Results by title

49 books match the query 'Copyright'

cover of A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services

A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services

Rebecca Tolley

American Library Association, 2014

We are only now coming to terms with how common trauma really is; a landmark Kaiser study that surveyed patients receiving physicals found that almost two-thirds had experienced at least one form of abuse, neglect, or other trauma as a child. Though originating in the fields of health and social services, trauma-informed care is a framework that holds great promise for application to library work. Empathetic service, positive patron encounters, and a more trusting workplace are only a few of the benefits that this approach offers. In this important book Tolley, experienced in both academic and public libraries, brings these ideas into the library context. Library administrators, directors, and reference and user services staff will all benefit from learning 

  • the six key principles of trauma-informed care;
  • characteristics of a trusting and transparent library organization, plus discussion questions to promote a sense of psychological safety among library workers;
  • how certain language and labels can undermine mutuality, with suggested phrases that will help library staff demonstrate neutrality to patron ideas and views during information requests;
  • delivery models that empower patrons; 
  • advice on balancing free speech on campus with students’ need for safety;
  • how appropriate furniture arrangement can help people suffering from PTSD feel safe;
  • guidance on creating safe zones for LGBTQIA+ children, teens, and adults; and
  • self-assessment tools to support change toward trauma-responsive library services.
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cover of Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation

Artistic License

The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation

Darren Hudson Hick

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The art scene today is one of appropriation—of remixing, reusing, and recombining the works of other artists. From the musical mash-ups of Girl Talk to the pop-culture borrowings of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, it’s clear that the artistic landscape is shifting—which leads to some tricky legal and philosophical questions. In this up-to-date, thorough, and accessible analysis of the right to copyright, Darren Hudson Hick works to reconcile the growing practice of artistic appropriation with innovative views of artists’ rights, both legal and moral.

Engaging with long-standing debates about the nature of originality, authorship, and artists’ rights, Hick examines the philosophical challenges presented by the role of intellectual property in the artworld and vice versa. Using real-life examples of artists who have incorporated copyrighted works into their art, he explores issues of artistic creation and the nature of infringement as they are informed by analytical aesthetics and legal and critical theory. Ultimately, Artistic License provides a critical and systematic analysis of the key philosophical issues that underlie copyright policy, rethinking the relationship between artist, artwork, and the law.
 
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cover of Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition

Bound by Law?

Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition

Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins

Duke University Press, 2008

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the Rocky theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? Eyes on the Prize, the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound by Law? reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property, and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.
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cover of Broadcasting Hollywood: The Struggle over Feature Films on Early TV

Broadcasting Hollywood

The Struggle over Feature Films on Early TV

Jennifer Porst

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Broadcasting Hollywood: The Struggle Over Feature Films on Early Television uses extensive archival research into the files of studios, networks, advertising agencies, unions and guilds, theatre associations, the FCC, and key legal cases to analyze the tensions and synergies between the film and television industries in the early years of television. This analysis of the case study of the struggle over Hollywood’s feature films appearing on television in the 1940s and 1950s illustrates that the notion of an industry misunderstands the complex array of stakeholders who work in and profit from a media sector, and models a variegated examination of the history of media industries. Ultimately, it draws a parallel to the contemporary period and the introduction of digital media to highlight the fact that history repeats itself and can therefore play a key role in helping media industry scholars and practitioners to understand and navigate contemporary industrial phenomena.
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cover of Coaching Copyright

Coaching Copyright

Erin L. Ellis

American Library Association, 2019

From researching to remixing, library users need your guidance on a wide range of copyright topics. The way to move beyond “yes, you can” or “no, you can’t” is to become a copyright coach. In this collection librarian and attorney Smith teams up with information literacy expert Ellis to offer a framework for coaching copyright, empowering users to take a practical approach to specific situations. Complete with in-depth case studies, this collection provides valuable information rooted in pragmatic techniques, including

  • in-depth discussion of the five questions that will help you clarify any copyright situation;
  • storytelling techniques to enliven copyright presentations, plus ways to use music or YouTube to hook students into copyright topics;
  • three coaching scenarios that tie into ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and bring real-world applications to your library instruction;
  • how-to guidance on leading mock negotiations over real journal publishing agreements;
  • a 90-minute lesson plan on author rights for writers in a student journal;
  • tips for teaching instructional designers how to apply copyright and fair use principles to course management systems; and
  • an LIS copyright course assessment model.

This resource will help you become a copyright coach by showing you how to discern the most important issues in a situation, determine which questions you need to ask, and give a response that is targeted to the specific need.

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cover of Compact Copyright: Quick Answers to Common Questions

Compact Copyright

Quick Answers to Common Questions

Sara R. Benson

American Library Association, 2021

Included in Choice's Top 75 Titles and Resources for Community College Libraries

Faculty, students, and colleagues come to you with copyright questions, both simple and complex. And they all want reliable answers—as fast as you can get them. With this guide, designed for ready access, you’ll be prepared to deliver. Lawyer, copyright librarian, and iSchool instructor Benson presents succinct explanations ideal for both on-the-fly reference and staff training. Copyright specialists will appreciate excerpts from the law itself alongside tools and resources for digging deeper. Practical discussions of key legal concepts, illustrated using 52 scenarios, will lead you to fast, accurate answers on a range of topics, such as

