Academic literature on the topic 'Restraints on alienation (Hindu law)'

The first sale doctrine decouples intellectual property and physical property. Suppose, at an auction at Sotheby’s, someone bought a contemporary painting by Chuck Close. The buyer now owns the physical painting, but the copyright to the painting remains with the owner of the copyright—the painter Chuck Close or whomever Close may have transferred the copyright to. Absent the first sale doctrine, if the buyer either sold the painting or displayed it to the public, the buyer would potentially infringe the copyright in the painting. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to display copies (including the original, the first copy) of the painting to the public and to distribute copies to the public. However, the first sale doctrine provides that the owner of an authorized copy may display or distribute that particular copy without infringing. The distribution right and display right no longer apply; these rights are “exhausted.” Permission from the copyright owner is not required to resell copyrighted works or to display them. First sale permits a broad swath of activity. Used bookstores, libraries, swap fests, eBay, students reselling casebooks, and many more may rely on first sale to protect their distribution of copyrighted works. Museums, galleries, archives, bookstores, and more can likewise display their copies of copyrighted works without infringing under first sale. First sale (more commonly called “exhaustion” in patent law) also applies to patented products. Someone who buys a patented product (such as a pharmaceutical, computing device, or printer cartridge) can use or resell that product without infringing the patent, even though the patent owner has the rights to exclude others from using or selling the invention. First sale enables markets for resale or lease of patent products, from printer cartridges to airplanes. First sale has its limits. In copyright, it applies only to the rights to distribute and to display the work. The copyright owner also has the exclusive right to make copies, to adapt the work, and to perform the work publicly, which are not subject to first sale. The painting buyer would potentially infringe if the buyer made a copy of the painting or adapted it into another artwork, but the buyer could not infringe the performance right, because one cannot perform a painting. The owner of a copy of a musical work may infringe if she performs it in public, which is why bars need licenses to play copyrighted music, even using copies they have purchased. The owner of a copy of a movie may infringe if she adapted the movie, such as making a sequel—or even dubbing the movie in another language. In patent, first sale likewise would not authorize the purchaser of a product to make additional copies. Similarly, first sale in patent would authorize the buyer of a patented item to use it or resell it, but not to make another one. First sale is long-established, by statute in copyright and by judicial interpretation in patent. The underlying policy of first sale, however, has been unsettled. First sale can be seen to rest on either of two rationales. The first is a contract-based, gap-filler approach. If someone sells a painting, one would expect an implicit agreement that the buyer could display the painting or resell it, as both actions are customary with artworks. To simplify transactions, the rights to resell and display are automatically included in the transaction. The other justification is the policy against restraints on alienation, borrowed from the law of real property. Someone who sells property may not impose unreasonable restraints on the buyer’s ability to resell the property. As transplanted to intellectual property law, once a party voluntarily parts with a copy, she should no longer be able to control what the buyer does with it. Hence, her rights are “exhausted” in that particular copy. The underlying rationale is important for determining the extent of the first sale doctrine. If first sale is a gap-filler, then the parties could contract around it, agreeing that the property sold would not be subject to first-sale rights. If first sale is a policy-based bar against unreasonable restraints on alienation, then first sale is mandatory—it is not subject to the agreement of the parties but rather is the opposite: a limit on the enforceability of their agreement. Both strains can be seen in the case law. Two recent Supreme Court cases, however, decisively rested first sale on the restraints-against- alienation rationale, expressly rejecting the proposition that parties can contract around first sale. This Article explores the implications of those cases for the boundaries of first sale, focusing on two issues. First, California’s resale royalty law required that artists receive 5% of the proceeds on resale of their work. The Ninth Circuit held that the California statute was preempted by the first sale doctrine of federal copyright law. We conclude that, if first sale serves to prevent unreasonable restraints on alienation, such resale royalty statutes should be valid. Rather than an unreasonable restraint on alienation, they permit resale, imposing a modest burden for a purpose entirely consonant with copyright law: rewarding authors. Second, software sellers have long avoided first sale by characterizing software sales as mere licenses, while formally retaining ownership of the software after delivery to the buyer. Courts have enforced transactions according to the parties’ contract. We conclude, however, that such transactions, which are intended to prevent resale of software, should be characterized as sales in substance, triggering first-sale rights to resell the software, overriding the contractual restraint on alienation.

This paper will address four contractual provisions that often come into play in the acquisition and disposition of oil and gas properties: preferential rights to purchase, maintenance of uniform interest, areas of mutual interest, and consents required for assignment. These provisions each address valid commercial purposes and when consciously and deliberately implemented, can reflect a negotiated allocation of value and risk among the parties to the various agreements where they are found. However, they are all long-lived, if not perpetual, and at some point when performance of, or compliance with, them is at issue, it will be in the interest of one party or a successor in interest that the provisions either not apply or not be enforced. Thus, there is a constant testing of the boundaries in the commercial arena and frequent legal challenges in the courts. Each of these four provisions share certain elements with others, so that common legal principles and bodies of law are relevant in establishing the boundaries and evaluating the inevitable challenges. Preferential rights to purchase and areas of mutual interest contemplate future vesting which implicates the Rule Against Perpetuities. Preferential rights, the maintenance of uniform interest provision, and consents as conditions to assignment are restraints on alienation which involve the common law Rule Against Unreasonable Restraints on Alienation. All of these provisions purport to burden real property, so that the Statute of Frauds and the law regarding "covenants running with the land" are relevant. This paper will not cover all of these issues in depth, but will attempt to identify relevant Texas cases that directly bear on the current status of these provisions.

Since the dawn of time, gender inequity and sex discrimination have been the result of the human mentality. Internationally acclaimed author Bapsi Sidhwa has contributed significantly to the field of feminist fiction. Her magnificent novels are a mix of conflict and beliefs, sensibility and dignity, all of which are rooted in the Indian Subcontinent's historical, political, and socio-cultural context. Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Water, set against the backdrop of Indian Freedom Movement, questions the orthodox religious traditions and the repressive restraints imposed on Hindu widows, pushing the bounds of India's male-dominated cultural narratives beyond patriarchal predicaments. She exposes the centuries-old practices that oppress women though her internationally acclaimed novels. The novel Water’s theme is contentious and complicated. It is about the plight of widows in India in 1930s. Water exposes traditional intrinsic indifference, fatalism, and orthodox conventions and injustice to women.

In the early nineteenth century, authoritative treatise writers such as James Kent and Joseph Story represented Anglo-American trust law as a seamless web. But the transplantation of trust law from England to America was not a simple process of adherence. Rather, American courts and legislatures came to discard fundamental English trust doctrines. Restraints on anticipation and on alienation were embraced, and in key state jurisdictions bare trusts were abolished, or else displaced from the core of trust law. Irreducible settlor power over beneficiaries and the strong protection of beneficiaries from creditors under spendthrift trusts were two strikingly original American creations, which flowed from these basic doctrinal choices. The changes made to American trust doctrine yield a paradox for the legal, social and economic historian, namely that republican America ended up with a more dynastic property law, more wedded to dead hand control and more hostile to commercial creditors, than did aristocratic England with its unreformed system of common law and equity rooted in the feudal property system. The American abandonment of free alienability of beneficial interests and the corresponding reduction of the beneficiary’s powers over trust assets may have been rooted in the volatility of credit in America and the desire of the wealthy to escape from the pressures of the market, though disparities between jurisdictions remain to be explained.