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For several decades now David Nimmer has maintained a steady flow of
insightful, witty, and deeply-informed commentary on copyright in the law
journals. His well-earned reputation as a major authority and theorist on
copyright law is unassailable.
In this new volume—a companion to his very well received Copyright: Sacred
Text, Technology, and the DMCA, published by Kluwer in 2003—Nimmer once again
tackles some of the thorniest issues that arise in the practice of copyright
law, including the following and much more:
• the work for hire doctrine;
• repeat infringers;
• fair use determination; and
• substantial similarity of computer programs.
Although the volume collects articles originally published between 1988 and
2006 (mostly in the past few years), Nimmer has scrupulously updated the texts
and woven them together into a unified whole. What the book offers as a result
is a microscopic scrutiny of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and all its
amendments, with an immeasurable abundance of interpretation grounded in the
author’s unmatched familiarity with the law and its application. This is a
work that no lawyer handling copyright cases—or indeed no student or scholar
of any branch of intellectual property law—will want to be without.
Preface. Acknowledgements. Table of Abbreviations.
Part One: Confronting the Statute as a Whole. 1. Codifying Copyright
Comprehensibly.
Two: Renewal and Termination. 2. Abend in Myth and in Fact. 3.
Abend’s Stepchild. 4. Sound Recordings, Works for Hire, and the
Termination-of-Transfers Time Bomb. 5. Preexisting Confusion in
Copyright’s Work for Hire Doctrine.
Part Three: Revisiting the DMCA. 6 . Repeat Infringers. 7.
Inaccessibility.
Part Four: Fair Use. 8 . “Fairest of Them All” and Other Fairy Tales of
Fair Use. 9. A Modest Proposal to Streamline Fair Use Determinations.
Part Five: Effect on Other Entitlements. 10. Copyright Ownership by the
Marital Community: Evaluating Worth. 11. The Moral Imperative Against
Academic Plagiarism (Without a Moral Right Against Reverse Passing Off).
Part Six: In the Realm of No Statute. 12. The Successive Filtering
Method to Determine Substantial Similarity of Computer Programs. 13.
Access Denied. Coda: Promises! Promises!