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This chapter on copyright laws in the 19th century covers legal sources of copyright, justifications and the evolving law, authorship and entitlement, infringing acts, the overall direction of Victorian copyright law, implementation of the Berlin Act, and Imperial Copyright Act.

This chapter traces the copyright legislative process in Palestine. A first piece of legislation was the little-known Ottoman Authors’ Rights Act 1910. When the British replaced the Ottomans, one of their first enactments was the Copyright Ordinance 1920. The chapter queries their motivation in enacting copyright law at such an early stage, and provides several possible answers: it was a British imperial interest, intertwined with the international agenda; it fit the colonial mission of developing the country, and lastly, a personal motivation of the Attorney General, Norman Bentwich. The list does not include local demand: none existed at the time. The next legislative step was the British extension of the Imperial Copyright Act in 1924 and the local enactment of the Copyright Ordinance 1924. The chapter also discusses the late official publication of the 1911 Act, and the establishment of copyright relationship between Palestine and the United States

The turn in what some have called the ‘digital moment’ and others have interpreted as the ‘digital dilemma’ has collapsed the distinctions between media producers and media consumers. Digitalisation, the movement of information by means of binary digits or ‘bits’, has meant that all forms of media can be easily manipulated, thereby undermining the ways in which copyright works both to promote creativity and to control copying. Digital media has the potential to collapse many of the distinctions that analogue media upheld and around which copyright has historically been formulated. This chapter examines why digital media have such far-reaching consequences for media rights and how governments and media industries have attempted to maintain regulation of the digital environment through new legislation and technological means. First, the chapter looks at exactly why digital media pose a threat. It then focuses on digital lives, digital rights management, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 and the Copyright Directive. It also discusses copyright issues involving DVDs and descrambling of content-scrambling systems.

The first chapter details how the author, user and pirate emerged collectively over the first two centuries of copyright’s existence, and argues that these subjects still intersect today. This analysis also stands as a brief introduction to the history of copyright law for unfamiliar readers, charting the emergence and subsequent development of copyright law. The chapter ends by critiquing the increased reification of authorship that has occurred over the twentieth century and makes a case for the continued relevance of relationality in this context.

The Copyright Act serves a combination of public and private interests. Where possible, conflicts between the two should be resolved in favor of the public interest. This approach would sort out some of the most pressing issues in copyright law today. The most troublesome aspects of copyright expansion over the past few decades include a longer copyright term, broad reproduction and derivative works rights, and digital rights in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevent uses previously thought to be noninfringing. Yet, copyright doctrines such as the idea/expression dichotomy and fair use protect the rights of the public to use portions of copyrighted works. This chapter discusses how courts can use constitutional adjudication and statutory interpretation to define the scope of these provisions and resolve ambiguities among them in order to restore copyright's balance of incentives and access.

Chapter Six examines how the pirate has been interpellated in different jurisdictions across the copyright wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the intermediaries that were charged with enabling online copyright infringement, namely peer-to-peer networks and Internet Service Providers. The chapter charts a narrative of gradual acceptance. Whereas initial decisions interpellated peer-to-peer networks as piratical and also as locations where individuals could become interpellated as pirates, by the early twenty-first century, the courts became somewhat more understanding. Instead, they viewed intermediaries as less liable and individuals as users who engaged in copyright infringement, rather than as subjects entirely defined by their piratical actions. I also reflect on how Apple and their customers were able to avoid the pirate moniker during their Rip, Mix, Burn campaign in 2003 and consider on the potential futures of the pirate subject.

This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.

Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

This chapter provides an overview of intellectual property rights, more specifically the underlying principles of copyright. It explores the increasing use of intellectual property rights in the everyday activities of media organisations and how they have become the most important assets in media markets. It is well established that the media increasingly operate at the global level and that even localised markets are influenced by globalising processes. Intellectual property rights, in particular copyright, and its couplet with contract have become quintessential to contemporary media commerce and have their foundation in Roman law. Although patents, copyright, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property rights were historically conceived to encourage individual creators by protecting their work, in the contemporary media environment they increasingly serve the interests of transnational corporations and the global business elite. The chapter is organised around two sections: international law and law in the United Kingdom. It first discusses the creeping internationalisation of copyright and then compares and contrasts legislative developments in the United States, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998.

