Person: Fisher, William
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Fisher, William
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Publication What’s Fair about Fair Use? The Battle over E-Reserves at GSU(Harvard Law School, 2014-11) Courtney, Kyle; Fisher, William; Moroney, ElizabethThe fair use case study puts students in the strategic and decision-making position of the legal counsel at Georgia State University, faced with responding to a copyright infringement suit from Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publishers, and Oxford University Press. The publisher-plaintiffs alleged that 6,700 electronic course materials exceeded reasonable standards of educational fair use. However, the “reasonable standards” were up for debate: the copyright statute of fair use is intentionally flexible, but over time, clear-cut extralegal guidelines made their way into court decisions. For decades, publishers, authors, libraries, and universities had yet to reach consensus about best practices and workable standards of fair use. With the complaint lodged against GSU, the contention had become cannibalistic: the publishing arms of universities suing universities. The case surveys the legal and extralegal history of educational fair use; the relationship of universities and academic publishers; the history of litigation surrounding coursepacks, reserves, and electronic course materials; and the copyright policies at GSU. Participants adopt the position of GSU’s general counsel to weigh risk and decide whether GSU should settle or take the suit to trial. The case also gets students to consider the strengths and limitations of existing copyright law, the impact of technology on fair use, the interests of various stakeholders, and options for building consensus among such stakeholders.Publication HLS1X: CopyrightX: Spring 2013 Course Report(2014) Fisher, WilliamThis report describes the first Harvard Law School open online course, first offered through HarvardX on the edX platform in Spring 2013. The course was taught by Professor William Fisher, who also prepared this report. Modified versions will be offered in the spring semesters of 2014 and 2015. This document describes and evaluates the 2013 version and outlines plans for the 2014 version.Publication Film and Media Studies and the Law of the DVD(University of Texas Press, 2006) Fisher, William; Harlow, JacquelinePublication Theories of Intellectual Property(Cambridge University Press, 2001) Fisher, WilliamPublication The Jurisprudence of Justice Marshall(Harvard Law School, 1989) Fisher, WilliamPublication The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age(Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2006) Fisher, WilliamPublication Reconstructing the Fair Use Doctrine(Harvard Law School, 1988) Fisher, WilliamThe fair use doctrine, codified at 17 U. S. C. § 107, permits a court to excuse a putatively infringing use of copyrighted material when the circumstances surrounding the use make it "fair." In this Article, Professor Fisher criticizes the doctrine - and in particular the changes wrought by two recent Supreme Court decisions - and considers how it might be improved. The most serious of the many problems with current fair use jurisprudence, he maintains, is that it rests on considerations derived from four disparate philosophic traditions; this incoherent foundation makes the application of the doctrine unpredictable and aggravates the cacophony of contemporary legal argumentation. To alleviate these problems, Professor Fisher considers two alternative strategies for reconstructing the field. First, he examines fair use from an economic standpoint, arguing that, by comparing the various entitlements that might be accorded copyright owners in terms of the incentives they provide for creativity and the costs they impose on consumers, courts could employ the doctrine to increase efficiency in the use of scarce resources. Second, building on a discussion of the limitations of the economic approach, Professor Fisher deploys a "utopian" analysis of fair use, suggesting how the doctrine might be recast to incorporate particular conceptions of the "good life" and the "good society." So formulated, the fair use doctrine would contribute to the realization of a more just social order and a more integrated legal discourse.Publication The South Africa AIDS Controversy: A Case Study in Patent Law and Policy(Harvard Law School, 2005) Fisher, William; Rigamonti, CyrillPublication iTunes: How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business of Digital Media(The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 2004) Fisher, WilliamIn this paper, the Berkman Center's Digital Media Project has conducted an exploratory case study on Apple's iTunes Online Music Store from a legal and business perspective. The objective of this analysis is twofold: First, it seeks to gain advanced knowledge of the relationships among copyright law, contract law, digital rights management schemes and business modeling processes in the Post-Napster world. Understanding such interactions is crucial when attempting to balance the divergent interests of consumers, artists, the entertainment industry, and technology manufacturers through regulatory mechanisms such as law, code market mechanisms, and adjustment of social norms. Second, the paper is intended as a further step toward expanding the knowledge base of the Digital Media Project beyond U.S. law to include a more detailed coverage of the legal and regulatory frameworks of other countries. The focus of the comparative law analysis conducted in this initial study is on European jurisdictions and selected nations in the Asia-Pacific.Publication Interpreting Holmes(Harvard University, Harvard Law School, 1997) Fisher, William