#IPSC18 Preview: Copyright

Yesterday I previewed the panels on patents and innovation at next week's IP Scholars Conference at Berkeley Law. Here are the copyright-focused panels:

• Breakout 1 – Copyright: Intermediaries and Markets
• Annemarie Bridy – IP owners are now conscripting content delivery networks and domain name registries for online IP enforcement.
• Juan Contreras & Carlos Uribe – TVEyes illustrates the tension between competition law and IP exclusion power.
• Jim Gibson & Chris Cotropia – Convergence of caselaw on online copyright infringement and DMCA standards has caused courts to conflate the two standards in problematic ways.
• Molly Van Houweling – Copyright limitations like fair use and first sale help support market conditions that allow contractual waivers of those limitations.
• Breakout 2 – Copyright
• Shane Burke – Sol LeWitt's practice of providing instructions for works with limited supervision—including examples leading to post-mortem performances—challenges conceptions of authorship.
• Andrew Gilden – Non-traditional interests such as privacy and autonomy are regularly vindicated through the rhetoric of copyright markets, but only by powerful rightsholders.
• Zahr Said – Copyright law is surprisingly jury-unfriendly, which could be addressed through improved jury instructions.
• Christopher Yoo – The debate over whether thought is independent of language can inform copyright doctrines.
• Breakout 3 – Copyright: Empirical
• Frederic Blockx – In copyright cases, SCOTUS and ECJ use 5 of 10 interpretive techniques similarly, and 5 differently (particularly related to legislative intent).
• Kevin Collins – Copyright in customized works that lack demand among strangers is not justified by incentives to create, but it does prevent clients from misappropriating works without fully compensating authors.
• Paul Heald – Empirical study: The right of statutory reversion to authors increases in-print status for important classes of books.
• Matthew Sag – Can "books as individual works" and "books as collective data" coexist?
• Breakout 4 – Copyright: Fair Use
• Clark Asay & Arielle Sloan – Review of transformativeness in fair use cases from 1991-2017.
• Barton Beebe – Update of empirical study of fair use cases 1978-2005.
• Cathay Smith – A moral rights claim under VARA could have a fair use defense.
• Xiyin Tang – Analysis of the relevant market for fair use should disfavor copyright owners who deliberately restrict the market for their works.
• Breakout 4 – AI and IP
• Aviv Gaon – Authorship under international treaties should be interpreted broadly to recognize countries' right to extend copyright protection for AI-created works.
• Gi-Kuen Jacob Li – Allowing AI-generated works to fall into the public domain may be harmful.
• Rob Merges – Autonomous vehicle design architecture. (No abstract.)
• Mira Sundara Rajan – Moral rights may be more appropriate to address AI creation than copyright as a whole.
• Breakout 5 – Copyright
• Ann Bartow [canceled] – Examines how copyright contributes (or not) to the value of works of visual art, and how this intersects with art institutions and with race and gender.
• Michael Carroll – Examines the law of musical quotation, adaptation, and sampling.
• Justin Hughes – Should actors be copyright authors, and if so, when and how?
• Tim McFarlin – What role should the public interest play in copyright injunctions?

Those interested in copyright scholarship should also check out Rebecca Curtin's paper in Breakout 1 – History: IP and Innovation, Shyamkrishna Balganesh's paper in Breakout 4 – Old and New Theories of IP, Ariel Katz & Patrick Pang's and Argyri Panezi's papers in Breakout 6 – IP and Academic Institutions, and Tonya Evans's and Kristelia Garcia & Justin McCrary's papers in the Closing Plenary.