Free/Low Cost Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement

Today, we are proud to announce the publication of our 2014 Intellectual Property  Statutory Supplement as a freely downloadable Open Course Book. Statutes Cover  It offers the full text of the Federal Trademark, Copyright and Patent statutes (including edits detailing the changes made by the America Invents Act.)  It also has a number of important international treaties and a  chart which compares the various types of Federal intellectual property rights — their constitutional basis, subject matter, length, exceptions and so on.You can see it here in print, or download it for free, here(I recommend right click/control clicking it and choosing “save as.”  But you can have it open in a browser window if you want.)

We want to thank Mr. Balfour Smith, the coordinator of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain, who pulled so many laboring oars on this project that he must have thought he was a galley slave.

Frequently Asked Questions: 

Why do this?

We are motivated in part by the outrageously steep cost of legal teaching materials, (and the increasing restrictions on those materials — such as the removal of the right of first sale).    This book is intended for use with our forthcoming Intellectual Property casebook (coming in the Fall) but can also be used as a free or low cost supplement for basic Intellectual Property courses — at the college, law school or graduate school levels. Whether or not you buy it, the free download will at the very least gives you a statutory reference book for those times when internet access is unavailable, and you just need to scratch that intellectual property research itch.    The book is also available at cost of production — about $10.50 — as a handsomely covered paperback. Most of the current Intellectual Property Statutory & Treaty Supplements are $45-$50.

Is this part of some kind of trend?

We hope so.  This is the first in a series of free/low cost statutory supplements to be published by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain – aimed at all the basic classes. The goal of this project, and that of other ones such as the Berkman Center’s fascinating H20 project,  and eLangdell is creatively to improve the pricing and access norms of the world of legal textbook publishing, while offering the flexibility and possibility for customization that unfettered  digital access provides. We hope it will provide a pleasant, restorative, competitive pressure on the commercial publishers to lower their prices and improve their digital access norms.

Why have a paper version at all?

We have heard from several colleagues, both those who ban laptops in class and those that do not, that an environmentally friendly alternative to printing out statutes and throwing them away would be desirable, particularly one that came with first sale rights!

What’s the catch?  What kinds of DRM or licensing restrictions are there?

None.  The supplement is under a CC: BY license, allowing unlimited reproduction and modification, including for commercial purposes. Of course, the underlying statutes and treaties are in the public domain.  You can use those without even providing attribution.

What formats is it available in?

PDF for now — other formats (and modular versions) coming soon.

Yes, but this is just the statutes and treaties.  Fat chance you are going to give your casebook away free too!

Actually, we are.  That will be under a CC BY, NC SA (a license that requires attribution, permits any non commercial use and tells those who modify that they must share the freedoms they were given.)   It will be free to download and also available in a low cost print version — probably around $30, given its length, which would be about $130 cheaper than the other Intellectual Property casebooks

So you are against professors who want to be paid for their work and time?

On the contrary.  In fact, one of the things we have learned in this process is how poorly both authors and students are being treated by the current system.  The authors of casebooks and statutory supplements are generally a.)  unable to give their students digital access to the very books they have just written — unless it is fettered by digital rights management b.) unable to customize the material — omitting unwanted chapters or statutes, or adding in new material on the fly c.)  and — despite the enormous, obscene prices on the books — given a relatively low share of the proceeds. We chose to keep the cost as low as possible, but we are fully aware of the labour and creativity required to put together a casebook — we are creating one right now!  Suppose a professor chose to self-publish with a print on demand service.  (We used Createspace, but there are many others.)  Suppose she wanted to create an 825 page paperback casebook; (in part because she did not need to include all those chapters she does not teach.)  Suppose she decided to price it at $60 — which would be $100 cheaper than the current casebook.  (Though those, to be fair, are both in hardcover and very large.)  Here is the screenshot of what her royalty payments would look like.  (The calculator is here.  Click the “Royalties” tab.)  And remember this is just one print on demand service.  There are many others.

