Thoughts on an Improvisation

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Lassonde
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Practice Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Late Afternoon ◽  
Intellectual Property Policy ◽  
The Law

On June 20, 2009, late afternoon, I improvised with Joe Sorbara as part of Lex Non Scripta, Ars Non Scripta: Law, Justice & Improvisation, a conference organised by the McGill Centre for Intellectual Property Policy as well as the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research project. The performance entitled “Improvised Contemporary Movement and Sound Performance” took place at Sala Rossa in Montreal. I was moving, using corporeal mime and other movement techniques, and Joe was making sound with various percussion objects. Joe and I were improvising based on a score that we developed together. The score was spatially defined in the shape of a line that we followed as we improvised. The coordination of our movements and sounds was also defined. Although primarily Joe was the musician and I was the mover, sometimes the line was blurred between who was moving and who was producing sound. Our improvised performance lasted around 17 minutes. This commentary aims to build on those 17 minutes by exploring the improvisational structure of the performance and examining this structure as the “law” of our improvisation. This text will also reflect on the broader relationship between law and improvisation.

Live Coding the Law: Improvisation, Code, and Copyright

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Zeilinger
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Patent Law ◽  
Programming Environments ◽  
Intellectual Property Policy ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Law ◽  
Cultural Commons ◽  
Property Regimes

This article concerns the emerging creative practice of live coding (i.e., the real-time programming of electronic music in text-based programming environments), and explores how this practice can be deployed as a tactic of resistance against the overreach of restrictive intellectual property policy. I begin by surveying definitions of copyright and patent law, and related issues, to situate live coding in the field of existing perspectives on cultural ownership. Drawing on legal theory and critical discourse on improvised music in other genres, I then argue that the dynamic, palimpsestic, and improvisational qualities of live coding contradict many of copyright law's core assumptions regarding the nature of “fixed” works of art. These contradictions can be usefully mobilized for the purpose of resisting legal and economic enclosures of the digital cultural commons. As I conclude, live coding can, from its current, inherently ambivalent position on copyright matters, develop a strong, performance-based critical stance against the imbalances and shortcomings of intellectual property regimes and outdated notions of exclusive cultural ownership. Integrating artistic practices with ongoing and emerging critiques of intellectual property, such resistance can go a long way towards highlighting readily available opportunities to oppose and confound the law.

Intellectual Property Rights and Access to Energy Services in Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Professor Adebambo Adewopo ◽  
Dr Tobias Schonwetter ◽  
Helen Chuma-Okoro
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property Rights ◽  
Energy Access ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Energy Services ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines the proper role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in achieving access to modern energy services in Africa as part of a broader objective of a pro-development intellectual property agenda for African countries. It discusses the role of intellectual property rights, particularly patents, in consonance with pertinent development questions in Africa connected with the implementation of intellectual property standards, which do not wholly assume that innovation in Africa is dependent on strong intellectual property systems. The chapter examines how existing intellectual property legal landscapes in Africa enhance or impede access to modern energy, and how the law can be directed towards improved energy access in African countries. While suggesting that IPRs could serve an important role in achieving modern energy access, the chapter calls for circumspection in applying IP laws in order not to inhibit access to useful technologies for achieving access to modern energy services.

The New Private Law and Intellectual Property

2020 ◽  
pp. 408-426
Author(s):  
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Concepts And Categories ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Legal Concepts

This chapter studies intellectual property (IP). A hallmark of the New Private Law (NPL) is attentiveness to and appreciation of legal concepts and categories, including the traditional categories of the common law. These categories can sometimes usefully be deployed outside of the traditional common law, to characterize, conceptualize, and critique other bodies of law. For scholars interested in IP, for example, common law categories can be used to describe patent, copyright, trademark, and other fields of IP as more or less “property-like” or “tort-like.” Thischapter investigates both the property- and tort-like features of IP to understand the circumstances under which one set of features tends to dominate and why. It surveys several doctrines within the law of copyright that demonstrate how courts move along the property/tort continuum depending on the nature of the copyrighted work at issue—including, in particular, how well the work’s protected contours are defined. This conceptual navigation is familiar, echoing how common law courts have moved along the property/tort continuum to address disputes over distinctive types of tangible resources.

