Law Commons^™

Can Moving Pictures Speak? Silent Film, Free Speech, And Social Science In Early 20th Century Law, Jennifer Petersen

Studio for Law and Culture

When the Supreme Court was first confronted with a First Amendment case involving film, it was confronted with a difficult and fascinating question: were silent films speech? The decision in the case, Mutual v. Ohio (1915), famously answered no. The decision is usually understood to be part of a tradition of interpretations of the First Amendment as applying primarily to political opinion; in this reading, film was not protected because it was entertainment and/or commerce. However, Mutual also contains a set of arguments about the nature of film as more akin to action than to speech — arguments embedded in …

Proto-Property In Literary And Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Study endeavors to reconstruct the Vatican’s precursor system of copyright, and the author’s place in it, inferred from examination of over five hundred privileges and petitions and related documents – almost all unpublished – in the Vatican Secret Archives. The typical account of the precopyright world of printing privileges, particularly in Venice, France and England, portrays a system primarily designed to promote investment in the material and labor of producing and disseminating books; protecting or rewarding authorship was at most an ancillary objective.

The sixteenth-century Papal privileges found in the Archives, however, prompt some rethinking of that story because …