Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2024

DOI

doi.org/10.1525/luminos.190

Abstract

In 2015, Judge Pierre Leval wrote that copyright isn’t about authors, it’s about the rest of us. “While authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright,” he explained, “the primary intended beneficiary is the public.” He would know—his scholarship has been transformative for how every jurist from the Supreme Court down approaches key copyright questions. But copyright often falls short of this aspiration by benefiting only a sliver of the public.

Copyright law grants exclusive rights to authors of qualifying works, such as books, which protects those works from unauthorized copying. The first copyright legislation, the Statute of Anne of 1710, was drafted and enacted by a British Parliament comprised of privileged white men, largely for the benefit of other privileged white men, to encode men’s vision for the intersection of creativity and capitalism. The Copyright Act of 1976, which continues to govern much of copyright law in the United States, was enacted by a Congress comprised of predominantly white men, and it eliminated formalities for copyright registration and extended copyright terms. Those changes make it more challenging for the public to access, read, and remix copyrighted works. Consistently, copyright laws have focused on the creativity of other men, evidenced by their exclusion of arts stereotyped as “women’s work.

Publication Citation

Amanda Levendowski, Feminist Use, in Feminist Cyberlaw, Jones, M. L. and Levendowski, A. (eds.), Oakland: University of California Press, 2024, Pp. 11-24, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.190

© 2024 The Regents of the University of California.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons (CC BY-NA-SA) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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