New from Harvard University Press:
Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (June 2016), by
Mark Rose (University of California, Santa Barbara). A description from the Press:
Through a series of vivid case studies, Authors in Court
charts the 300-year-long dance between authorship and copyright that
has shaped each institution’s response to changing social norms of
identity, privacy, and celebrity. Authors’ self-presentations in court
are often inflected by prevailing concepts of propriety and
respectability. And judges, for their part, have not been immune to the
reputation and standing of the authors who have appeared before them in
legal dramas.
Some authors strut their roles on the public stage. For example,
Napoleon Sarony—the nineteenth-century photographer whose case
established that photographs might be protected as works of art—was fond
of marching along Broadway dressed in a red fez and high-top campaign
boots, proclaiming his special status as a celebrity. Others, such as
the reclusive J. D. Salinger, enacted their dramas precisely by
shrinking from attention. Mark Rose’s case studies include the
flamboyant early modern writer Daniel Defoe; the self-consciously
genteel poet Alexander Pope; the nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet
Beecher Stowe; the once-celebrated early twentieth-century dramatist
Anne Nichols, author of Abie’s Irish Rose; and the provocative contemporary artist Jeff Koons.
These examples suggest not only how social forms such as gender and
gentility have influenced the self-presentation of authors in public and
in court but also how the personal styles and histories of authors have
influenced the development of legal doctrine.
A few blurbs:
“A literary historian by training, Rose
is completely at home in the world of law, as well as the history of
photography and art. This is the work of an interdisciplinary scholar at
the height of his powers. The arguments are sophisticated and the
elegant text is a work of real craftsmanship. It is superb.”—Lionel Bently
“Authors in Court is well-written,
erudite, informative, and engaging throughout. As the chapters go along,
we see the way that personalities inflect the supposedly impartial law;
we see the role of gender in authorial self-fashioning; we see some of
the fault lines which produce litigation; and we get a nice history of
the evolution of the fair use doctrine. This is a book that should at
least be on reserve for any IP–related course. Going forward, no one
writing about any of the cases Rose discusses can afford to ignore his contribution.”—Lewis Hyde
More information is available
here.
