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Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Fetishizing Copies, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
We have copyright laws to encourage authors to create new works and communicate them to the public, because we hope that people will read the books, listen to the music, see the art, watch the films, run the software, and build and inhabit the buildings. That is the way that copyright promotes the Progress of Science. Recently, that not-very-controversial principle has collided with copyright owners’ conviction that they should be able to control, or at least collect royalties from, all uses of their works. A particularly ill-considered manifestation of this conviction is what I have decided to call copy-fetish. This …
Creative Reading, Jessica Litman
Creative Reading, Jessica Litman
Jessica Litman
In this short essay, a comment on Rebecca Tushnet’s Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity, 70 Law & Contemporary Problems 133 (2007), I argue that copyright scholars have undervalued the copyright interests of readers, listeners and viewers. By ignoring the central importance of audience interests in the copyright scheme, we have all but conceded that the essential policy question in determining whether a use of copyrighted material should be lawful is the way the use looks from the viewpoint of the copyright owner. This approach fails to appreciate that reading, listening, viewing and playing commonly involve significant creativity, …