Picasso? Monet? Renoir? Bah, who needs them anymore?
By Joseph R. Patrell
Congress passed 17 U.S.C. § 101 in 1976, which is commonly known as the Copyright Act (“The Act”).[1] Among other things, the Act grants exclusive protection to copyright owners to exclude others from reproducing and displaying the copyrighted item.[2]
Under the Act, one of the requirements for copyright protection is Initial Ownership.[3] As defined vaguely under § 201(a), copyright protection “vests with the initially in the author, or authors of the work.”[4] Additionally, that protection allows authors to recover monetary damages and receive injunctions against infringers.[5] One of the theoretical underpinnings of Copyright law is Lockean Labor Theory.[6] Under this theory, creators are granted the rights to their intellectual property because of the physical and intellectual labor that went into creating the expression.[7]
Congress could not have predicted the rise of the internet in the 1970s when creating the Act. During the 1990s, when the internet became commercially available, many new and unexpected problems for copyright owners were created, especially in protecting their work from infringers.[8]