Createspace Pricing

We will be honest.  We want very much to tip the norm towards free, unregulated digital access — so the whole world and not just her class can learn from her materials.  And we think $60 is a little high — though not as bad as $165!  But she could require the purchase of a paper copy, which her students could resell when the class is over, while also giving her students free digital access, and get much wider dissemination of and impact from her ideas.  Actually, we hope that the inexorable multiplication of projects such as these will be an aid to those still publishing with conventional textbook publishers. To the casebook author trapped in contracts with an existing publishing house: remember when you said you needed an argument to convince them to price your casebook and your supplement more reasonably? Or an argument to convince them to give you more options in making digital versions available to your students in addition to their print copies, but without taking away their first sale rights?  Here is one such argument.  There are many more either already out there or in the pipeline.  Traditional textbook publishers can compete with free.  But they have to try harder. We will all benefit when they do.

But what about a salesforce?  How would she be able to get others to adopt her book without mailing it to everyone or having insistent salespeople pounding the halls?

They can read it, instantly, freely anywhere, just by downloading it!  They can browse it on the exercise bike or on the train, scan through it on their tablet.  Read it in their office.  That’s much more efficient.  In the world we imagine, professors will be able instantly to browse, search within and assess the pedagogical suitability of a free digital version of a casebook online.  Perhaps this will put a merciful end to the never-ending cascade of free but unread casebooks in cardboard mailing boxes and charming but unwelcome casebook representatives in natty business suits that constitutes the 1950’s distribution mechanism for the casebook in the halls of the 21st century law school.  That mechanism needs to go the way of the whale oil merchant, the typing pool and the travel agent.  To the extent that the “justification” offered for today’s prices is that they are needed to pay for the last century’s distribution methods, we would have to disagree politely but emphatically.

How long to get an actual copy of the book?

We’ve found it takes about 5 days.  Your mileage may vary.

Back to this book.  What’s in it?  Can I have a review copy?
Download it and see.  That’s your review copy.  But here is the table of contents.

  • Introduction
  • Comparative Chart of Intellectual Property Rights
  • Trademark Act of 1946 (Lanham Act) (as amended)
  • Copyright Act of 1976 (as amended)
  • Patent Act of 1952 (as amended, with annotations indicating the provisions applicable pre and post America Invents Act)
  • Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
  • WIPO Copyright Treaty
  • Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property
  • Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)

When’s the casebook coming out?  

Late August.  But watch this space, we will be posting chapters as we go.

James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law Duke Law School.

Jennifer Jenkins, Director Center of the Study of the Public Domain, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke Law School

From the Blog

  • Read An Excerpt From The Line

    Introduction

               In June of 2022 a man called Blake Lemoine told reporters at The Washington Post that he thought the computer system he worked with was sentient.[i] By itself, that does not seem strange. The Post is one of the United States’ finest newspapers and its reporters are used to hearing from people who think that the CIA is attempting to read their brainwaves or that prominent politicians are running a child sex trafficking ring from the basement of a pizzeria.[ii] (It is worth noting that the pizzeria had no basement.) But Mr. Lemoine was different; For one thing, he was not some random person off the street. He was a Google engineer. Google has since fired him. For another thing, the “computer system” wasn’t an apparently malevolent Excel program, or Apple’s Siri giving replies that sounded prescient. It was LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications[iii]—that is, an enormously sophisticated chatbot. Imagine a software system that vacuums up billions of pieces of text from the internet and uses them to predict what the next sentence in a paragraph or the answer to a question would be.


    read more
  • About the Book

    James Boyle

    My new book, The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood, will be published by MIT Press on Oct 22 2024 under a Creative Commons License. MIT is allowing me to post preprint excerpts. The book is a labor of (mainly) love — together with the familiar accompanying authorial side-dishes: excited discovery, frustration, writing block, self-loathing, epiphany, and massive societal change that means you have to rewrite everything. So just the usual stuff. It is not a run-of-the-mill academic discussion, though. For one thing, I hope it is readable. It might even occasionally make you laugh. For another, I will spend as much time on art and constitutional law as I do on ethics, treat movies and books and the heated debates about corporate personality as seriously as I do the abstract philosophy of personhood. These are the cultural materials with which we will build our new conceptions of personhood, elaborate our fears and our empathy, stress our commonalities and our differences. To download the first two chapters, click here.


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  • Everything You Know About §230 Is Wrong (But Why?)

    James Boyle, Oct 25th, 2021

    There are a few useful phrases that allow one instantly to classify a statement.  For example, if any piece of popular health advice contains the word “toxins,” you can probably disregard it.  Other than, “avoid ingesting them.” Another such heuristic is that if someone tells you “I just read something about §230..” the smart bet is to respond, “you were probably misinformed.” 

