Newly Published: Jacqueline D. Lipton, Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook For Authors (2020) @PittLaw

Jacqueline D. Lipton, University of Pittsburgh Law School, has published Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook For Authors (University of California Press, 2020). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's content.

Everything a writer needs to know about the law. This accessible, reader-friendly handbook will be an invaluable resource for authors, agents, and editors in navigating the legal landscape of the contemporary publishing industry. Drawing on a wealth of experience in legal scholarship and publishing, Jacqueline D. Lipton provides a useful legal guide for writers whatever their levels of expertise or categories of work (fiction, nonfiction, or academic). Through case studies and hypothetical examples, Law and Authors addresses issues of copyright law, including explanations of fair use and the public domain; trademark and branding concerns for those embarking on a publishing career; laws that impact the ways that authors might use social media and marketing promotions; and privacy and defamation questions that writers may face. Although the book focuses on American law, it highlights key areas where laws in other countries differ from those in the United States. Law and Authors will prepare every writer for the inevitable and the unexpected.

 

Frye on The Stolen Poem of Saint Moling @brianlfrye @ShubhaGhosh @ElgarPublishing

Brian L. Frye, University of Kentucky College of Law, is publishing The Stolen Poem of Saint Moling in Forgotten Intellectual Property Lore (Shubha Ghosh ed. Edward Elgar 2019). Here is the abstract.

It’s a truism of copyright scholarship that the modern concept of the author didn’t exist until the modern era. The medieval and Renaissance author was a vehicle for the text, but the modern author is the creator of the text. And in the 18th century, the Romantic movement transformed authorship into self-expression. This individualization of authorship enabled the creation of copyright. While the printing press made commercial publishing possible, the modern concept of the author created “literary property.” But is the truism entirely true? The concept of the author has certainly changed over time, and taken different forms in different places at different times. But is the modern concept of the author truly unique to the modern era, or does it merely reflect a particular literary economy? In other words, did our concept of the author create our literary economy, or did our literary economy shape our concept of the author? Surely, the answer is a bit of both. But a medieval Irish legend at least suggests that the modern concept of the author is only a particular expression of an economic phenomenon.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

CFP: Volume on Law, Authorship, and Appropriation

Call for papers for a volume on law, authorship, and appropriation. We are seeking papers from 10,000 to 40,000 words on any aspect of law, authorship, and appropriation, including the intersection of freedom of expression and copyright, history of authorship, defenses to copyright infringement, appropriation vs. theft, plagiarism and originality in creation, cultural appropriation, digital sampling and the law, wearable technology and IP, and related topics. Do terms like "author" and "creator" continue to have meaning? Abstracts are due no later than September 30, 2019. Finished papers are due no later than January 1, 2020. If you are interested or have questions about the project, please contact Christine Corcos at ccorcos@lsu.edu.

Wildenthal on Shapiro "On the Media": Name-Calling and Bullying Students and Doubters @tjsl

Bryan H. Wildenthal, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is publishing Shapiro 'On the Media': Name-Calling and Bullying Students and Doubters in the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship Newsletter (2018). Here is the abstract.

For far too long, when it comes to the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ), orthodox academics, whatever their motivations, have largely avoided the simple duty that any serious scholar has: to engage forthrightly with the evidence. Instead, such scholars, when they deign to mention the SAQ at all, have focused almost entirely on trying to denigrate or psychoanalyze authorship doubters. In its most insulting and ridiculous forms, this has involved suggestions of snobbery or even mental illness. A milder version — almost more maddeningly smug and condescending — has been to retreat behind a fog of fashionable academic jargon, analyzing authorship doubt as a purely contingent product of modern times and cultural preoccupations. This was largely the approach taken by English Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University in his book about the SAQ, "Contested Will" (2010). Somehow, from the orthodox perspective, it is never about the simple factual and historical issue at the heart of the SAQ: Does the available evidence, fully considered in context, raise reasonable questions about who actually wrote these particular works of literature? Professor Shapiro spoke at length about the SAQ in a December 2016 interview with Brooke Gladstone on her public radio show "On the Media." This essay criticizes the way in which both Shapiro and Gladstone approached the SAQ, especially the troubling implications of Shapiro's comments for how Shakespeare authorship doubters, especially students, should be treated.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

By Any Other's Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship, and Appropriation, October 28-29, 2016

Coming soon:

By Any Other's Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship, and Appropriation, October 28-29, 2016, on the campus of Louisiana State University.

The Louisiana State University School of Theatre, College of Music and Dramatic Arts and LSU Law Center in conjunction with the LSU Office of Research and Economic Development and the Law and Humanities Institute present “By Any Other Name: A Conference on Law, Authorship and Appropriation” October 28 and 29 on the campus of LSU.

The conference will bring together scholars, performers, and students to discuss law and authorship in the face of challenges issued by artists who engage in appropriation—the practice of taking the works of others to rethink or recreate new works.

A New Book on Authors, Copyright, and Celebrity

Mark Rose, University of California, Santa Barbara, has published Authors in Court: Scenes From the Theater of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website. 

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.

Via @LawandLit and Legal History Blog.