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Rca V. Whiteman: Contested Authorship, Copyright, And The Racial Politics Of The Fight For Property Rights In Musical Recordings In The 1930s, Kurt Newman

Studio for Law and Culture

Between the Progressive Era and World War II, African American jazz music became the source of big profits for some white entrepreneurs in the United States. The encounter between whites and jazz was both a propertization and a privatization of African American group resources. While new technologies of recording and radio broadcasting were critical factors facilitating these cultural enclosures, the sine qua non was the embeddedness of American intellectual property law in the logic of white supremacy. In this paper, I focus on the popular jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, best known to most contemporary legal scholars as the defendant in …