The Work Of Authorship

What fresh perspectives can viewing copyright law through a humanities' looking glass bring to key notions of tomorrow's copyright law?

As information flows become increasingly ubiquitous in our post digital environment, the challenges to traditional concepts of intellectual property and the practices deriving from them are immense. The romantic understanding of the lone author as an endless source of new creations has to face these challenges. In order to do so, this work presents a collectivist model of intellectual property rights. The core argument is that since copyright works enjoy profit from significant public contribution, they should not be privately owned, but considered to be a joint enterprise, made real by both the public and author. It is argued that every copyright work depends on and is reflective of the author's exposure to externalities such as language, culture and the various social events and processes that occur in the public domain, therefore copyright works should not be regarded as exclusive private property. The study takes its organizing principle from John Locke, defining and proving the fatal flaw inherent in debates on copyright: on the one hand the copyright community is eager to arm authors with a robust property right over their creation, while on the other this community totally ignores the fact that the exposure of the individual to externalities is what makes him or her capable of creating material that is copyrightable. Just as Locke was against the absolute authority of kings, the expressed view of the study is against the exclusive right an author can claim.

Addresses the difficult question of how to determine the authorship, and ownership, of copyright in highly collaborative works.

Copyright laws are important regulators of cultural expression, because they grant extensive rights to control the reproduction, adaptation and communication of 'literary' and 'artistic' works. The twin concepts of authorship and original work are central to copyright laws the world over; their interpretation driven by economic and technological concerns. In this collection of essays contributors from various academic disciplines query what diverse disciplines in the humanities - including literary studies, aesthetics, film studies, and the philosophy of art - have to offer law, in a quest to establish a more nuanced and useful conception of copyright and authorship. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the challenges inherent in translating aesthetics and creativity studies to concepts of copyright.

A challenging new reading of Grass's literary work and political writings that examines how the author has reacted to sustained public interest in his person from the mid-1960s onwards. Braun draws together an eclectic body of literary writing and suggests that questions of authorship lie at the heart of Grass's work.

The scholarly debate about authorship has not only transcended all aspects of literary studies, but has also prompted contemporary authors to counter, subvert, and challenge it. One author to whom this applies in particular is Milan Kundera. In this study, Christine Knoop re-examines Kundera's essayistic and novelistic work against the background of the theoretical paradigms of literary authority, intention, and ownership. In so doing, she demonstrates how he overcomes traditional theoretical distinctions by postulating the existence of both a strong, powerful author figure and of potentially boundless literary meaning. Kundera's radically ambiguous conception of the author in the novel, developed primarily to influence the reader, is discussed and developed to cast new light on the critical debate about authorship at large while maintaining his primary conjecture that authorship as such is perpetually hybrid, dynamic, and unfinished. Christine Angela Knoop is a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Comparative Literature at Freie Universitat Berlin.

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful and versatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly as the mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches—called “e-Research”—and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors, leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only how research is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion in specific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practical developments and results associated with e-Research innovations. The contributors, who include Geoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why and how e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, and experience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they share information, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to do this. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) and its purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research).

The film director or `auteur' has been central in film theory and criticism over the past thirty years. Theories of Authorship documents the major stages in the debate about film authorship, and introduces recent writing on film to suggest important ways in which the debate might be reconsidered.