Copyright Creativity Big Media And Cultural Value

As the publishing, film and music industries are dominated by Big Media conglomerates, there is often recourse to simplistic ideological and conspiratorial readings of industry dynamics. Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author explains why copyright is much more than a creator’s private property right or a mechanism through which corporations control cultural production and influence mass consumption choices. The volume is grounded in extensive, painstakingly detailed and colourful original archival research into business histories of major successful artists including Conan Doyle, Hall Caine, Margaret Atwood, Dame Nellie Melba, Radiohead and Banksy, and the industries and genres that grew up around their activities. Chapters address big questions about how copyright generates income and how distributions of profits are allocated in the publishing, film and music industries. It includes discussion of the creation of new formats, the interplay between old media and new technologies, international copyright reform and cross-industry relations. Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value is a wide-ranging and important resource for students and practitioners of law and policy, media studies, cultural studies and literary history.

As the publishing, film and music industries are dominated by Big Media conglomerates, there is often recourse to simplistic ideological and conspiratorial readings of industry dynamics. Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author explains why copyright is much more than a creator’s private property right or a mechanism through which corporations control cultural production and influence mass consumption choices. The volume is grounded in extensive, painstakingly detailed and colourful original archival research into business histories of major successful artists including Conan Doyle, Hall Caine, Margaret Atwood, Dame Nellie Melba, Radiohead and Banksy, and the industries and genres that grew up around their activities. Chapters address big questions about how copyright generates income and how distributions of profits are allocated in the publishing, film and music industries. It includes discussion of the creation of new formats, the interplay between old media and new technologies, international copyright reform and cross-industry relations. Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value is a wide-ranging and important resource for students and practitioners of law and policy, media studies, cultural studies and literary history.

This book argues that moral rights provisions in copyright law rest on a misunderstanding, or romanticisation, of the role of the author. The Romantic conception of authorship, as a lone genius, creating from nothing, sensitive and vulnerable, has helped publishers push for strong copyright reform. But is this conception borne out in practice – especially in a world of meme culture, of artificial intelligence generated art and poetry, and of open source and fan fiction? This book probes the romantic vignette of the author through its legal adoption. Moral rights are rights that attach to the non-economic – for example, intellectual or emotional – interests of an author in their work. Much like defamation, moral rights see the right of reputation as superior to the right of freedom of expression. However, unlike defamation, moral rights are not protecting against defamatory actions against a person. In most jurisdictions, they are provisions set within copyright regimes; regimes whose purpose is to incentivise innovation. Challenging the way we think about authorship and how it should be protected by law, the book draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how moral rights can constitute a barrier to transformative creativity. While authors and artists require strong rights to protect their ability to earn an income and incentivise creativity, moral rights, the book argues, may in turn actually harm their ability to do so. This timely criticism of moral rights will appeal to researchers, students, policy makers and lawyers working in the area of intellectual property law, as well as legal theorists, sociolegal scholars and legal historians with relevant interests.

Based on empirical research, this innovative book explores issues of performativity and authorship in the theatre world under copyright law and addresses several inter-connected questions: who is the author and first owner of a dramatic work? Who gets the credit and the licensing rights? What rights do the performers of the work have? Given the nature of theatre as a medium reliant on the re-use of prior existing works, tropes, themes and plots, what happens if an allegation of copyright infringement is made against a playwright? Furthermore, who possesses moral rights over the work? To evaluate these questions in the context of theatre, the first part of the book examines the history of the dramatic work both as text and as performative work. The second part explores the notions of authorship and joint authorship under copyright law as they apply to the actual process of creating plays, referring to legal and theatrical literature, as well as empirical research. The third part looks at the notion of copyright infringement in the context of theatre, noting that cases of alleged theatrical infringement reach the courts comparatively rarely in comparison with music cases, and assessing the reasons for this with respect to empirical research. The fourth part examines the way moral rights of attribution and integrity work in the context of theatre. The book concludes with a prescriptive comment on how law should respond to the challenges provided by the theatrical context, and how theatre should respond to law. Very original and innovative, this book proposes a ground-breaking empirical approach to study the implications of copyright law in society and makes a wonderful case for the need to consider the reciprocal influence between law and practice.

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the various approaches to the field, explaining why media messages matter, how media businesses prosper and why media is integral to defining contemporary life. The text is divided into three parts – Media texts and meanings; Producing media; and Media and social contexts – exploring the ways in which various media forms make meaning; are produced and regulated; and how society, culture and history are defined by such forms. Encouraging students to actively engage in media research and analysis, each chapter seeks to guide readers through key questions and ideas in order to empower them to develop their own scholarship, expertise and investigations of the media worlds in which we live. Fully updated to reflect the contemporary media environment, the third edition includes new case studies covering topics such as Brexit, podcasts, Love Island, Captain Marvel, Black Lives Matter, Netflix, data politics, the Kardashians, President Trump, ‘fake news’, the post-Covid world and perspectives on global media forms. This is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media and popular culture.

The book illuminates the legal and business history of the American theatre through new archival discoveries.

How copyright law and the practice of narrative-based property development influenced each other before 1978

This book shows how intellectual property turned the family into a market while, simultaneously, the market became a family.