  • barriers to using the TEACH Act provisions in content for online teaching;
  • showing a full-length movie in a university class;
  • public domain and the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act;
  • your legal options when receiving a DMCA take-down notice;
  • court interpretations of fair use in three key recent cases;
  • Creative Commons licenses, complete with a quick reference chart;
  • library rights to license photographs in a digital collection;
  • using letters under copyright in a special collections display case;
  • a grad student’s right to use in a thesis writing published in their professor’s journal article;
  • applying the implied license option to post historical student dissertations in institutional repositories;
  • the Marrakesh Treaty provision supporting transfer of accessible works internationally; and
  • limiting factors for interlibrary loan.
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cover of Compact Copyright: Quick Answers to Common Questions, Second Edition

Compact Copyright

Quick Answers to Common Questions, Second Edition

Sara R. Benson

American Library Association, 2026

When faculty, students, and colleagues come to you with legal questions and you suddenly find yourself in the thick of a copyright conundrum, you don’t need pages of historical background information and long-winded legal explanations — you need answers, fast. Previously included in Choice's Top 75 Titles and Resources for Community College Libraries, this bestselling book gives you just that, succinctly addressing common head-scratchers and scenarios in a way that you will lead you to accurate answers quickly. Ideal for on-the-fly reference, staff training, and LIS instruction, Benson’s guide provides excerpts from the law itself alongside tools and suggested additional resources for digging deeper. Compact Copyright

  • skillfully explains legal principles in plain language for more than 50 of the most common real-life scenarios library workers face;
  • includes new chapters on cutting-edge developments such as AI, separability, and copyright and data;
  • provides a primer on contracts and licensing basics, including Creative Commons licensing;
  • explores key topics like the First Sale doctrine, Fair Use, public domain, making copies for preservation, the TEACH Act, interlibrary loan, sovereign immunity, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA);
  • offers pointers on access to copyrighted material for patrons with disabilities and other concepts related to accessibility;
  • discusses select international copyright library issues; and
  • includes a Fair Use checklist, copyright and film screening best practices, and additional recommended reading and materials.
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cover of Complete Copyright for K12 Librarians and Educators

Complete Copyright for K12 Librarians and Educators

Carrie Russell

American Library Association, 2023

Particularly in places of learning, technology is all-pervasive; because everyone is always making copies, copyright is center stage. And copyright law, when misapplied or misinterpreted, affects not only the way that you teach but even what you teach. With decades of experience interpreting the intricacies of copyright law as it pertains to librarianship, Russell is the ideal authority to address the concerns of librarians, teachers, and teaching librarians who work in the K–12 environment. Her book will encourage you to stop allowing your fear of copyright issues to limit how and what you share or teach, and instead be more involved in shaping copyright law to better serve your learning community. Through scenario-based discussions, it covers key topics such as
  • the reasons librarians and teachers have so many misconceptions about copyright, and why understanding copyright is a process, not a one-time event;
  • recent legislative and policy developments that impact schools and libraries;
  • situations often encountered by educators, such as using copyrighted material in class assignments, digital lesson plans, bulletin board displays, social media, school plays, and band performances and talent shows;
  • the use of licensed content in a variety of settings;
  • what constitutes "fair use," so that you can be empowered by knowing exactly what's possible within the law; and
  • guidance on making long-term strategic decisions and developing copyright policies.
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cover of Complete Copyright for K–12 Librarians and Educators

Complete Copyright for K–12 Librarians and Educators

Carrie Russell

American Library Association, 2012

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cover of Contesting Copyright: A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans

Contesting Copyright

A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans

Augusta Dimou

Central European University Press, 2026

The creative sector, including the cultural industry, is key for today’s economy. Copyright has the capacity to x the roles and tasks of the actors involved and determine the direction of cash ows within this sector. The study of the evolution of copyright helps understand and adjust the regulation and commercialization of creative labor. Augusta Dimou provides a thoroughly researched, interdisciplinary and comparative study of the historical development of copyright regimes in three countries – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. She examines the function and signi cance of copyright in the institutionalization, development, and regulation of modern culture in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the diverse political regimes of the modern era, and at the interface between the various nationalization and globalization processes of the 20th century.
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cover of Copyright Conversations: Rights Literacy in a Digital World

Copyright Conversations

Rights Literacy in a Digital World

Sara Benson

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2019

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cover of Copyright Essentials for Librarians and Educators

Copyright Essentials for Librarians and Educators

American Library Association, 2000

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cover of Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions

Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators

Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions

Kenneth D. Crews

American Library Association, 2020

Copyright law never sleeps, making it imperative to keep abreast of the latest developments. Declared “an exemplary text that seals the standards for such books” (Managing Information), this newly revised and updated edition by respected copyright authority Crews offers timely insights and succinct guidance for LIS students, librarians, and educators alike. Readers will

  • learn basic copyright definitions and key exceptions for education and library services;
  • find information quickly with “key points” sidebars, legislative citations, and cross-references;
  • get up to speed on fresh developments, such as how the recently signed Marrakesh Treaty expands access for people with disabilities and why the latest ruling in the Georgia State University case makes developing a fair use policy so important;
  • understand the concept of fair use, with fresh interpretations of its many gray areas that will aid decision making;
  • learn the current state of affairs regarding mass digitization, Creative Commons, classroom use and distance education, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and other important topics;
  • receive guidance on setting up on a copyright service at a library, college, or university; and
  • find many helpful checklists for navigating copyright in various situations.

