David Nimmer

Back from the Future: A Proleptic Review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

This article explores an important development in the informal regulation of online privacy. Privacy norm proselytizers have been the leading contributors toward the recognition by Internet users of a moral entitlement to privacy in cyberspace. This article begins by examining the non-moral social meaning of the original personal data collection practices that emerged at the World Wide Webs inception in the early 1990s. Next, it analyzes methods by which privacy activists endeavored to moralize the social meaning of online data collection. It also emphasizes that other norm entrepreneurs, namely, the Federal Trade Commission and creators of new software privacy solutions, have subsequently supported an entitlement to privacy for reasons less selfless, but no less efficacious, in terms of helping to stimulate demand for increased privacy protections. The article concludes that even though a grundnorm of respect for consumer data privacy has generally emerged in American culture, American society is only at the beginning of the difficult task of incorporating this grundnorm into its social and business practices.

Nation, Duration, Violation, Harmonization: An International Copyright Proposal for the United States

For most of its two centuries, the United States has been a copyright island, its jurisprudence having evolved in isolation from developments elsewhere. As long as it served American interests, U.S. copyright law did not concern itself with the waves that our statutes or rulings would set in motion outside our borders, and few ripples from abroad affected U.S. copyrights. In 1955, however, the international tide began to lap against U.S. copyright shores. In 1976, Congress acknowledged what had by then become the crash of foreign waves, amending parts of the Copyright Act to reflect international standards. Finally, in 1989, the floodgates opened to a massive effort to bring the United States into the world copyright fold and to amend U.S. law for compatibility with that purpose. Fully three years after this 1989 effort, the integration is still not complete, however. Certain backwaters exist in U.S. copyright law, as yet untouched by the standards observed throughout the rest of the world. And a perilous undertow threatens the subsistence of copyrights in various U.S. works abroad and various foreign works inside the United States. This article addresses those lingering anomalies. The structure of this article is as follows: Part II summarizes the historical

Sound Recordings, Works for Hire, and the Termination-of-Transfers Time Bomb

In crafting the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress brokered a grand compromise between authors and publishers so as to bring about a unitary term of protection. Authors obtained an inalienable right to terminate transfers 35 years after an assignment, subject to designated carve outs for nine categories of collaborative works that could become unmarketable following termination due to the transaction costs of reassembling the necessary rights. While motion pictures and encyclopedias made the list, sound recordings were not expressly covered - although they arguably fit into other designated categories. This Article traces the background to this dispute, which will likely take on great salience in 2013, when the first post-1976 works become eligible for termination.