New Private Law? Intellectual Property 'Common-Law Precedents' in China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Runhua Wang
Author(s):  
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling

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.


Author(s):  
Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Intellectual property law remains a body of private law, but for reasons that transcend its reliance on ideas and concepts from the common law of property and tort. This essay argues that the connection between forms of intellectual property law and private law is rooted in a form of autonomy that characterizes private law regimes—known as “redressive autonomy.” It shows how a strong commitment to redressive autonomy undergirds the unique right–duty structure of intellectual property, informs intellectual property’s central doctrines, and injects an additional layer of normative complexity into its functioning.


This book discusses developments in scholarship dedicated to reinvigorating the study of the broad domain of private law. This field, which embraces the traditional common law subjects “property, contracts, and torts” as well as adjacent, more statutory areas, such as intellectual property and commercial law, also includes important subjects that have been neglected in the United States but are beginning to make a comeback. The book particularly focuses on the New Private Law, an approach that aims to bring a new outlook to the study of private law by moving beyond reductively instrumentalist policy evaluation and narrow, rule-by-rule, doctrine-by-doctrine analysis, so as to consider and capture how private law’s various features fit and work together, as well as the normative underpinnings of these larger structures. This movement is resuscitating the notion of private law itself in United States and has brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the more traditional, doctrinal approach prevalent in Commonwealth countries. The book embraces a broad range of perspectives to private law “including philosophical, economic, historical, and psychological” yet it offers a unifying theme of seriousness about the structure and content of private law.


Author(s):  
Lionel Smith
Keyword(s):  

This chapter aims to answer the question, “what can the civil law tradition tell us about the New Private Law?” It seeks to do this by offering one civilian's perspective on private law, on U.S. private law, and on the New Private Law. In order to answer that question, it is necessary to say a little bit about what is a civilian perspective, or in other words, what makes a jurist a civilian. This is a question to which many different answers could be given. The chapter then looks at the different perspective that a civilian may have on what is the domain of private law. It also asks what insights the civilian's understanding of the discipline of law may offer to common lawyers. From a civilian perspective, the future of the New Private Law will be interesting indeed.


Author(s):  
Julia Hörnle

Jurisdiction is the foundational concept for both national laws and international law as it provides the link between the sovereign government and its territory, and ultimately its people. The internet challenges this concept at its root: data travels across the internet without respecting political borders or territory. This book is about this Jurisdictional Challenge created by internet technologies. The Jurisdictional Challenge arises as civil disputes, criminal cases, and regulatory action span different countries, rising questions as to the international competence of courts, law enforcement, and regulators. From a technological standpoint, geography is largely irrelevant for online data flows and this raises the question of who governs “YouTubistan.” Services, communication, and interaction occur online between persons who may be located in different countries. Data is stored and processed online in data centres remote from the actual user, with cloud computing provided as a utility. Illegal acts such as hacking, identity theft and fraud, cyberespionage, propagation of terrorist propaganda, hate speech, defamation, revenge porn, and illegal marketplaces (such as Silkroad) may all be remotely targeted at a country, or simply create effects in many countries. Software applications (“apps”) developed by a software developer in one country are seamlessly downloaded by users on their mobile devices worldwide, without regard to applicable consumer protection, data protection, intellectual property, or media law. Therefore, the internet has created multi-facetted and complex challenges for the concept of jurisdiction and conflicts of law. Traditionally, jurisdiction in private law and jurisdiction in public law have belonged to different areas of law, namely private international law and (public) international law. The unique feature of this book is that it explores the notion of jurisdiction in different branches of “the” law. It analyses legislation and jurisprudence to extract how the concept of jurisdiction is applied in internet cases, taking a comparative law approach, focusing on EU, English, German, and US law. This synthesis and comparison of approaches across the board has produced new insights on how we should tackle the Jurisdictional Challenge. The first three chapters explain the Jurisdictional Challenge created by the internet and place this in the context of technology, sovereignty, territory, and media regulation. The following four chapters focus on public law aspects, namely criminal law and data protection jurisdiction. The next five chapters are about private law disputes, including cross-border B2C e-commerce, online privacy and defamation disputes, and internet intellectual property disputes. The final chapter harnesses the insights from the different areas of law examined.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Katz

The first sale doctrine limits the exclusive rights that survive the initial authorized sale of an item protected by intellectual property (IP) rights, and therefore limits the ability of IP owners to impose post-sale restraints on the distribution or use of items embodying their IP. While the doctrine has deep common law and statutory roots, its exact rationale and scope have never been fully explored and articulated. As a result, the law remains somewhat unsettled, in particular with respect to the ability of IP owners to opt-out of the doctrine and with respect to the applicability of the doctrine to situations of parallel importation.This Article provides answers to these unsettled issues. By applying insights from the economics of post-sale restraints, the Article shows that the main benefits of post-sale restraints involve situations of imperfect vertical integration between coproducing or collaborating firms, which occur during the production and distribution phases or shortly thereafter. In such situations, opting out of the first sale doctrine should be permitted. Beyond such limited circumstances, however, the first sale doctrine promotes important social and economic goals: it promotes efficient long-term use and preservation of goods embodying IP and facilitates user-innovation. Therefore, contrary to some other views, I conclude that the economics of post-sale restraints confirm the validity and support the continued vitality of the first sale doctrine.


2021 ◽  
pp. 82-95
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Frosio

This chapter discusses intellectual property (IP) and extra-contractual liability by highlighting general comparative analysis issues within civil and common law systems, with some consideration given also to major theoretical clusters that might influence the different legal regimes. The chapter focuses on emerging issues of extra-contractual liability for intellectual property infringement in the platform economy, with special emphasis on copyright and trademark infringement, seeking to co-ordinate miscellaneous approaches from the United States (US), the European Union (EU), and selected European countries’ experiences. In doing so, this chapter highlights research and methodological issues related to limited harmonization at a regional level in secondary and extra-contractual liability doctrines when applied to IP. Finally, this chapter describes the World Intermediary Liability Maps (WILMap) as an attempt to provide consistency within a fragmented research framework while also presenting other miscellaneous endeavours seeking the same goal.


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