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Bowrey, Kathy --- "Law, aesthetics and copyright historiography: A critical reading of the genealogies of Martha Woodmansee and Mark Rose" [2016] ELECD 461; in Alexander, Isabella; Gómez-Arostegui, Tomás H. (eds), "Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) 27

Book Title: Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law

Editor(s): Alexander, Isabella; Gómez-Arostegui, Tomás H.

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783472390

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Law, aesthetics and copyright historiography: A critical reading of the genealogies of Martha Woodmansee and Mark Rose

Author(s): Bowrey, Kathy

Number of pages: 26

Abstract/Description:

This chapter discusses the importance of Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art and the Market and Mark Rose’s Authors and Owners to the history of copyright. My ambition is to use these works as a springboard to open up a broader discussion about the disciplinary boundaries of copyright historiography in order to reflect upon some of the reasons for the limited disciplinary exchange between humanities and law in Anglo scholarship. In detailing late eighteenth century refinements of German aesthetics that come to inform the notion of authorship, Woodmansee shows the importance of understanding the interplay between philosophy, materiality and the law. She shows how the conditions facing authors in literary markets in the late eighteenth century led to a disciplinary exchange that ultimately affected the character of the aesthetic project, the development of copyright law and the cultural reception of the idea of authorship. However Woodmansee’s history does not detail how aesthetics came to life within the law. Whereas Woodmansee offers a genealogy of aesthetics, Rose is interested in setting out the genealogy of the ‘author as owner’. Rose chooses the literary property debates that culminate in the leading case of Donaldson v Becket (1774), which he argues was key to establishing the notion of the author as proprietor. As philosophy is primarily addressed through the prism of the legal arguments and political advocacy Rose’s work is, perhaps, an easier read than Woodmansee for legal scholars.