Abstract
When Erin Andrews found out that an intimate recording of her had leaked online, the authorship-as-fixation doctrine told her that the felon who illicitly captured the footage owned the copyright, not her. When Lynn Thomson’s creative partner, Jonathan Larson, died tragically just hours after the final rehearsal for the musical Rent, joint authorship’s mutual-intent requirement told her that she had no copyright interest in the Broadway hit. When The Fearless Girl took on Charging Bull and challenged its unabashedly masculine celebration of American capitalism by calling attention to the underrepresentation of women on Wall Street, copyright law told her that she might constitute an unauthorized derivative work, both without copyright protection (ie, no cognizable authorship) and subject to destruction. In all three of these scenarios, the legal meaning of authorship had far-reaching consequences – not just for copyright law itself, but for society at large …
Tehranian, John, Copyright’s Male Gaze: Authorship and Inequality in a Panoptic World (June 1, 2018). Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, volume 41, 2018.
First posted 2018-07-17 00:35:37
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