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Full-Text Articles in Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law
Copyright Without Creators, Jonathan M. Barnett
Copyright Without Creators, Jonathan M. Barnett
Jonathan M Barnett
Copyright is typically justified by the rationale that profits induce authors and other artists to invest resources in cultural production. This rationale is vulnerable to the objection that some artists have intrinsic incentives to invest in cultural production and do not require significant capital to do so. Even accepting this objection, copyright is justified by an alternative rationale: it supports the profit-motivated intermediaries that bear the high costs and risks involved in evaluating, distributing and marketing content in mass-cultural markets. This “authorless” rationale is consistent with the intermediated structure of mature mass-cultural markets and accounts for long-standing features of copyright …
Hollywood Deals: Soft Contracts For Hard Markets, Jonathan Barnett
Hollywood Deals: Soft Contracts For Hard Markets, Jonathan Barnett
Jonathan M Barnett
Hollywood film studios, talent and other deal participants regularly commit to, and undertake production of, high-stakes film projects on the basis of unsigned “deal memos”, informal communications or draft agreements whose legal enforceability is uncertain. These “soft contracts” constitute a hybrid instrument that addresses a challenging transactional environment where neither formal contract nor reputation effects adequately protect parties against the holdup risk and project risk inherent to a film project. Parties negotiate the degree of contractual formality, which correlates with legal enforceability, as a proxy for allocating these risks at a transaction-cost savings relative to a fully formalized and specified …