This straightforward, easy-to-use guide provides the tools librarians and educators need to take control of their rights and responsibilities as copyright owners and users.

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cover of Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions

Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators

Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions

Kenneth D. Crews

American Library Association, 2012

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cover of Copyright for Academic Librarians and Professionals

Copyright for Academic Librarians and Professionals

Rebecca P. Butler

American Library Association, 2014

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cover of Copyright for Teachers and Librarians in the 21st Century

Copyright for Teachers and Librarians in the 21st Century

Rebecca P. Butler

American Library Association, 2011

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cover of Copyright in Historical Perspective

Copyright in Historical Perspective

L. Ray Patterson

Vanderbilt University Press, 1968

First published in 1968, Copyright in Historical Perspective remains one of the most important histories of early copyright traditions and laws. Starting in the late 15th century and going through the late 19th century, Lyman Ray Patterson traces the regulation of publishing in Europe and the United States and the threats to fair use and public domain caused by shifting understandings of copyright law.
 
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cover of Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities: Promoting the Progress of Higher Education

Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities

Promoting the Progress of Higher Education

Kenneth D. Crews

University of Chicago Press, 1993

The recent lawsuit against Kinko's Copies for copyright infringement has exposed the confusion and heightened the fear of liability surrounding copyright issues in colleges and universities. This volume offers an enlightening explanation of copyright and the ambiguous concept of fair use as they affect and are affected by higher education.

In the first large-scale study of its kind, Kenneth D. Crews surveys the copyright policies of ninety-eight American research universities. His analysis reveals a variety of ways in which universities have responded to—and how they could better manage—the conflicting goals of copyright policies: avoiding infringements while promoting lawful uses that serve teaching and research. He explains in detail the background of copyright law and congressional guidelines affecting familiar uses of photocopies, videotapes, software, and reserve rooms. Crews concludes that most universities are overly conservative in their interpretation of copyright and often neglect their own interests, adding unnecessary costs and obstacles to the lawful dissemination of information.

Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities provides administrators, instructors, lawyers, librarians, and educational leaders a much-needed exegesis of copyright and how it can better serve higher education.
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cover of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

Creative License

The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling

Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola

Duke University Press, 2011

How did the Depression-era folk-song collector Alan Lomax end up with a songwriting credit on Jay-Z’s song “Takeover”? Why doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield, the primary drummer on James Brown recordings from the late 1960s such as “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat,” get paid for other musicians’ frequent use of the beats he performed on those songs? The music industry’s approach to digital sampling—the act of incorporating snippets of existing recordings into new ones—holds the answers. Exploring the complexities and contradictions in how samples are licensed, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola interviewed more than 100 musicians, managers, lawyers, industry professionals, journalists, and scholars. Based on those interviews, Creative License puts digital sampling into historical, cultural, and legal context. It describes hip-hop during its sample-heavy golden age in the 1980s and early 1990s, the lawsuits that shaped U.S. copyright law on sampling, and the labyrinthine licensing process that musicians must now navigate. The authors argue that the current system for licensing samples is inefficient and limits creativity. For instance, by estimating the present-day licensing fees for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990), two albums from hip-hop’s golden age, the authors show that neither album could be released commercially today. Observing that the same dynamics that create problems for remixers now reverberate throughout all culture industries, the authors conclude by examining ideas for reform.

Interviewees include David Byrne, Cee Lo Green, George Clinton, De La Soul, DJ Premier, DJ Qbert, Eclectic Method, El-P, Girl Talk, Matmos, Mix Master Mike, Negativland, Public Enemy, RZA, Clyde Stubblefield, T.S. Monk.

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cover of Creativity and Its Discontents: China's Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses

Creativity and Its Discontents

China's Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses

Laikwan Pang

Duke University Press, 2012

Creativity and Its Discontents is a sharp critique of the intellectual property rights (IPR)–based creative economy, particularly as it is embraced or ignored in China. Laikwan Pang argues that the creative economy—in which creativity is an individual asset to be commodified and protected as property—is an intensification of Western modernity and capitalism at odds with key aspects of Chinese culture. Nevertheless, globalization has compelled China to undertake endeavors involving intellectual property rights. Pang examines China’s IPR-compliant industries, as well as its numerous copyright violations. She describes how China promotes intellectual property rights in projects such as the development of cultural tourism in the World Heritage city of Lijiang, the transformation of Hong Kong cinema, and the cultural branding of Beijing. Meanwhile, copyright infringement proliferates, angering international trade organizations. Pang argues that piracy and counterfeiting embody the intimate connection between creativity and copying. She points to the lack of copyright protections for Japanese anime as the motor of China's dynamic anime culture. Theorizing the relationship between knockoffs and appropriation art, Pang offers an incisive interpretation of China’s flourishing art scene. Creativity and Its Discontents is a refreshing rejoinder to uncritical celebrations of the creative economy.
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cover of Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law

Cutting Across Media

Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law

Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, eds.

