Authors, users, and pirates : copyright law and subjectivity / James Meese.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Meese, James (Writer on law), author.

Series:

Information society series

The information society series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Copyright.

Copyright--History.

Authorship.

Copyright infringement.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

x, 227 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2018]

Summary:

In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. In this book, James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users, and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice. Meese presents a series of historical and contemporary examples, from nineteenth-century cases of book abridgement to recent controversies over the reuse of Instagram photos. He not only considers the author, user, and pirate in terms of copyright law, but also explores the experiential element of subjectivity-how people understand and construct their own subjectivity in relation to these three subject positions. Meese maps the emergence of the author, user, and pirate over the first two centuries of copyright's existence; describes how regulation and technological limitations turned people from creators to consumers; considers relational authorship; explores practices in sampling, music licensing, and contemporary art; examines provisions in copyright law for user-generated content; and reimagines the pirate as an innovator.

Contents:

Connected origins : locating relationality in copyright history

From the piratical to the creative user

Creative practice and relational authorship

Locating the user and reforming the law

Reimagining the pirate: approaching infringement relationally

Producing the pirate : the courtroom and cultural power.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-220) and index.

ISBN:

9780262037440

0262037440

OCLC:

987492020

Publisher Number:

99978981907