Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article makes a simple yet counterintuitive argument: it advocates the recognition of popularity as a general factor that can limit the scope of copyright protection, across the range of copyright-protected works. Until now, copyright law has not explicitly recognized popularity as a relevant factor that affects the scope of copyright protection. Not only is popularity irrelevant, asserts the ‘official’ copyright position, but holding otherwise would be ‘flipping copyright on its head’ and ‘ignoring [its] major premise.’ This article offers an adverse view. It argues that there is solid justification for explicitly recognizing popularity as a factor in copyright law and for affording the most popular works, across the broad range of works protected by copyright, lesser copyright protection than is afforded to ‘regular’ works. Thus, the article offers a new and interdisciplinary perspective on the issues of standardization and networks, which have so far been discussed mainly in the context of utilitarian works. It seeks to lay out a comprehensive analytical framework for establishing popularity as a general factor relevant to determining the scope of protection for the variety of works protected by copyright. The argument is based on multidisciplinary scholarship. It uses network science to examine the process leading to extreme popularity of certain works, to identify their common features, and to analyse the primary difficulties associated with affording them full copyright protection. Using economic, social, and democratic analyses, the article then demonstrates that limiting copyright protection can contribute to resolving – or, at least, undermining – these difficulties. It further shows that from an ‘internal’ copyright perspective, a narrowing rule focusing on popularity is largely consistent with the prevailing theoretical justifications for copyright and can even help copyright law to more accurately draw the desired boundaries of copyright protection. Based upon this analysis, the last part of the article outlines a proposed model for explicitly recognizing popularity as a transparent and established factor that can influence the scope of copyright protection.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".