Duke University Press, 2011

In this collection of essays, leading academics, critics, and artists historicize collage and appropriation tactics that cut across diverse media and genres. They take up issues of appropriation in the popular and the avant-garde, in altered billboards and the work of the renowned painter Chris Ofili, in hip-hop and the compositions of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and in audio mash-ups, remixed news broadcasts, pranks, culture jamming, and numerous other cultural forms. The borrowing practices that they consider often run afoul of intellectual property regimes, and many of the contributors address the effects of copyright and trademark law on creativity. Among the contributors are the novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem, the poet and cultural critic Joshua Clover, the filmmaker Craig Baldwin, the hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, the ’zine-maker and sound collage artist Lloyd Dunn, and Negativland, the infamous collective that was sued in 1991 for sampling U2 in a satirical sound collage. Cutting Across Media is both a serious examination of collage and appropriation practices and a celebration of their transformative political and cultural possibilities.

Contributors. Craig Baldwin, David Banash, Marcus Boon, Jeff Chang, Joshua Clover, Lorraine Morales Cox, Lloyd Dunn, Philo T. Farnsworth, Pierre Joris, Douglas Kahn, Rudolf Kuenzli, Rob Latham, Jonathan Lethem, Carrie McLaren, Kembrew McLeod, Negativland, Davis Schneiderman, David Tetzlaff, Gábor Vályi, Warner Special Products, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

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cover of Digital Copyright

Digital Copyright

Jessica Litman

Michigan Publishing Services, 2017

The general public is used to thinking of copyright (if it thinks of it at all) as marginal and arcane. But copyright is central to our society’s information policy and affects what we can read, view, hear, use, or learn. In 1998 Congress enacted new laws greatly expanding copyright owners’ control over individuals’ private uses of their works. The efforts to enforce these new rights laws have resulted in highly publicized legal battles between established media, including major record labels and motion picture studios, and new upstart internet companies such as MP3.com and Napster.

Jessica Litman questions whether copyright laws crafted by lawyers and their lobbyists really make sense for the vast majority of us. Should every interaction between ordinary consumers and copyright-protected works be restricted by law? Is it practical to enforce such laws, or expect consumers to obey them? What are the effects of such laws on the exchange of information in a free society? Litman’s critique exposes the 1998 copyright law as an incoherent patchwork. She argues for reforms that reflect the way people actually behave in their daily digital interactions.

The Maize Books edition includes both an afterword written in 2006 exploring the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing and a new Postscript reflecting on the consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as it nears its twentieth birthday.
 
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cover of Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Dockside Reading

Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House

Isabel Hofmeyr

Duke University Press, 2022

In Dockside Reading Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.
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cover of Expanding Intellectual Property: Copyrights and Patents in 20th Century Europe and beyond

Expanding Intellectual Property

Copyrights and Patents in 20th Century Europe and beyond

Augusta Dimou

Central European University Press, 2017

The book deals with the expansion and institutionalization of intellectual property norms in the twentieth century, with a European focus. Its thirteen chapters revolve around the transfer, adaptation and the ambivalence of legal transplants in the interface between national and international projects, trends and contexts. The first part discusses the institutionalization of copyright and patent law in the frame- work of the bigger political and economic projects of the twentieth century. The second and third parts of the collection review relevant processes in the communist regimes and the post-communist societies, respectively. The essays point at processes of enculturation, trans-nationalization and universalization of norms, as well as practices of incorporation and resistance. The contributors lay a particular emphasis on the role and activity of social actors in the establishment and validation of intellectual property norms and regimes, from the function of experts and creation of expert cultures to the compelling power of popular street protests.
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cover of Finding the Public Domain: Copyright Review Management System Toolkit

Finding the Public Domain

Copyright Review Management System Toolkit

Melissa Levine, Kristina Eden, Justin Bonfiglio, and Richard Adler

Michigan Publishing Services, 2016

Copyright is meant to do something—several things—to accomplish socially desirable ends. One of those ends is to create a space for a free exchange of ideas that allows us to build upon a universe of expression that came before. 
How can I tell if something is in the public domain? This is the central question addressed daily by the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) project. It is a special question and one essential to the social bargain that society has struck with authors and rights holders.
 
It is also a deceptively simple question. There should be a straightforward answer, especially for books. It should be easy to know when something is—or is not—subject to copyright. And yet, in an age of absolute fluidity of media and medium, even plain old books can be highly complex embodiments of copyright. We need to make it easier to ascertain whether a work is in the public domain. If the rights of copyright holders are to be respected and valued as part of the social bargain, the public domain as a matter of copyright law should be ascertainable and enjoyed
.
Given this complexity, consider the determination of the copyright status of a given creative work as a design problem. How do we move the copyright status of works in the collections of our libraries, museums, and archives from confusion and uncertainty to clarity and opportunity? Working over a span of nearly eight years, the University of Michigan Library received three grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to generously fund CRMS, a cooperative effort by partner research libraries to identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust. The Toolkit is a resource that aims to allow others to understand and replicate the work done by CRMS.
 
 
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cover of Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property

Freedom of Expression

Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property

Kembrew McLeod

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Freedom of Expression® covers the ways in which intellectual property laws have been used to privatize all forms of expression—from guitar riffs and Donald Trump’s “you’re fired” gesture to human genes and public space—and in the process stifle creative expression. Kembrew McLeod challenges the blind embrace of privatization as it clashes against our right to free speech and shared resources.

Kembrew McLeod is professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa, author of Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law, and coproducer of the documentary Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport.

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford Law School.

This book’s documentary companion will be available through Media Education Foundation.

