Timothy McFarlin, Samford University Cumberland School of Law, has posted three papers, one coauthored, about Mark Twain and Mary Ann Cord, a freedwoman whose story Twain told in an article in The Atlantic. As the abstract for one of the articles explains, they address the questions:
Did Mark Twain and the Atlantic infringe a copyright belonging to Mary Ann Cord in the telling of how enslavers tore her family apart and how her son returned years later, as a Union soldier, to liberate her from bondage? If so, could that long-ignored infringement be remedied today?In answering those questions, Professor McFarlin writes, the articles provide
wide-ranging insights into how the doctrines of consent, estoppel, laches, abandonment, adverse possession, escheat, and the statute of limitations apply in copyright law. Cord's case—nearly a century-and-a-half-old but examined for the first time in this project—can also help chart a course for how to address other longstanding wrongs in intellectual property and beyond. This includes those raised in recent lawsuits against Harvard for its exploitation of enslaved people's images and Tulsa for the 1921 race massacre on Black Wall Street.The first article, A Copyright Ignored: Mark Twain, Mary Ann Cord, and the Meaning of Authorship, is forthcoming in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. The second, A Copyright Restored: Mark Twain, Mary Ann Cord, and How to Right a Longstanding Wrong, appears in the Wisconsin Law Review. The third article, coauthored with his Samford Law colleague Alyssa A. DiRusso, is Identity Appropriation and Wealth Transfer: Twain, Cord, and the Post-Mortem Right of Publicity.
--Dan Ernst
