The Making of the Post-War Paradigm in American Intellectual Property Law

Abstract

The wide-ranging New Deal disputes over intellectual property were notable because they mixed economic issues—both aggregate and allocative/distributive outcomes—with questions of the role of the public sphere in a participatory democracy. This chapter introduces the problem of anti-competition and traces its evolution from the Progressive Era through the New Deal. It presents two case studies showing how the New Deal negotiated competing interests in copyright involving sound recordings and industrial design within the fashion industry. The first case study explores the debates over the licensing of sound recordings and discusses how Congress was the fulcrum point for demands from competing interests. In the case of sound recordings, a policing mechanism existed in the form of a royalty collection society, but various interest groups contested its broad market power. Much as the Lanham Act created a national intellectual property market for trademarks, copyright revision was meant to establish an international market for American cultural products.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.