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cover of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

Inherent Vice

Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright

Lucas Hilderbrand

Duke University Press, 2009

In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology, for recording television without permission. The studios initially resisted VCRs and began legal action to oppose their marketing. In turn, U.S. courts controversially reinterpreted copyright law to protect users’ right to record, while content owners eventually developed ways to exploit the video market. Lucas Hilderbrand shows how videotape and fair use offer essential lessons relevant to contemporary progressive media policy.

Videotape not only radically changed how audiences accessed the content they wanted and loved but also altered how they watched it. Hilderbrand develops an aesthetic theory of analog video, an “aesthetics of access” most boldly embodied by bootleg videos. He contends that the medium specificity of videotape becomes most apparent through repeated duplication, wear, and technical failure; video’s visible and audible degeneration signals its uses for legal transgressions and illicit pleasures. Bringing formal and cultural analysis into dialogue with industrial history and case law, Hilderbrand examines four decades of often overlooked histories of video recording, including the first network news archive, the underground circulation of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a feminist tape-sharing network, and the phenomenally popular website YouTube. This book reveals the creative uses of videotape that have made essential content more accessible and expanded our understanding of copyright law. It is a politically provocative, unabashedly nostalgic ode to analog.

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cover of Intellectual Freedom Manual, Eleventh Edition

Intellectual Freedom Manual, Eleventh Edition

Erin Office for Intellectual Freedom

American Library Association, 2026

When someone faces a difficult intellectual freedom (IF) issue, they usually don’t have time to wade through dense text to find the answers they need. Designed as a real-world reference, OIF’s Intellectual Freedom Manual provides trusted, comprehensive guidance for every library worker, from the volunteer to the director, in plain language. Whether you’re developing or reviewing policies, on-boarding new staff or trustees, responding to challenges and controversies, or studying librarianship, you’ll find this a vital tool, with features such as

  • contributions that center the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ people, who are often targeted by censorship efforts;
  • chapters that begin with an overview explaining the big ideas and offering reflection questions;
  • an introduction to IF and why it matters, drawing on ALA's core IF documents and supported with adaptable policy worksheets;
  • information and best practice guidance on key topics such as access, children and youth, censorship and internet filtering, collection development and management, copyright, meeting rooms and exhibit spaces, library programming, politics and religion, privacy, and visits and requests from law enforcement;
  • stories from real people whose lives have been impacted by IF, showing how library policies shape culture, protect staff and users, and affect real people;
  • concise breakdowns of IF issues from legal experts, helping you understand the laws and how they apply in real situations;
  • practical advice on advocating for IF, getting help when challenges arise, lobbying, and working with your elected officials;
  • a thorough index to help you quickly find the information you need; and
  • a helpful glossary and selected bibliography of additional resources.
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cover of Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing

Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing

Martine Courant Rife

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

This is the first empirical, mixed-methods study of copyright issues that speaks to writing specialists and legal scholars about the complicated intersections of rhetoric, technology, copyright law, and writing for the Internet. Martine Courant Rife opens up new conversations about how invention and copyright work together in the composing process for  digital writers and how this relationship is central to contemporary issues in composition pedagogy and curriculum.

In this era of digital writing and publishing, composition and legal scholars have identified various problems with writers’ processes and the law’s construction of textual ownership, such as issues of appropriation, infringement, and fair use within academic and online contexts. Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing unpacks digital writers’ complex perceptions of copyright, revealing how it influences what they choose to write and how it complicates their work. Rife uses quantitative and qualitative approaches and focuses on writing as a tool and a technology-mediated activity, arguing the copyright problem is about not law but invention and the attendant issues of authorship.

Looking at copyright and writing through a rhetorical lens, Rife leverages the tools and history of rhetoric to offer insights into how some of our most ancient concepts inform our understanding of the problems copyright law creates for writers. In this innovative study that will be of interest to professional and technical writers, scholars and students of writing and rhetoric, and legal professionals, Rife offers possibilities for future research, teaching, curriculum design, and public advocacy in regard to composition and changing copyright laws.

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cover of Legal Stories: Narrative-Based Property Development in the Modern Copyright Era

Legal Stories

Narrative-Based Property Development in the Modern Copyright Era

Gregory Steirer

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Tracing the emergence of what the media industries today call transmedia, story worlds, and narrative franchises, Legal Stories provides a dual history of copyright law and narrative-based media development between the Copyright Act of 1909 and the Copyright Act of 1976. Drawing on archival material, including legal case files, and employing the principles of actor-network theory, Gregory Steirer demonstrates how the meaning and form of narrative-based property in the twentieth century was integral to the letter and practice of intellectual property law during this time. 

Steirer’s expansive view of intellectual property law encompasses not only statutes and judicial opinions, but also the everyday practices and productions of authors, editors, fans, and other legal laypersons. The result is a history of the law as improvisatory and accident-prone, taking place as often outside the courtroom as inside, and shaped as much by laypersons as lawyers. Through the examination of influential legal disputes involving early properties such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, Steirer provides a ground’s eye view of how copyright law has operated and evolved in practice.
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cover of Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Licensing Digital Content

A Practical Guide for Librarians

Lesley Ellen Harris

American Library Association, 2018

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cover of Licensing Digital Content: A Practical Guide for Librarians

Licensing Digital Content

A Practical Guide for Librarians

Lesley Ellen Harris

American Library Association, 2009

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cover of Lion's Share: Remaking South African Copyright

Lion's Share

Remaking South African Copyright

Veit Erlmann

Duke University Press, 2022

In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.
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cover of Owning And Using Scholarship: An Ip Handbook For Teachers

Owning And Using Scholarship

An Ip Handbook For Teachers

Kevin Smith

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2014

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cover of Owning Performance | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage

Owning Performance | Performing Ownership

Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage

Jane Wessel

University of Michigan Press, 2022

In 1710, England’s first copyright law gave authors the ability to own their works, but it was not until 1833 that literary property law was extended to protect dramatic performance. Between these dates, generations of playwrights grappled for control over their intellectual property in a cultural and legal environment that treated print differently from performance. As ownership became a central concern for many, actors fought to possess their dramatic parts exclusively, playwrights struggled to control and profit from repeat performances of their works, and managers tried to gain a monopoly over the performance of profitable plays.

