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Semiotic Disobedience, Sonia K. Katyal
Semiotic Disobedience, Sonia K. Katyal
Sonia Katyal
Nearly twenty years ago, a prominent media studies professor, John Fiske, coined the term “semiotic democracy” to describe a world where audiences freely and widely engage in the use of cultural symbols in response to the forces of media. A semiotic democracy enables the audience, to a varying degree, to “resist,” “subvert,” and “recode” certain cultural symbols to express meanings that are different from the ones intended by their creators, thereby empowering consumers, rather than producers. In this Article, I seek to introduce another framework to supplement Fiske’s important metaphor: the phenomenon of “semiotic disobedience.” Three contemporary cultural moments in …
Trademark Intersectionality , Sonia K. Katyal
Trademark Intersectionality , Sonia K. Katyal
Sonia Katyal
Even though most scholars and judges treat intellectual property law as a predominantly content neutral phenomenon, trademark law contains a statutory provision, Section 2(a) that provides for the cancellation of marks that are “disparaging,” “immoral,” or “scandalous,” a provision that has raised intrinsically powerful constitutional concerns. The constitutional tensions surrounding Section 2(a), invariably, affect two central metaphors that are at war within trademark law: the marketplace of goods, which premises itself on the fixedness of intellectual properties, and the marketplace of ideas, which is premised on the very fluidity of language itself. Since the architecture of trademark law focuses only …
Keynote Address, Harmless Use: Gleaning From Fields Of Copyrighted Works, Wendy J. Gordon, Sonia Katyal
Keynote Address, Harmless Use: Gleaning From Fields Of Copyrighted Works, Wendy J. Gordon, Sonia Katyal
Sonia Katyal
No abstract provided.
Filtering, Piracy Surveillance And Disobedience , Sonia K. Katyal
Filtering, Piracy Surveillance And Disobedience , Sonia K. Katyal
Sonia Katyal
There has always been a cyclical relationship between the prevention of piracy and the protection of civil liberties. While civil liberties advocates previously warned about the aggressive nature of copyright protection initiatives, more recently, a number of major players in the music industry have eventually ceded to less direct forms of control over consumer behavior. As more aggressive forms of consumer control, like litigation, have receded, we have also seen a rise in more passive forms of consumer surveillance. Moreover, even as technology has developed more perfect means for filtering and surveillance over online piracy, a number of major players …