University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 2020 Restructuring Copyright Infringement Gideon Parchomovsky University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Abraham Bell University of San Diego Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Repository Citation Parchomovsky, Gideon and Bell, Abraham, "Restructuring Copyright Infringement" (2020). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 2102. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2102 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. PARCHOMOVSKY.PRINTER (DO NOT DELETE) 3/23/2020 1:37 PM Restructuring Copyright Infringement Abraham Bell* and Gideon Parchomovsky** Copyright law employs a one-size-fits-all strict liability regime against all unauthorized users of copyrighted works. The current regime takes no account of the blameworthiness of the unauthorized user or of the information costs she faces. Nor does it consider ways in which the rightsholders may have contributed to potential infringements, or ways in which they could have cheaply avoided them. A nonconsensual use of a copyrighted work entitles copyright owners to the full panoply of remedies available under the Copyright Act, including supra- compensatory damage awards, disgorgement of profits, and injunctive relief. This liability regime is unjust, as it largely fails to differentiate among willful infringers, good-faith users who accidently infringe, and ordinary users who fail to understand the intricacies of copyright-protection infringement.