Owning Performance follows the careers of some of the 18th century’s most influential playwrights, actors, and theater managers as they vied for control over the period’s most popular shows. Without protection for dramatic literary property, these figures developed creative
 extra-legal strategies for controlling the performance of drama—quite literally performing their ownership. Their various strategies resulted in a culture of ephemerality, with many of the period’s most popular works existing only in performance and manuscript copies. Author Jane Wessel explores how playwrights and actors developed strategies for owning their works and how, in turn, theater managers appropriated these strategies, putting constant pressure on artists to innovate. Owning Performance reveals the wide-reaching effects of property law on theatrical culture, tracing a turn away from print that affected the circulation, preservation, and legacy of 18th century drama.
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cover of Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property

Permissions, A Survival Guide

Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property

Susan M. Bielstein

University of Chicago Press, 2006

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it's a good bet that at least half of those words relate to the picture's copyright status. Art historians, artists, and anyone who wants to use the images of others will find themselves awash in byzantine legal terms, constantly evolving copyright law, varying interpretations by museums and estates, and despair over the complexity of the whole situation. Here, on a white—not a high—horse, Susan Bielstein offers her decades of experience as an editor working with illustrated books. In doing so, she unsnarls the threads of permissions that have ensnared scholars, critics, and artists for years.

Organized as a series of “takes” that range from short sidebars to extended discussions, Permissions, A Survival Guide explores intellectual property law as it pertains to visual imagery. How can you determine whether an artwork is copyrighted? How do you procure a high-quality reproduction of an image? What does “fair use” really mean? Is it ever legitimate to use the work of an artist without permission? Bielstein discusses the many uncertainties that plague writers who work with images in this highly visual age, and she does so based on her years navigating precisely these issues. As an editor who has hired a photographer to shoot an incredibly obscure work in the Italian mountains (a plan that backfired hilariously), who has tried to reason with artists' estates in languages she doesn't speak, and who has spent her time in the archival trenches, she offers a snappy and humane guide to this difficult terrain.

Filled with anecdotes, asides, and real courage, Permissions, A Survival Guide is a unique handbook that anyone working in the visual arts will find invaluable, if not indispensable.
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cover of Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright

Pink Pirates

Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright

Caren Irr

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Today, copyright is everywhere, surrounded by a thicket of no trespassing signs that mark creative work as private property. Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates asks how contemporary novelists—represented by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—have read those signs, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. Bringing together voices from law schools, courtrooms, and the writer's desk, Irr shows how some of the most inventive contemporary feminist novelists have reacted to this history. 

 Explaining the complex, three-century lineage of Anglo-American copyright law in clear, accessible terms and wrestling with some of copyright law's most deeply rooted assumptions, Irr sets the stage for a feminist reappraisal of the figure of the literary pirate in the late twentieth century—a figure outside the restrictive bounds of U.S. copyright statutes. 

 Going beyond her readings of contemporary women authors, Irr’s exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.

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cover of Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929

Pop Song Piracy

Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929

Barry Kernfeld

University of Chicago Press, 2011

The music industry’s ongoing battle against digital piracy is just the latest skirmish in a long conflict over who has the right to distribute music. Starting with music publishers’ efforts to stamp out bootleg compilations of lyric sheets in 1929, Barry Kernfeld’s Pop Song Piracy details nearly a century of disobedient music distribution from song sheets to MP3s.
 
In the 1940s and ’50s, Kernfeld reveals, song sheets were succeeded by fake books, unofficial volumes of melodies and lyrics for popular songs that were a key tool for musicians. Music publishers attempted to wipe out fake books, but after their efforts proved unsuccessful they published their own. Pop Song Piracy shows that this pattern of disobedience, prohibition, and assimilation recurred in each conflict over unauthorized music distribution, from European pirate radio stations to bootlegged live shows. Beneath this pattern, Kernfeld argues, there exists a complex give and take between distribution methods that merely copy existing songs (such as counterfeit CDs) and ones that transform songs into new products (such as file sharing). Ultimately, he contends, it was the music industry’s persistent lagging behind in creating innovative products that led to the very piracy it sought to eliminate.
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cover of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright

Reclaiming Fair Use

How to Put Balance Back in Copyright

Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when some permissions “i” proves undottable. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi chart a clear path through the confusion by urging a robust embrace of a principle long-embedded in copyright law, but too often poorly understood—fair use. By challenging the widely held notion that current copyright law has become unworkable and obsolete in the era of digital technologies, Reclaiming Fair Use promises to reshape the debate in both scholarly circles and the creative community.
            This indispensable guide distills the authors’ years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals into no-nonsense advice and practical examples for content producers. Reclaiming Fair Use begins by surveying the landscape of contemporary copyright law—and the dampening effect it can have on creativity—before laying out how the fair-use principle can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Finally, Aufderheide and Jaszi summarize their work with artists and professional groups to develop best practice documents for fair use and discuss fair use in an international context. Appendixes address common myths about fair use and provide a template for creating the reader’s own best practices. Reclaiming Fair Use will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.
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cover of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, Second Edition

