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

Abstract

This chapter is about "authorship," which is arguably the most central, and certainly the most resonant, of the foundational concepts associated with Anglo-American copyright doctrine. It begins with a discussion of the limitations of conventional structuralist analysis to make sense of the confusion of copyright doctrine. The chapter then points out how the "authorship" concept has operated to conceal, rather than to reveal, the actual stakes in the ongoing discussions of "literary property" and how the multiple functions of "authorship" continue to generate incoherence in copyright doctrine. It explains the unusual power and persistence of "authorship," demonstrating that far from being a non-controversial, generalized "source" of copyright doctrine, it in fact is the specific locus of a basic contradiction between public access to and private control over imaginative creations. In sum, "authorship" is simultaneously an artifact of the marketplace in commodity art and a throwback to early, pre-industrial ideas of the artist's relation to society.

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