When the Internet truly took off as a mass medium in 1996 in the guise of the World Wide Web, it was like an untamed wilderness ripe for discovery, and new users marvelled at the wondrous and instantaneous way in which information and images could be pulled to their desktops from around the world. But perhaps most importantly in the context of media rights, more and more of what people do online and the ways in which the online world is organised are sanctioned by licence agreements, registration and contracts all protected under the sign of intellectual property law. This chapter examines how media rights shape the ways in which the Internet is developing and the ways in which it can be used. The WIPO Copyright Treaty viewed the ‘indirect’ and ‘temporary’ copies of a work held within computer networks as copyrighted material. While copyright remains important, the chapter also looks at trademarks and patents. In addition, it considers hyperlinking and reuse of copyright material.

Access to ‘all the world’s knowledge’ is an ancient aspiration; a less venerable, but equally vigorous, universalism strives for the borderless protection of authors’ rights. Late 19th-century law and politics brought us copyright universalism; 21st-century technology may bring us the universal digital library. But how can ‘all the world’s knowledge’ be delivered, on demand, to users anywhere in the world (with Internet access), if the copyrights of the creators and publishers of many of those works are supposed to be enforceable almost everywhere in the world? Does it follow that the universal digital library of the near future threatens copyright holders? Or are libraries the endangered species of the impending era, as publishers partner with for-profit Internet intermediaries to make books ubiquitously available? Does access-triumphalism therefore risk giving us not the universal digital library, but the universal digital bookstore? And, whether libraries or commercial intermediaries offer access, how will the world’s authors fare?

This chapter examines the making of colonial copyright in the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It outlines various imperial patterns of diffusing the law. Most of the research done thus far on this topic was told from a British perspective. An important exception is Lionel Bently’s work, who pointed to two stages of the British policy: first, the absence of an imperial strategy, and secondly, a trend towards uniformity. This chapter nuances these observations and further adds the phase immediately after the enactment of the Imperial Copyright Act 1911, when the interest in uniformity turned to a well-coordinated strategy to assure that uniformity is achieved. This has manifested itself in the treatment of customs and criminal copyright law. The 1847 Foreign Reprint Act and international schemes of protection, including the Berne Convention and its Berlin Revision, are contextualized within this discussion.

This chapter observes two trends: the rise of the digital marketplace as the result of technological development and the decline of ownership due to aggressive intellectual property laws, restrictive contractual provisions and technological locks. Admittedly, the market offers consumers a choice between ownership and more conditional, impermanent access to goods, but because of the asymmetric information possessed by consumers and retailers or IP rights holders, consumers frequently cannot make informed decisions. This leads to the loss of control over the goods they purchase; more importantly, the lack of ownership rights has serious implications for cultural preservation, innovation and consumer autonomy. The rest of the book unfolds by detailing how consumers and IP rights holders contend for control over physical and digital goods in various areas.

This chapter outlines the conceptual framework for the rest of the book by describing the basic principles of personal and intellectual property law. The default rules of ownership used to define the purchasers’ rights, allowing for resale, lending, gifting and many other forms of transaction by the consumer. Now, with the rise of the digital economy, consumer rights are defined through licenses, which impose various restrictions on consumers’ disposition of their digital goods. Among the traditional rules of ownership, the exhaustion principle is particularly important for mediating the tension between intellectual property holders and consumers. Exhaustion is the notion that an IP rights holder relinquishes some control over a product once it sells or gives that product to a new owner. IP rights holders have resisted exhaustion at nearly every turn, and the licensing model allowed them to infuse new vigor into their resistance.

This chapter address technologies that are collectively known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is a set of software-based tools implemented by copyright holders, device makers, and retailers to monitor and restrict consumer behavior. For example, after the Supreme Court took the side of consumers and affirmed the legality of the VCR, Hollywood threw its weight behind the DVD, an encrypted format that allowed studios to dictate the design and functionality of playback devices. These and other forms of technological self help are strengthened by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the bypassing, disabling, or otherwise circumventing the digital locks that DRM represents. But the DMCA has largely failed to prevent circumvention, and many copyright holders have recognized that the restrictions imposed by DRM discourage consumers from buying encumbered products. Moreover, as the Sony rootkit incident demonstrates, DRM puts consumer security and privacy at risk.

This chapter introduces the book’s theoretical approach to relationality and subjectivity and makes a case for studying the author, user and pirate collectively. It goes on to situate this position within a wider body of interdisciplinary literature, addressing key debates in scholarship around copyright law. I then detail the benefits of taking a relational approach, suggesting that it offers a more accurate account of how copyright law is currently constructed and responds to the conceptual uncertainty underpinning copyright. The chapter ends with a brief outline of the rest of the book.