Abstract
This article considers the extent to which insights from the philosophy of art can assist copyright law in identifying the author or authors of works to which many have contributed. In doing so, it looks to institutional theories of art, which go beyond a simple bifurcation of ‘author’ and ‘work’, and focus instead on broader determinants of an art work’s production, such as the ‘artworld’. It puts forward a framework focusing on three components of authorship supported by these theories: role, authority and intention. The paper then draws attention to some important challenges that this framework raises for copyright law’s joint authorship doctrine in the UK and USA, and suggests some ways in which copyright law might be reformed, so as to allow copyright to retain its own benchmarks while also bringing conceptions of authorship in law and art closer together.
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Acknowledgments
The research for this paper was undertaken as part of the Of Authorship and Originality project at the University of Cambridge which is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme. The authors are grateful to Lionel Bently, Martha Buskirk, Peter Jaszi, Derek Matravers for comments on various drafts of this paper. The authors also thank the following artists for discussions on issues relevant to this paper: Donna Cox, Marc Downie (of the OpenEnded Group), Ken Feingold, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Miltos Manetas, Joseph Nechvatal and Don Ritter. The artists were interviewed as part of a qualitative empirical project, the full findings of which will be published as part of M. Van Eechoud (ed), The Work of Authorship (University of Amsterdam Press, 2014), the anthology of the Of Authorship and Originality project.
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Laura Biron and Elena Cooper contributed equally to this paper and share responsibility for any errors or omissions.
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Biron, L., Cooper, E. Authorship, Aesthetics and the Artworld: Reforming Copyright’s Joint Authorship Doctrine. Law and Philos 35, 55–85 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-015-9244-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-015-9244-y