Exposing Professionalism in United States Copyright Law: The Disenfranchised Lay Public in a Semiotic Democracy

Citation: Shun-Ling Chen (2015) Exposing Professionalism in United States Copyright Law: The Disenfranchised Lay Public in a Semiotic Democracy. University of San Francisco Law Review (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Exposing Professionalism in United States Copyright Law: The Disenfranchised Lay Public in a Semiotic Democracy
Wikidata (metadata): Q63248175
Download: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2598458
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Summary

Argus that professionalism provides a new analytical tool for examining copyright, adding the image of the "expert author" to those of "romantic author" and "owner-author".

Examination of debates leading to 1909 and 1976 US Copyright Acts show professional agitation for expansion of subject matter was important to the outcomes of those statutes, and recursively allowed professionals to gain not only more copyright ownership, but also more symbolic resources such as prestige and authority. Typically professional organizations would argue:

1. new technology made their work easier to reproduce
2. their contributions not inferior to those professionals who produce copyrightable subject matter
3. professionals produce better quality than amateurs, therefore the professionals in question should get copyright incentive

Notes that professional consumers of works are typically dismissed: professional producers are the reason for copyright. The few professional groups that have lobbied for public in copyright debates are seen as knowledge producing professionals or have a basis for high prestige in their own right: educators, librarians, researchers, and journalists.

Also examines US joint work cases to show that courts treat professionals deemed as expert producers of copyrightable subject matter more favorably, e.g., architects assumed sole author despite contributions of clients to plans, artists who produce "fixed" form assumed sole authors despite critical "working up" and improvisational contributions of performers.

Finally notes that successful mass collaborations such as free and open source software projects and Wikipedia challenge and are challenged by not only romantic genius and property incentive theories of copyright, but also the expert author theory described.

It is important to recognize these challengers and the role of professionalism in copyright politics in order to obtain "copyright reform that moves toward a more inclusive semiotic democracy."