Description

Professor Heald’s prior research details how copyright keeps out-ofprint books unavailable to the public. Commentators, however, have speculated that statutes transferring rights back to authors may provide incentives for the republication of books from unexploited back catalogs. He will present new data comparing the availability of books whose copyrights are eligible for statutory reversion under US law with books whose copyrights are still exercised by the original publisher. He will also explore the effect of the 2002 decision in Random House v. Rosetta Books, which worked a one-time de facto reversion of ebook rights to authors and finds a significant effect on in-print status.

About The Speaker

Paul Heald, the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor of Law, joined the Illinois faculty in 2011 after 22 years at the University of Georgia School of Law, where he was the youngest faculty member in the law school’s history to be named to a chaired position. He is also a fellow and associated researcher at CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy, based at the University of Glasgow.

Heald lectures on patent, copyright and international intellectual property law around the world and has previously held visiting positions at universities in Buenos Aires, Bournemouth, London, Lyon, Regensburg, and at the University of Chicago, University of Texas, and Vanderbilt University. He also ran the UGA/OSU program at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, during the spring of 2009. He was Herbert Smith Visitor at Cambridge University in 2012.

Recent publications have focused on economic aspects of the public domain, and theoretical papers on optimal patent remedies, the role transaction costs in patent law, and the problem of patent pricing as well as empirical studies on best-selling fiction and musical compositions and the behavior of famous trademarks in product and service markets. He has also written two books on law and literature, and three novels, Death in Eden (2014), Cotton (2016) (selected as an Okra Pick by the Southern Booksellers’ Association), and Courting Death (2016).