Property in Human Body Parts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Human Body ◽  
First Principles ◽  
The Political ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Regulatory Approach ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
The Law

This chapter surveys the current legal position concerning property in bodies and bodily materials. Of especial relevance in the current age of advanced genetic and other bio technologies, it looks beyond property in bodies and their materials ‘as such’ to consider also (a) the availability of rights of personal and intellectual property in objects incorporating or derived from them, and (b) the reliance on quasi-property rights of possession and consent to regulate the storage and use of corpses and detached bodily materials, including so-called ‘bio-specimens’. Reasoning from first principles, it highlights the practical and conceptual, as well as the political and philosophical, difficulties in this area, along with certain differences in the regulatory approach of European and US authorities. By way of conclusion, it proposes the law of authors’ and inventors’ rights as simultaneously offering a cautionary tale to those who would extend the reach of property even further than it extends currently and ideas for exploiting the malleability of the ‘property’ concept to manage the risks of extending it.

Hamilton and the Law

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Alexander Hamilton ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
The Law

Since its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. This book offers a revealing look into the legal community's response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton's inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understanding of law and race, while authorities on the Second Amendment discuss the language of the Constitution's most contested passage. Legal scholars moonlighting as musicians discuss how the musical lifts history and law out of dusty archives and onto the public stage. This collection of minds, inspired by the phenomenon of the musical and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, urges us to heed Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Founding Fathers and to create something new, daring, and different.

scholarly journals Corrigendum

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. NP1-NP2
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
Acoustic Device ◽  
The Law ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
First Time ◽  
Us University

James E.K. Parker, Towards an Acoustic Jurisprudence: Law and the Long Range Acoustic Device, Law, Culture and the Humanities (LCH). DOI: 10.1177/1743872115615502 The following corrections have been made to the article: Under heading III.1, another paragraph has been added. This paragraph begins ‘Whereas normal loudspeaker works…’ Under heading III.2, a paragraph has been edited: ‘In effect, what ATC did with the LRAD…’ Under heading III.2, the first sentence of the last paragraph has been expanded to clarify that the G-20 summit was held in Pittsburgh: The LRAD seems to have been used by police for the first time in Georgia in 2007, before receiving its first and most notorious outing on American soil in September 2009 at protests relating to the G-20 Summit being held in Pittsburgh.66 Under heading III.4, the sentence below in the second paragraph has been changed as follows: The law of property provides the conditions for the circulation and ownership of knowledge that enable developments in the science of acoustics at a US university in the 1950s to re-emerge as failed commercial prototypes in Japan in the 1980s only to be taken up again in 1996 by ACT before being patented, trademarked and marketed first as HSS® and then as the LRAD.82 Under heading III.4, the following has been added to the end of the paragraph ‘If the LRAD was originally imagined…’: Not that the presiding judge in the Toronto case would know however. In his discussion of a deposition by Professor David Wood, of Queen’s University, relating to ‘videos posted on the internet’ documenting the LRAD’s use at Pittsburgh, Justice Brown notes that, ‘unfortunately, Professor Wood did not attach any of those media reports or videos as exhibits to his affidavit. As a result, I cannot attach any weight to his statements.’93 Indeed, it’s not clear that any recordings of an LRAD in action were ever actually played in court. As far as I know, the LRAD has yet to feature in the ‘judicial soundscape’. In the conclusion the word ‘copyright’ has been replaced with ‘intellectual property’: The LRAD is the product of diverse institutions, jurisdictions and areas of doctrine, stretching from the law of intellectual property through the law of war to constitutional and labor law. The references and reference numbers have been updated accordingly. All the subsequent versions of the article will be corrected.

Catholic Thought and Intellectual Property: Learning from the Ethics of Obligation

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel J. Michael
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Medical Technologies ◽  
Sick Person ◽  
Current State ◽  
Alive Today ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ethical Obligations

The twelfth century canon lawyer Gratian once wrote “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him you have killed him.” If Gratian were alive today, he might take a look at the current state of global health and say, “Succor the woman dying of disease, because if you have not helped her you have killed her.” Both of these statements express an ethical obligation: if I have food, and someone else who is hungry does not, I am obligated to share my food. Likewise, if I have medicine, and someone else who is sick does not, I am obligated to share my medicine.Unfortunately, with regard to medicines and other essential products, modern institutions of intellectual property often fail to enforce or even recognize such ethical obligations. In some ways, these institutions uphold an even harsher attitude toward intellectual property than other types of property. With food, even if the hungry person receives no bread, he is still permitted to produce his own. With medicines, medical technologies, and other types of goods that are protected by institutions of intellectual property, the law can and often does prevent the sick person from producing her own.

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