MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier

Week of class on Sept. 26

Odds and ends

In class this week

Readings to do before class:

• Read chapters 1 through 5 (pages 1-88) of Litman's Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet.

• Read the Supreme Court case Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879), in which the Court ruled that describing a system of accounting in a textbook did not confer copyright protection on the system itself. This is a major precedent in copyright law concerning the idea/expression doctrine.

• Skim the 1891 case from the Colorado Supreme Court, Strickler v. City of Colorado Springs (16 Colo. 61; 26 P. 313; 1891 Colo. LEXIS 158). This deals with the rights of a landowner to water flowing through his property (so-called riparian rights. It raises basic issues of what "property" is, and serves as a useful foil to our discussion of intellectual property policy.

• Skim the 1930 Second Circuit Appeals Court decision Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation (45 F.2d 119; 1930 U.S. App. LEXIS 3587). The Second Circuit has a long tradition of judicial leadership in copyright matters. Much of this is rooted in the work of Learned Hand, one of the great judges of the 20th centrury. The Nichols opinion is one of several in which Hand addresses the problem of how much similarity between two works is required in order to make a determination of copyright infringement, laying out the so-called abstraction/filteration/comparison test.