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  • Free, Open, Intellectual Property Textbook

    Jennifer Jenkins and I have just published the 2021 edition of our free, Creative Commons licensed, Intellectual Property textbook.

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  • ‘Dumping: On Law Reviews’. The Green Bag

    I will probably never be published in a law review ever again after writing this.  I find myself curiously untroubled by the thought.  

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  • Mark of the Devil: The University as Brand Bully

    I teach at Duke University, an institution I love.  The reverse may not be true however, at least after my most recent paper (with Jennifer Jenkins) — Mark of the Devil:  The University as Brand Bully.  (forthcoming in the Fordham Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law Journal).  The paper is about the university most frequently accused of being a “trademark bully” — an entity that makes assertions and threats far beyond what trademark law actually allows, something that is all too common, with costs to both competition and free speech.   Unfortunately, that university is our own — Duke. 

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  • Tragedy/Comedy of the Commons @ 50

    The Economist was kind enough to ask me to write an article commemorating the 50th anniversary of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons.  ““THE ONLY way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed.” This ominous sentence comes not from China’s one-child policy but from one of the 20th century’s most influential—and misunderstood—essays in economics. “The tragedy of the commons”, by Garrett Hardin, marks its 50th anniversary on December 13th.”  Read the rest here.

  • Theft: A History of Music — Free Comic

    title

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  • (When) Is Copyright Reform Possible?

    I am posting here a draft of a chapter for Ruth Okediji’s forthcoming book on the possibilities of international intellectual property reform.  In my case, the article recounts the lessons I learned from being part of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property in the UK.

    “In the five months we have had to compile the Review, we have sought never to lose sight of David Cameron’s “exam question”. Could it be true that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth? The short answer is: yes. We have found that the UK’s intellectual property framework, especially with regard to copyright, is falling behind what is needed. Copyright, once the exclusive concern of authors and their publishers, is today preventing medical researchers studying data and text in pursuit of new treatments. Copying has become basic to numerous industrial processes, as well as to a burgeoning service economy based upon the internet. The UK cannot afford to let a legal framework designed around artists impede vigorous participation in these emerging business sectors.” Ian Hargreaves, Foreword: Hargreaves Review (2011)

    Read the chapter.

  • Apple Updates — A Comic

    sampleEver been utterly frustrated, made furious, by an Apple upgrade that made things worse?  This post is for you.  (With apologies to Randall Munroe.)

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  • Open Coursebook in Intellectual Property

    Cover of Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society and link to purchase at Amazon.comDuke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain is announcing the publication of Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society—Cases and Materials by James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins. This book, the first in a series of Duke Open Coursebooks, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. If you do not want to use the entire casebook you can view and download the individual chapters (in a variety of formats) here. It can also be purchased in a glossy paperback print edition for $29.99, $130 cheaper than other intellectual property casebooks.

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  • So you’ve invented fantasy football, now what?

    We are posting excerpts from our new coursebook Intellectual Property: Law and the Information Society which will be published in two weeks is out now! It will be is of course  freely downloadable, and sold in paper for about $135 less than other casebooks.  (And yes, it will include  discussions  of whether one should ever use the term “intellectual property.” )  The book is full of practice examples..  This is one from Chapter One, on the theories behind intellectual property: “What if you came up with the idea of Fantasy Football?”  No legal knowledge necessary.  Why don’t you test your argumentative abilities…?

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  • Free/Low Cost Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement

    Today, we are proud to announce the publication of our 2014 Intellectual Property  Statutory Supplement as a freely downloadable Open Course Book. Statutes Cover  It offers the full text of the Federal Trademark, Copyright and Patent statutes (including edits detailing the changes made by the America Invents Act.)  It also has a number of important international treaties and a  chart which compares the various types of Federal intellectual property rights — their constitutional basis, subject matter, length, exceptions and so on.You can see it here in print, or download it for free, here

    read more

  • Persnickety Snit

    This is the fourth in a series of postings of material drawn from our forthcoming, Creative Commons licensed, open coursebook on Intellectual Property.  It is about lawyers and language. 

