Article On Succession Law And The Postmortem Term

Eva E. Subotnik (St. Johns University School of Law) recently published an article entitled, Copyright and the Living Dead?: Succession Law and the Postmortem Term, 29 Harv. J.L. & TECH. 77 (2015). Provided below is an excerpt from the article:

A number of commentators have recently objected to the existence of any postmortem period of copyright protection. Absent from the contemporary debate over this issue, however, is a systematic study of how longstanding succession law theories and doctrines, which govern the at-death transmission of other forms of property, bear on the justifications for, and scope of, postmortem copyrights. This Article takes up that task. It applies the justifications for, and incidents of, the generally robust principle of testamentary freedom to the particular case of copyrights.

Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse for bringing this article to my attention.