University of Cincinnati College of Law University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications Faculty Articles and Other Publications Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2010 Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the Public Timothy K. Armstrong University of Cincinnati College of Law Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs Part of the Intellectual Property Commons Recommended Citation Armstrong, Timothy K., "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers for the Benefit of the ubP lic" (2010). Faculty Articles and Other Publications. Paper 144. http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/144 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Articles and Other Publications by an authorized administrator of University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLE SHRINKING THE COMMONS: TERMINATION OF COPYRIGHT LICENSES AND TRANSFERS FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE PUBLIC TIMOTHY K. ARMSTRONG* Federallaw limits the free alienabilityof copyright rights to preventpower- ful transfereesfrom forcing authors into unremunerative bargains. The limiting mechanism is a statutory provision that permits authors or their heirs, at their sole election, to terminate any transfer or license of any copyright interest dur- ing a defined period. Indeed, the applicable provisions of the Copyright Act go so far as to invalidate purported waivers by authors of their statutory termina- tion powers. These statutory provisions may constitute an impediment to the effective grant of rights for the benefit of the public under widely used "open content" licensing arrangements, such as the GNU General Public License ("GPL") for software or the Creative Commons family of licenses for other sorts of expres- sive works.