Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item SO AS TO COMPASS THE INTEREST: ARTISAN DRAMATURGY, COPYRIGHT REFORM, AND THE THEATRICAL INSURGENCY OF 1856(2014) Tobiason, Aaron M.; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1856, a change in American copyright law finally gave playwrights control over performances of their work. That change was the culmination of decades of concerted and sustained efforts by a small number of playwrights and their political allies, men who embraced a theatrical aesthetic at odds with antebellum American production practices. I argue that previous scholarship has underestimated the importance of the 1856 law to the development of American theatre. Using a series of case studies, I propose that antebellum theatrical production was guided by a system of artisan dramaturgy. Key to this formulation is the concept of bespoke playwrighting: those who composed antebellum performance texts were more wrights than writers, handicraftsmen and women whose medium was the manuscript rather than the printed text. They drew freely from an extensive public domain created and protected by American copyright law. Published and unpublished plays, novels, songs, poems, current events - all were raw materials for the antebellum dramatist, to be combined, recontextualized, and reimagined. The system of artisan dramaturgy encouraged plays tailored to particular actors, companies, and audiences. These practices, among others, vexed playwrights who resented subjecting their plays to the messy, collaborative undertaking of antebellum American playmaking. I explore how their vision for the theatre drew on a particular understanding of natural rights, one that led them to see copyright as the most effective way to alter the economic conditions of playwriting. I document the largely unexplored legislative history of their efforts, which ultimately interposed statutory law into an art form that had been regulated almost entirely by the common law. The1856 legislation accelerated a process that would ultimately alter the balance of power among the various theatrical collaborators in favor of the playwright, driving greater and greater synergy between dramatic text and performance and ultimately allowing playwrights to supplant the primacy of the actor or manager in shaping performances. By so doing, it also significantly reduced the vibrancy, flexibility, and innovation that had characterized the antebellum American theatre.Item The Metaphysics and Ethics of Copyright(2008-04-14) Hick, Darren Hudson; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Copyright, broadly defined, is a legal form of proprietary ownership of authored works, including literary, pictorial, musical, and selected other intellectual kinds. Ideally, one who is familiar with the law should know whether something they have created is protected by copyright (and to what extent), and whether some action they take will infringe a copyright. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Rather, established copyright law gives rise to a host of problems, including legal decisions and established doctrines that are alternatively arbitrary, counterintuitive, and contradictory. My central argument is that these problems arise from a failure in copyright law to recognize the nature of its objects, authored works, and that a coherent and stable approach to copyright must be built upon such an understanding. To this end, I outline an ontology of authored works suitable for grounding both the legal and ethical domains of copyright. Centrally, I contend, a reasonable understanding of copyright depends on grasping four composite dimensions of authored works: their atomic dimension--the parts of which they are composed, and the selection and arrangement of these parts; their causal dimension--their contexts of creation and instantiation, and the weak and strong historical links that connect a given work to others; their abstract dimension--that all such works are best understood as type/token entities capable of multiple instantiation; and their categorial dimension--that multiple works belonging to mutually-exclusive categories can be embodied in the same physical object. On an understanding of these factors, I establish conditions for the copyrightability of authored works, for the infringement of these copyrights, and for the creation of "derivative works." Finally, I consider the right of copyright. First showing how the strongest contenders for grounding this right--the Lockean and Constitutional approaches--fail to align with our understanding of authored works, I sketch an alternative approach--one based on the author's creativity as realized in the authored work--building on the ontological account outlined above, and for establishing the extent of this right, including its duration and when it might be infringed without amounting to a violation of the right.