Reclaiming Fair Use

How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, Second Edition

Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when a permissions i proves undottable. Analyzing the dampening effect that copyright law can have on scholarship and creativity, Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi urge us to embrace in response a principle embedded in copyright law itself—fair use.
Originally published in 2011, Reclaiming Fair Use challenged the widely held notion that copyright law is obsolete in an age of digital technologies. Beginning with a survey of the contemporary landscape of copyright law, Aufderheide and Jaszi drew on their years of experience advising documentary filmmakers, English teachers, performing arts scholars, and other creative professionals to lay out in detail how the principles of fair-use can be employed to avoid copyright violation. Taking stock of the vibrant remix culture that has only burgeoned since the book’s original publication, this new edition addresses the expanded reach of fair use—tracking the Twitter hashtag #WTFU (where’s the fair use?), the maturing of the transformativeness measure in legal disputes, the ongoing fight against automatic detection software, and the progress and delays of digitization initiatives around the country.
Full of no-nonsense advice and practical examples, Reclaiming Fair Use remains essential reading for anyone interested in law, creativity, and the ever-broadening realm of new media.
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cover of Regulating Content on Social Media: Copyright, Terms of Service and Technological Features

Regulating Content on Social Media

Copyright, Terms of Service and Technological Features

Corinne Tan

University College London, 2018

How are social media users influenced by platform when creating content, and does this influence determine whether or not they comply with copyright laws? These are pressing questions in today’s internet age, and Regulating Content on Social Media answers them by analyzing social media use from a copyright perspective. Corinne Tan compares the regulation of copyright laws across selected social media platforms—Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia—with other regulatory factors such as the terms of service and the technological features of each platform. This comparison enables her to explore how each platform affects the role copyright laws play in securing compliance from their users. Through empirical research and a hypothetical case study detailing the social media activities of user Jane Doe, the book argues that, in spite of copyright laws’ purported regulation, users are encouraged by the social media platforms themselves to behave in ways that may be inconsistent with the law.

The first book to look at how social media platforms affect users’ compliance with copyright laws, Regulating Content on Social Media is a timely addition to the current media landscape.
 
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cover of Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy

Rock This Way

Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy

Mel Stanfill

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. 

Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.

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cover of The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright

The Author's Due

Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright

Joseph Loewenstein

University of Chicago Press, 2002

The Author's Due offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. Joseph Loewenstein traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books.

As Loewenstein shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization.

With its probing look at the origins of modern copyright, The Author's Due will prove to be a watershed for historians, literary critics, and legal scholars alike.
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cover of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature

The Construction of Authorship

Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature

Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds.

Duke University Press, 1994

What is an author? What is a text? At a time when the definition of "text" is expanding and the technology whereby texts are produced and disseminated is changing at an explosive rate, the ways "authorship" is defined and rights conferred upon authors must also be reconsidered. This volume argues that contemporary copyright law, rooted as it is in a nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of the author as a solitary creative genius, may be inapposite to the realities of cultural production. Drawing together distinguished scholars from literature, law, and the social sciences, the volume explores the social and cultural construction of authorship as a step toward redefining notions of authorship and copyright for today's world.
These essays, illustrating cultural studies in action, are aggressively interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in topic and approach. Questions of collective and collaborative authorship in both contemporary and early modern contexts are addressed. Other topics include moral theory and authorship; copyright and the balance between competing interests of authors and the public; problems of international copyright; musical sampling and its impact on "fair use" doctrine; cinematic authorship; quotation and libel; alternative views of authorship as exemplified by nineteenth-century women's clubs and by the Renaissance commonplace book; authorship in relation to broadcast media and to the teaching of writing; and the material dimension of authorship as demonstrated by Milton's publishing contract.

Contributors. Rosemary J. Coombe, Margreta de Grazia, Marvin D'Lugo, John Feather, N. N. Feltes, Ann Ruggles Gere, Peter Jaszi, Gerhard Joseph, Peter Lindenbaum, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede, Jeffrey A. Masten, Thomas Pfau, Monroe E. Price and Malla Pollack, Mark Rose, Marlon B. Ross, David Sanjek, Thomas Streeter, Jim Swan, Max W. Thomas, Martha Woodmansee, Alfred C. Yen

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cover of The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke

The Intellectual Properties of Learning

A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke

John Willinsky

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Providing a sweeping millennium-plus history of the learned book in the West, John Willinsky puts current debates over intellectual property into context, asking what it is about learning that helped to create the concept even as it gave the products of knowledge a different legal and economic standing than other sorts of property.
 
Willinsky begins with Saint Jerome in the fifth century, then traces the evolution of reading, writing, and editing practices in monasteries, schools, universities, and among independent scholars through the medieval period and into the Renaissance. He delves into the influx of Islamic learning and the rediscovery of classical texts, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the founding of the Bodleian Library before finally arriving at John Locke, whose influential lobbying helped bring about the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne of 1710. Willinsky’s bravura tour through this history shows that learning gave rise to our idea of intellectual property while remaining distinct from, if not wholly uncompromised by, the commercial economy that this concept inspired, making it clear that today’s push for marketable intellectual property threatens the very nature of the quest for learning on which it rests.
 
