Abstract
In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for the authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice. His work rests on the comparative analysis of the legal situation in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.
Highlights
Claire Larsonneur: One does not usually associate the legal notion of copyright and the philosophical or psychological concept of subjectivity: what led you to that connection? JM: The monograph (Meese 2018) emerged from my doctoral dissertation
Through my reading in this area, I discovered critical legal scholarship and found that a number of legal scholars had spent decades interrogating power relations and subjectivity, drawing on philosophers like Michel Foucault. Some of these scholars were formidable intellectual property scholars in their own right, like James Boyle and Rosemary Coombe. Their focus on the legal subject interested me because Australia had undergone a series of copyright reforms, where the subjects of these reforms were viewed as identifiable by policymakers
I felt that this clear demarcation of legal subjects was not an ideal way of conceptualising copyright and did not recognize the complexity of the relations between subjects, or the broader power relations and economic forces that contextualised them
Summary
ISSN: 2274-2042 Publisher Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur. Electronic reference James Meese and Claire Larsonneur, « Authors, Users and Pirates: Copyright Law and Subjectivity », Angles [Online], 7 | 2018, Online since 01 November 2018, connection on 15 September 2020. This text was automatically generated on 15 September 2020. Angles est mise à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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