A Rights-Based View of the Idea/ Expression Dichotomy in Copyright Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper offers a rights-based, Kantian interpretation of the idea/expression dichotomy in the law of copyright. It demonstrates that the idea/expression dichotomy normatively structures the relation between the parties to a copyright action in terms of their equal rights to authorship. To the extent that the defendant has not copied the plaintiff’s expression but has instead expressed an idea anew, the defendant has exercised her own authorship. The limits of the plaintiff’s right (i.e. the law’s refusal to copyright ideas) are therefore the contours of a public domain that, as a matter of equality, the plaintiff himself must be held to recognize. The public domain is not externally imposed upon but internally constitutive of authorial right. Thus the paper shows that a Kantian understanding of the fundamentals of copyright questions the perceived opposition between authorial right and public domain that informs much of contemporary copyright discourse. In so doing, the paper establishes the largely neglected possibility of a rights-based defense of the public domain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".