costs, without needing a change in patent law itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Benjamin L. W. Sobel
Argues US fair use doctrine, built around human learning and creativity, breaks down when applied to machine-learning systems trained on copyrighted works, and needs a different doctrinal test.
link checked 17 Sept 2026