Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT 6.805/6.806/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
Fall Semester, 2003
Class 8 -- Week of class on October 23
In class this week
This week begins a sement on study of copyright law copyright law.
We'll start with some basics of intellectual property law. Then we'll
focus on copyright.
Hal's lecture notes from
class
Readings to do before class:
- Read chapters 1 through 3 (pages 1-88) of Litman's Digital
Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet.
Printouts were distributed at the midterm in class on October 16.
- 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.
Final paper
Friday's rotisserie assignment begins a series of writing
assignments devoted to preparing your final paper. For this week you
are to propose a topic area and idea. Look here for information on the
paper and on this first assignment.