Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of “Authorship”

Abstract

This Article is about "authorship," which is arguably the most central, and certainly the most resonant, of the foundational concepts associated with Anglo-American copyright doctrine. But discussions of copyright doctrine tend to assume the importance of "authorship" as a privileged category of human enterprise, rather than to examine where this notion arose or how it has influenced the law. In what follows, I try to show how copyright received a constructed idea of "authorship" from literary and artistic culture and to explore ways-sometimes peculiar and even perverse ways-in which this "authorship construct" has been mobilized in legal discourse. The "author" has been the main character in a drama played out on the parallel stages of literary and legal culture. By the mid-seventeenth century, well before the English enacted the 1709 Statute of Anne', writers began to assert claims to special status by designating themselves as "authors." During the eighteenth century, "authorship" became intimately associated with the Romantic movement in literature and art, expressing "an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience.., together with the sense of the infinite and the transcendental. ' '2 Until very recently, the position of the "author" as a category in literary criticism was: central not only in theory but in practice: in the way single-figure studies dominate criticism; in the organization of texts in "complete editions"; in biographies; and above all, in the idea of style, of a marked writing characteristically the "expression" of a person's

Where Are the Missing Coauthors? Authorship Practices in Participatory Research

“…The work of authorship in establishing ownership and a right to income from one's writings is long‐standing, going back to the first copyright law, the English Statute of Anne in 1709 (Jaszi ). Rose (:54) provides a useful summation of what an author is from this standpoint: “he [ sic ] is a proprietor, … he is conceived as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the ‘work.’ And a crucial institutional embodiment of the author‐work relation is copyright, which not only makes possible the profitable publishing of books but also, by endowing it with legal reality, produces and affirms the very identity of the author as author.” While this is central to copyright law (Jaszi ), it is not necessarily important for nonacademic collaborators in participatory research, since income from scholarly publications (including books) is generally small or nonexistent. However, any such income may be significant in a local context and, if research could not have been done without nonacademic collaborators, then they should be entitled to part of the income stream.…”

Public open collaborative creation (POCC): A new archetype of authorship?

“…As Jaszi () observes, authorship is a culturally, socially, politically or economically constructed category rather than a real or natural one (p. 459). As such, social shifts and transformations in the way creation is carried out and creativity is viewed necessarily lead to changes in the way the notion of authorship is constructed.…”

“…Woodmansee and Jaszi are the proponents of the theory that, the traditional notion of authorship in copyright law is based on the romantic conception of the author as a solitary genius who creates intellectual content flowing from his own personal inspiration and devoid of external influence as further elaborated in Jaszi () and Woodmansee (). See also Rose () who observes that, “Copyright is founded upon the concept of the unique individual who creates something original and is entitled to reap the profit from those labors” (p. 2).…”

“…For an exploration of the genesis of the conception of the author as a solitary genius in literary theory and copyright law see Woodmansee (). See also Jaszi () for a critical analysis of copyright law's construct of the author as a romantic solitary genius.…”

¿Qué significa justificar el derecho de autor?

“…Como normalmente se reconoce, el antecedente institucional directo del derecho de autor es el Estatuto de la Reina Ana (Mirosevic, 2007: 41). 8 Sin embargo, para comprender el origen del derecho de autor es necesario comprender que la categoría de autor precede a dicho Estatuto (Jaszi, 1991;Woodmansee, 1984). Este punto es importante porque supone reconocer que la categoría legal de autor es un concepto construido socialmente, cuya adopción tiene consecuencias normativas que es preciso explicitar para poder entender correctamente el sentido que tiene el derecho de autor.…”