• AI, Copyright, and Pseudo Art
    Yale Journal of Law and Technology. forthcoming.
    This Article addresses the copyright regime of artistic works generated by artificial intelligence. I argue that the law of authorship as developed by courts, together with the Intellectual Property Clause in the U.S. Constitution, entails that, if anyone is entitled to copyright ownership of these works, it is the AI itself. Arguments advanced in the literature that programmers, developers, or similarly situated humans should own the copyright instead are rejected. However, I argue further that…Read more
  •  94
    Animal Voting Rights
    Analysis 1. 2023.
    The idea that animals should have the right to vote sounds preposterous. Accordingly, most authors who have touched on the issue dismiss it in few words as obvi.
  •  201
    Patients, Corporate Attorneys, and Moral Obligations
    St. Mary’s Journal on Legal Malpractice and Ethics 12 (2): 284-328. 2022.
    There are two main questions that any account of corporate lawyers’ moral obligations needs to answer: (1) Do corporate lawyers have moral obligations to third parties? and (2) In cases of conflict between obligations to the corporation and obligations to third parties, which should prevail? This Article offers answers to these questions in the context of lawyers working in medical corporations. I argue that lawyers do have moral obligations to third parties, and that in cases where patients’ …Read more
  • FAREWELL TO NICHOLS: PROPERTY ASCRIPTION AND FICTIONAL CHARACTER COPYRIGHT
    Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 12 (1): 26-46. 2022.
    In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for analyzing fictional copyright protection of fictional characters in literature. Using this framework, I argue that the two most prominent approaches that U.S. courts have adopted with respect to fictional character copyright (the Nichols test and the Sam Spade “Story Being Told” test) are unsustainable. The idea of distinct delineation that came out of Nichols may be understood in two ways: on one view, fictional characters are distinctly de…Read more
  •  49
    A Bad Theory of Truth in Fiction
    British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (4): 379-387. 2017.
    William D’Alessandro has recently argued that there are no implicit truths in fiction. According to the view defended by D’Alessandro, which he terms explicitism, the only truths in fiction are the ones explicitly expressed therein. In this essay, I argue that explicitism is incorrect on multiple counts. Not only is the argument D’Alessandro gives for it invalid, but explicitism as a theory of truth in fiction fails drastically to account for a number of phenomena that are crucial to our underst…Read more
  •  3
    A market-based approach to internet intermediary strict products liability
    International Review of Law, Computers and Techonology. 2020.
    This essay proposes a way of dealing with the strict liability of Internet sellers of other manufacturers’ products, such as Amazon under its ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ program. I discuss and reject two approaches to the problem that have been proposed by the courts, and advance a view according to which the relevant inquiry is whether Internet intermediaries such as Amazon could have prevented a defective product from reaching the US market. This view accounts in a satisfactory manner for the noti…Read more
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    Fictional Surrogates
    Philosophia 42 (4): 1033-1053. 2014.
    It is usually taken for granted, in discussions about fiction, that real things or events can occur as referents of fictional names . In this paper, I take issue with this view, and provide several arguments to the effect that it is better to take the names in fiction to refer to fictional surrogates of real objects. Doing so allows us to solve a series of problems that arise on the reference-continuity view. I also show that the arguments philosophers usually rely on in order to ban surrogates …Read more
  •  32
    Kinds of Fair Play and Regulation Enforcement: Toward a Better Sports Ethic
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 42 (1): 121-136. 2015.
    It is customary for institutions that organize sporting competitions and events to exercise a considerable degree of authority over the participants. That authority is often manifested in the enforcement of penalties for infringements of fair play. This paper focuses on one concrete case from soccer, although I take the discussion to extend to other sports as well. I argue that not all fair play rules should be enforced by the respective organizing institutions, and that enforcing all of them in…Read more
  •  42
    Are Fictional Characters and Literary Works Ontologically on a Par?
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4): 596-611. 2018.
    This article is a reaction to the following argument that has been offered in favor of abstract realism about fictional characters: fictional characters do not impose any extra ontological cost on our ontology, because they belong to the same ontological kind as literary works, which we already accept. I address arguments that have been adduced by Jeffrey Goodman in defense of this argument, and I show that there is no relevant parallelism between fictional entities and literary works that the a…Read more
  • Fictional Realism
    Dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago. 2016.
    There are two kinds of mainstream realist views of fictional characters: (1) They are abstract entities, created by the writers. They do not genuinely possess the properties ascribed to them in the fiction. (2) They are non-existent objects (alternatively, abstract objects) that do genuinely possess the properties ascribed in the fiction. The dissertation criticizes (1) and (2) and argues for a third realist view, according to which fictional characters exist and have the properties ascribed in…Read more