Law & Humanities Blog |
Using Literary Theory To Illuminate Copyright Doctrine Posted: 10 Apr 2013 07:41 AM PDT Zahr Said, University of Washington School of Law, is publishing Fixing Copyright in Characters: Literary Perspectives on a Legal Problem, in volume 35 of the Cardozo Law Review (2013). Here is the abstract. Scholars have long noted that copyright in characters is fraught with uncertainty and inconsistency. This Paper argues that an interdisciplinary approach sheds light on the doctrinal confusion. Literary history, theories, and texts demonstrate that the very factors that gave rise to characters' centrality to modern literature may be the factors that make protecting them independently under copyright difficult. The more central characters become to works of literature, the less separable they will be from those works for the purposes of receiving independent copyright protection. Literary theories of reading also suggest that characters may fail to satisfy one of copyright's fundamental requirements: fixation. Contemporary theories of reading practices hold that reader engagement is necessary in the mental process that "completes" characters. If this is true, then in a fundamental way, while texts may be fixed, characters, outside their texts, are not.Download the full text of the article from SSRN here. |
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