Copyrighting Yoga, Recipes, and Fashion

Prof. Christopher Buccafusco  of Chicago-Kent Law School wants to extend copyright protection beyond works appealing to the senses of sight and hearing to products appealing to other senses. "Making Sense of Intellectual Property Law," soon to be published in the Cornell Law Review, says that developments in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary aesthetics, and haptic and culinary communication have undermined fundamental principles of Western aesthetic, and suggest that sight and hearing might be more aesthetically constrained and functional than we tend to think they are, while the opposite is true for touch, taste, and smell.