Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet
Author(s): Peter Decherney
Copyright law is important to every stage of media production and reception. It helps determine filmmakers' artistic decisions, Hollywood's corporate structure, and the vatieties of media consumption. The rise of digital media and the internet has only expanded copyright's reach. Everyone from producers and sceenwriters to amateur video makers, file sharers, and internet entrepreneurs has a stake in the history and future of piracy, copy protection, and the public domain. Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive patent and copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube and Universal, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law. Many landmark decisions have barely changed the industry's behavior, while some quieter policies have had revolutionary effects.
His most remarkable contribution uncovers Hollywood's reliance on self-regulation. Rather than involve congress, judges, or juries in settling copyright disputes, studio heads and filmmakers have often kept such arguments "in house," turning to talent guilds and other groups for solutions. Whether the issue has been battling piracy in the 1900s, controlling the threat of home video, or managing modern amateur and noncommercial uses of protected content, much of Hollywood's engagement with the law has occurred offstage, in the larger theater of copyright. Decherney's unique history recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture.
General Information
- :
- : Columbia University Press
- : Columbia University Press
- : 31 March 2012
- : United States
- : 01 April 2012
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Peter Decherney
- : Hardback
- : 346.730482
- : 304
- : 40 black & white illustrations
More About The Product
I tell my students that one cannot understand how media work without understanding copyright. With deep research and lively writing, this book makes that point emphatically. Peter Decherney shows how the copyright system shaped the American film industry and how film in turn shaped copyright. This is cultural history at its best. -- Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity
Peter Decherney is associate professor of cinema studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American.
