Law Commons^™

The Right To Claim Authorship In U.S. Copyright And Trademarks Law, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

If you inquired among the general public, “What does U.S. copyright law protect?” many people might start by grumbling that it overprotects piggish record companies. Calming slightly, they might next reply that copyright protects authors' rights and that among those is the right to be recognized as the author of the work. Indeed, few interests seem as fundamentally intuitive as that authorship credit should be given where credit is due. For example, in prelapsarian, pre-Napster days, the act of copyright infringement in which a youthful individual most likely engaged was probably plagiarism: there, lifting another author's text may have been …