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  • Macaulay on Copyright

    Macaulay’s 1841 speech to the House of Commons on copyright law is often cited and not much read.  In fact, the phrase “cite unseen” gains a new meaning.  That is a shame, because it is masterful.  (And funny.) One fascinating moment?  When Macaulay warns that copyright maximalism will lead to a future of rampant illegality, as all happily violate a law that is presumed to have lost all moral legitimacy.

    At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot…  Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

    The legal change he thought would do that?  Extending copyright to the absurd length of life plus 50 years.  (It is now life plus 70).  Ah, Thomas, if only you could have been there for the Sonny Bono Term Extension debates.

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  • Mark Twain on the Need for Perpetual Copyright

    This is the second in a series of postings of material drawn from our forthcoming, Creative Commons licensed, open coursebook on Intellectual Property.  The first was Victor Hugo: Guardian of the Public Domain The book will be released in late August.

    In 1906, Samuel Clemens (who we remember better by his pen name Mark Twain) addressed Congress on the reform of the Copyright Act.  Delicious.

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  • Victor Hugo: Guardian of the Public Domain

    Jennifer Jenkins and I are frantically working to put together a new open casebook on Intellectual Property Law.  (It will be available, in beta version, this Fall under a CC license, and freely downloadable in multiple formats of course.  Plus it should sell in paper form for about $130 less than the competing casebooks. The accompanying statutory supplement will be 1/5  the price of most statutory supplements — also freely downloadable.)  More about that later.  While assembling the materials for a casebook, one gets to revisit the archives, reread the great writers.  Today I was revisiting Victor Hugo.  Hugo was a fabulous — inspiring, passionate — proponent of the rights of authors, and the connection of those rights to free expression and free ideas.

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  • “We Need To Start Seeing Other Futures..”

    Today is the second day of “Copyright Week!” Talk about a lede. That sentence has all the inherent excitement of “Periodontal Health Awareness Week” or “‘Hug Your Proctologist! No, After He’s Washed His Hands’ Week.” And that’s a shame. Copyright Week is a week devoted to our relationship with our own culture. Hint: things aren’t going well. The relationship is on the rocks.

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  • Discussion: “The Foolish War Against Song-Lyric Websites”

    Professor Alex Sayf Cummings, author of a fascinating book called Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the 20th Century (recommended as a  thought-provoking read)  has an interesting  post up about attempts to shut down music lyric sites such as Rapgenius.com.

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  • The Top Ten List of a Conference Planner

    Academics (and others) arrange conferences.  Perfectly normal people are invited to those conferences to speak.  Most of them are just as charming as can be… but then there are the special ones.  This Top 10 List of the special people one has to respond to is devoted to all conference planners everywhere.  Hold your heads up high.  After this, purgatory should be a snap.

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  • (EM)I Has A Dream

    EM(I) Has A DreamAugust 28th, 2013 is the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The copyright in the speech is administered by EMI, with the consent of the King family. Thus the speech may not be freely played on video or reproduced and costlessly distributed across the nation — even today. Its transient appearance depends on the copyright owner’s momentary sufferance, not public right. It may disappear from your video library tomorrow. It has even been licensed to advertise commercial products, including cars and mobile phone plans.

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  • The Prosecution of Aaron: A Response to Orin Kerr

    Aaron Swartz committed suicide last week.  He was 26, a genius and my friend.  Not a really good friend, but someone I had worked with off and on for 11 years, liked a lot, had laughed with frequently, occasionally shaken my head over and deeply admired.

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  • The Hargreaves Review

    An Intellectual Property System for the Internet Age

    James Boyle

    In November 2010, the Prime Minister commissioned a review of the Britain’s intellectual property laws and their effect on economic growth, quoting the founders of Google that “they could never have started their company in Britain” because of a lack of flexibility in British copyright..  Mr. Cameron wanted to see if we could have UK intellectual property laws “fit for the Internet age.”   Today the Review will be published. Its conclusion?  “Could it be true that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth?  The short answer is: yes.” Those words are from Professor Ian Hargreaves, head of the Review.   (Full disclosure: I was on the Review’s panel of expert advisors.)

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  • Keith Aoki — A Remembrance Book

    A slideshow and downloadable book remembering Keith in words and pictures.  You can order a glossy, high quality copy of the book itself here from Createspace or here from Amazon.  We tried to make it as beautiful as something Keith would create.  We failed. But we came close; have a look at how striking it is… all because of Keith’s art.

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  • Now THAT is how you teach a class

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