Professor Robert Ellickson has proposed that a close-knit community will develop rules, customs, and traditions addressing property that maximize the group’s welfare—independent of government intervention.
Copyright Law
The dominant justification for copyright protection is that it is necessary to remedy an underproduction problem that arises from the public-good nature of expressive works.
Law, like other human artifacts, is costly to produce, to distribute, and to apply.
Imagine an author. One day, she sees a website that allows users to annotate short stories in an innovative way, providing a variety of short stories with which to experiment. As she peruses the site, she finds that some of the stories are actually hers.
I. Current Understandings of Fair Use