'Regulating Social Media: Copyright's Regulation of Content-Generative User Behaviours on Instagram' by Corinne Tan in (2018) 2
Intellectual Property Quarterly 140
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This article uses Richard Prince’s controversial use of Instagram images in his artworks, as well as other uses preceding or arising from his use as a case study, as a basis to analyse how copyright laws in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia could apply. The article also considers the application of Instagram’s terms of use, before proceeding to identify the technological features on Instagram that encourage and constrain the content generative activities of Prince and other users. Users are observed to receive mixed signals as to the activities that are permissible onsite. Further, each of the terms of use and the technological features is found to deviate from the copyright regime. These deviations arguably foster incorrect expectations in users, and can compromise the effectiveness of copyright laws in regulating content generative behaviours on social media sites such as Instagram.
'IP and Critical Methods' by Margare Chon in Irene Calboli and Lillà Montagnani (eds),
Handbook on Intellectual Property Research (Edward Elgar, 2018)
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The heyday of the critical legal studies movement has passed, yet its impact continues to be felt in many areas of legal scholarship including intellectual property (IP) law, not to mention numerous disciplines outside of legal studies where it is still very much alive and well. Key concepts incubated within this school of thought, such as intersectionality and micro-aggression, have migrated into our everyday political discourse and common vocabulary of describing social relationships of power. Philosophically, critical theory is indebted to the insights of Continental theory such as Foucault, Gramsci, Habermas, and Lévi-Strauss (as received and interpreted by US and other North American scholars), in addition to those philosophers typically associated with the Anglo-American- Commonwealth legal tradition such as Locke, Mills, Rawls, and Adam Smith.
This chapter provides a brief outline of the principal goals, tenets, and methods of critical theory. Describing how this theoretical turn appears in IP scholarship, it then illustrates with non- exhaustive examples (some of which are written by scholars not necessarily identified with critical legal studies). These examples expose the under-acknowledged influence of critical theory in scholarship about IP, including the big three (patent, copyright, and trademark) as well as plant genetic resources and traditional knowledge. It concludes with a brief speculation about the reason for this lack of credit as well as the value of future scholarship guided by this approach..