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cover of The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles

The Last Mixtape

Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles

Seth Long

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A reflection on the evolution of physical media into metaphor, through the history of music curation.
 
Obsolescence makes the heart grow fonder, at least in the case of the mixtape. Not all technologies are so lucky. Some (say, wax cylinders) fade almost completely from cultural memory. A lucky few pass into metaphor: we still “hang up” our smartphones, “cut” film, and “patch” computer code. As digital streaming completes the obsolescence of physical media, what will become of the humble cassette?

In The Last Mixtape, Seth Long offers a microhistory of music curation, anchored by the cassette, from which he explores the meanings of obsolescence, ownership, nostalgia, and the speed of cultural change. A moving meditation on our relationship with music, memory, and curation in the digital century, Long ultimately calls for a return to the media ecology represented by the mixtape: a world in which media is cheap and abundant but tactile and meaningfully engaged.
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cover of The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry's War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties

The Piracy Crusade

How the Music Industry's War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties

Aram Sinnreich

University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

In the decade and a half since Napster first emerged, forever changing the face of digital culture, the claim that “internet pirates killed the music industry” has become so ubiquitous that it is treated as common knowledge. Piracy is a scourge on legitimate businesses and hard-working artists, we are told, a “cybercrime” similar to identity fraud or even terrorism. 

In The Piracy Crusade, Aram Sinnreich critiques the notion of “piracy” as a myth perpetuated by today's cultural cartels—the handful of companies that dominate the film, software, and especially music industries. As digital networks have permeated our social environment, they have offered vast numbers of people the opportunity to experiment with innovative cultural and entrepreneurial ideas predicated on the belief that information should be shared widely. This has left the media cartels, whose power has historically resided in their ability to restrict the flow of cultural information, with difficult choices: adapt to this new environment, fight the changes tooth and nail, or accept obsolescence. Their decision to fight has resulted in ever stronger copyright laws and the aggressive pursuit of accused infringers.

Yet the most dangerous legacy of this “piracy crusade” is not the damage inflicted on promising start-ups or on well-intentioned civilians caught in the crosshairs of file-sharing litigation. Far more troubling, Sinnreich argues, are the broader implications of copyright laws and global treaties that sacrifice free speech and privacy in the name of combating the phantom of piracy—policies that threaten to undermine the foundations of democratic society.

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cover of The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

The Powell Papers

A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati

Hershel Parker

Northwestern University Press, 2011

In 1849—months before the term “confidence man” was coined to identify a New York crook—Thomas Powell (1809–1887), a spherical, monocled, English poetaster, dramatist, journalist, embezzler, and forger, landed in Manhattan. Powell in London had capped a career of grand theft and literary peccadilloes by feigning a suicide attempt and having himself committed to a madhouse, after which he fled England. He had been an intimate of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and a crowd of lesser literary folk. 

Thoughtfully bearing what he presented as a volume of Tennyson with a few trifling revisions in the hand of the poet, Powell was embraced by the slavishly Anglophile New York literary establishment, including a young Herman Melville. In two pot-boilers—The Living Authors of England (1849) and The Living Authors of America (1850)—Powell denounced the most revered American author, Washington Irving, for plagiarism; provoked Charles Dickens to vengeful trans-Atlantic outrage and then panic; and capped his insolence by identifying Irving and Melville as the two worst “enemies of the American mind.” For almost four more decades he sniped at Dickens, put words in Melville’s mouth, and survived even the most conscientious efforts to expose him. Long fascinated by this incorrigible rogue, Hershel Parker in The Powell Papers uses a few familiar documents and a mass of freshly discovered material (including a devastating portrait of Powell in a serialized novel) to unfold a captivating tale of skullduggery through the words of great artists and then-admired journalists alike.

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cover of Wilkie Collins and Copyright

Wilkie Collins and Copyright

Sundeep Bisla

The Ohio State University Press, 2013

In the works and letters of his later years, Wilkie Collins continually expressed his displeasure over copyright violations. Wilkie Collins and Copyright: Artistic Ownership in the Age of the Borderless Word by Sundeep Bisla asks whether that discontent might not also have affected the composition of Collins’s major early works of the 1850s and 60s. Bisla’s investigation into this question, surprisingly, does not find an uncomplicated author uncomplicatedly launched on a defense of what he believes to be rightfully his. Instead, Bisla finds an author locked in fierce negotiation with the theoretical underpinnings of his medium, the written word, underpinnings best delineated by the twentieth-century deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Collins’s discomfort with copyright violation comes to be in tension with his budding understanding of the paradoxical nature of the “iterability” of the word, a nature presenting itself as a conflict between the settling and breaking manifestations of linguistic repetition. In his efforts at resolving this paradox, Collins adopts a mechanism of recursive self-reflexivity through which each story reflects upon itself to a more fundamental extent than had its predecessor. This self-reflexive exploration has significant consequences for the author’s own iterability-menaced subjectivity, a striking example of which can be seen in the fact that the name being sought in Collins’s last masterpiece, The Moonstone, will end up being “MY OWN NAME” — in other words, “WILKIE COLLINS.”
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