"The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs" was an article in the ''

Harvard Law Review The ''Harvard Law Review'' is a law review published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the ''Harvard Law Review''s 2015 impact factor of 4.979 placed the journal first out of 143 ...

'' by future United States Supreme Court Justice

Stephen Breyer Stephen Gerald Breyer ( ; born August 15, 1938) is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 until his retirement in 2022. He was nominated by President Bill Clinton, and repl ...

in 1970, while he was still a legal academic. The article was a challenge to copyright expansionism, which was just entering its modern phase, and was still largely unquestioned in the United States. It became one of the most widely cited skeptical examinations of copyright. In this piece, Breyer made several points: * That the only defensible justification of copyright is a consequentialist economic balance between maximizing the distribution of works and encouraging their production. * That there is significant historical, logical, and anecdotal evidence which shows that exclusive rights will provide only limited increases in the volume of literary production, particularly within certain sections of the book market. * That there was limited justification for contemporary expansions in the scope and duration of copyright. There was a formal reply by law student Barry W. Tyerman in the '' UCLA Law Review'', and a rejoinder by Breyer, but the article appears to have had little impact on copyright policy in the lead up to the

Copyright Act of 1976 The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, cod ...

. Seventeen years later, in their mathematical law and economics article "An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law" (1989),

William Landes William M. Landes (born c. 1939) is an American economist who has written about the economic analysis of law and an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which ci ...

and Richard Posner systematically analyzed each of Breyer's arguments and concluded that "they do not make a persuasive case for eliminating copyright protection." In particular they noted that many of his arguments rested on imperfect copying technology, an argument which weakens with technological innovation.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Uneasy Case for Copyright, The Copyright law literature Works originally published in the Harvard Law Review 1970 documents 1970 in law Works about the information economy Economics of intellectual property