Synopsis
Copyright consists of a bundle of different exclusive rights. Each of these sub-rights can be owned, transacted, and enforced separately. This is called copyright divisibility. Copyright divisibility enables separate ownership interests in different subsets of the exclusive rights to a single work. As not all copyright holders are in the position to maximize the value of various uses of their works, copyright divisibility enables them to enlist the assistance of others in multiple markets. However, because of copyright divisibility and overlapping exclusive rights, users often need to identify, negotiate with, and obtain permissions from different parties that own different sub-rights even for a single use of only one copyrighted work. Consequently, the fragmented copyright has led to significant uncertainties for users and huge transactions costs for the exploitation, dissemination, and enforcement of copyright. This problem mirrors the tragedy of the anticommons defined by Michael Heller when he observed the underuse of property and resulting inefficiency in the post-communist Russian economy. This presentation will provide a comparative law perspective, examining judicial treatment of users’ costs in obtaining multiple licenses for a single use of copyrighted work in different jurisdictions. Dr. Lee will use anticommons theory as a lens to analyze copyright divisibility, its consequential costs on users and the society, and possible policy solutions. Those policy proposals include consolidating current bundles of exclusive rights, adopting an implied license doctrine to the incidental use of copyrighted work based on one single exclusive right, and streamlining the collective copyright management mechanism.
Professor Liu will introduce the speaker and act as a moderator for the debate questions following the lecture.
Speaker
Jyh-An LEE is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he currently serves as the Deputy Director of the LL.B. Programme and Director of the Centre for Financial Regulation and Economic Development (CFRED). He holds a J.S.D. from Stanford Law School and an LL.M from Harvard Law School. Dr. Lee has extensively published in English and in Chinese on various aspects of intellectual property and Internet law. His publications appear in leading academic journals. He is also the single author of two books: Coding a Free Society: Open Source Strategies for Policymakers (VDM Verlag Müller Press, 2007) and Nonprofit Organizations and the Intellectual Commons (Edward Elgar, 2012). During his studies at Stanford Law School, Dr. Lee was appointed as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. Prior to joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he taught at National Chengchi University and was an Associate Research Fellow in Center for Information Technology Innovation at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He was the Legal Lead and Co-Lead of Creative Commons Taiwan (2011-2014) and an advisory committee member for Copyright Amendment in the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) at the Ministry of Economic Affairs (2011-2014). Professor Lee is currently a member of the advisory board of the European Center for E-Commerce & Internet Law affiliated with University of Vienna. He has served as a domain name dispute resolution panellist appointed by the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre (ADNDRC) since 2016.
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Last updated on 16 May 2018 .
