The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog

Copyright Classics

My Spring seminar is entitled "Antitrust and IP Policy Seminar: Copyright Classics." We are reading classic articles from the secondary copyright literature. Students will be posting on the articles and commenting on the posts of their fellow students. The blog is open to the public; only students can author original posts but anyone can post a comment. The blog is at http://picker.typepad.com/picker_seminar/.

This week we are reading then Professor Breyer's 1970 Harvard Law Review article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies and Computer Programs." (84 Harv. L. Rev. 281)

Judge Posner, Hamdi, and Korematsu

On Thursday, Judge Posner led a work-in-progress Workshop on his forthcoming book, Not a Suicide Pact, which examines the inevitable trade-offs between security and liberty in times of national emergency. As always, Judge Posner made many provocative points. One struck me in particular, however. Judge Posner commended the Court's 2004 decision in Hamdi, in which the Court held that the government could not indefinitely detain an American citizen captured in Afghanistan, without giving him some sort of hearing in which he could contest the claim that he was an "enemy combatant." The details of such a heard were unspecified, but Judge Posner agreed that the Court was correct to insist on a fair hearing as a condition of extended detention. After all, why should we detain someone who is not an enemy combatant?