Copyright Illuminated

Book excerpt: For several decades now David Nimmer has maintained a steady flow of insightful, witty, and deeply-informed commentary on copyright in the law journals. His well-earned reputation as a major authority and theorist on copyright law is unassailable. In this new volumeand—a companion to his very well received Copyright: Sacred Text, Technology, and the DMCA, published by Kluwer in 2003and—Nimmer once again tackles some of the thorniest issues that arise in the practice of copyright law, including the following and much more: and• the work for hire doctri? and• repeat infringers; and• fair use determination; and and• substantial similarity of computer programs. Although the volume collects articles originally published between 1988 and 2006 (mostly in the past few years), Nimmer has scrupulously updated the texts and woven them together into a unified whole. What the book offers as a result is a microscopic scrutiny of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and all its amendments, with an immeasurable abundance of interpretation grounded in the authorand’s unmatched familiarity with the law and its application. This is a work that no lawyer handling copyright casesand—or indeed no student or scholar of any branch of intellectual property lawand—will want to be without.