Susan Scafidi

Who Owns Culture?

Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813536065
Number of pages: 208
Publishing Date: 2005-07-31
Branch: cultural policy & public administration
Category: book (softcover)
 
Americans are cultural copycats. White suburban youths perform rap music, New York fashion designers ransack the worlds closets for inspiration, and Euro-American authors adopt the voice of a geisha or shaman. The ownership of these art forms, however, remains contested. Do they belong to the community that originally generated them, or to the culture that has absorbed them?

While claims of authenticity or quality may prompt some consumers to seek cultural products at their source, the communities of origin are generally unable to exclude copyists through legal action. Like other works of unincorporated group authorship, cultural products lack protection under our system of intellectual property law. But is this legal vacuum an injustice, the lifeblood of American culture, a historical oversight, a result of administrative incapacity, or all of the above?


Who Owns Culture? offers the first comprehensive analysis of cultural authorship and appropriation within American law. From indigenous art to Linux, Susan Scafidi takes the reader on a tour of the no-mans-land between law and culture, pausing to ask: What prompts us to offer legal protection to works of literature, but not folklore? What does it mean for a creation to belong to a community, especially a diffuse or fractured one? And is our national culture the product of Yankee ingenuity or cultural kleptomania?


Providing new insights to communal authorship, cultural appropriation, intellectual property law, and the formation of American culture, this innovative and accessible guide greatly enriches future legal understanding of cultural production.

Susan Scafidi is a member of the law and history faculties at Southern Methodist University. She has taught at the University of Chicago Law School, Saint Louis University School of Law, and most recently, the Yale Law School.

Subtitle: Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law

Paper ISBN 0-8135-3606-5

Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3605-7

Pages: 208 pp.

Series: The Public Life of the Arts

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