{"id":259,"date":"2021-02-19T00:29:41","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T00:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conferences.law.stanford.edu\/legal-histories-of-innovation-labor-and-creativity\/?page_id=259"},"modified":"2021-04-23T22:38:48","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T22:38:48","slug":"conference-panel-abstracts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/conferences.law.stanford.edu\/legal-histories-of-innovation-labor-and-creativity\/conference-panel-abstracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Panel Abstracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Working with Intellectual Property: Legal Histories of Innovation, Labor, and Creativity
\n<\/strong>Third Annual Conference of the Stanford Center for Law and History<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Virtual Event: April 23, April 30, May 7, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cosponsored by Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology and Program in History & Philosophy of Science, Stanford University<\/strong><\/p>\n

Note: titles of papers and abstracts subject to change closer to the event<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Day 1: April 23, 2021<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Welcome: 9:25 \u2013 9:30 AM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Panel 1: <\/strong>Histories of Creation, Practice, and Intellectual Property, 9:30 \u2013 10:45 AM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Commentator: Bernadette Meyler<\/a>,<\/strong> Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law, Professor, by courtesy, English, Stanford<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Shusterman Professor of Business & Transactional Law
\nTemple University Beasley School of Law<\/p>\n

Copyright And Curation: <\/em><\/strong>Zora Neale Hurston, John Lomax And Visions Of Black Culture<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

African American music is deeply woven in the fabric of twenty-first century global culture. The rise of African American music reflects profound shifts in musical tastes in the United States and elsewhere since the late nineteenth century. As a hybrid music form that emerged at the intersection of varied cultural crossroads, African American music reflects various types of borrowing. African American culture has also more generally become a major source for borrowings in myriad contexts. Cultural hierarchies can impact perceptions of modes\u00a0 of acceptable borrowing. The socioeconomic status of many African American musicians was a factor enabling appropriation and exploitation that occurred as African American music became more broadly disseminated in the twentieth century. African American music has far too often been treated as part of the public domain, which has made it freely accessible for all to use. Varied substantive legal frameworks, including copyright law, and formal and informal laws and legal processes, have reflected distinct modes of curation. Pulling together, sifting through, and selecting materials for presentation and representation evident in curation of art and music are also pervasive in law. The shaping of black music as a category owes much to curation by varied actors at different points in time. Consequently, what is thought to constitute black music is closely related to societal conceptions and individual understandings of what African American culture should be. The body of works that came to be categorized as black music constitutes a malleable category that has changed with time, place, and circumstance. Folklorist John Lomax was a powerful curator of African American culture who illustrates the interaction of curation and copyright. In addition to collecting African American folklore, including music, John Lomax accumulated copyright ownership rights in the material he collected. Lomax\u2019s career underscores the role of power relationships in shaping cultural authority to curate and, more particularly, to represent African American culture at a time when African Americans and were typically not granted institutional authority to represent their own culture and identity. African Americans thus essentially lacked both cultural ownership and copyright ownership rights in their cultural production. The vision underlying Lomax\u2019s curation activities is important for conceptions of both copyright law and culture. Lomax viewed African American culture in part as a vehicle for exploitation and personal profit. His copyright dispute with Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), evidences exploitative uses of African American culture. Lomax\u2019s views of black culture were rooted in a museum-like approach, which was not atypical for a folklorist of his era, that sought to collect, profit from, and preserve \u201cauthentic\u201d vanishing cultural forms. In contrast, folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston had a conception of African American culture that reflected an understanding of culture as a living and dynamic force. The competing visions of Lomax and Hurston have implications outside of the cultural sphere. Dominant conceptions of copyright today may be based on a view of culture that reflects the Lomax vision but which does not sufficiently take account of living cultures and varied cultural communities. This may facilitate exploitation, particularly of cultural production of marginalized communities, and give insufficient recognition to the broad range of creativities that may exist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mario Biagioli<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Distinguished Professor of Law and Communication, UCLA<\/p>\n

Expressionless Copyright<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Authorial expression has been placed at the roots of modern copyright — a conceptual move that has been traced to (and critiqued in) 18th sources.\u00a0 Here I argue that readings of 18th-century English and German sources (mine included) may have mistaken forensics (expression construed as a way to tell two texts apart) with causality (unique authorial expression as that which creates literary property).\u00a0 After reviewing this ambiguity, I discuss Kant’s proposal for protecting authors and publishers from the harm of reprinting without the invocation of any new concept of literary property or copyright.\u00a0 Part of an ongoing book project with Alain Pottage, an analysis of Kant’s proposal shows that “expression” can simply be treated as the specific pattern of distinctive characters that make up a book.\u00a0 Rather than expressive, expression may be an artifact of the medium of print.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren van Haaften-Schick<\/a>
\n<\/strong>PhD Candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University<\/p>\n

Remedies for Inequity 1971-2021: Resale Royalties to Redistribution via <\/em><\/strong>\u2018The Artist\u2019s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement\u2019 (1971) <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

During the 1960s-70s as artists in the United States challenged traditional aesthetic forms, they also questioned property and power relations in art by protesting inequality, advocating for artists\u2019 rights laws, and experimenting with contracts, testing how legal regulations and ownership relations could be reconceived. One of the most iconic products of this moment was The Artist\u2019s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement<\/em> drafted by conceptual art dealer-curator Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky in New York in 1971. This \u201cArtist\u2019s Contract\u201d was intended to become the standard agreement for all artwork sales, and granted artists many rights not available through U.S. copyright law at the time, including moral rights, the right to approve exhibitions of one\u2019s work, and most controversially, a 15% royalty of collectors\u2019 profits at every resale. While its main purpose was to \u201cremedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world\u201d that privileged the interests of art buyers over those of artists, it was also designed to account for the needs and motives of all parties, recognizing the extraordinary connection between artists and collectors as both influence and are impacted by the changing value of artworks over time.<\/p>\n

But amidst the activist fervor from which the Artist\u2019s Contract sprang, a series of more radical proposals also emerged that focused not only on how artists\u2019 rights frameworks could benefit individuals, but how the wealth produced through the art market could be redistributed. These included plans for an \u201cArtists\u2019 Survival Fund\u201d that would support living artists through studio and exhibition space, and by meeting more general needs like legal defense and even health care. Supporters of these plans were quick to criticize the Artist\u2019s Contract for abandoning redistribution as a goal, and for potentially re-entrenching the art market\u2019s severe imbalance of resources and power by rewarding only those rare artists whose work was already profitable. Legislation for resale royalties, which the Artist\u2019s Contract inspired, has been similarly criticized.<\/p>\n

While research demonstrates that the Artist\u2019s Contract and resale royalty legislation have benefitted artists at all economic levels, they remain no panacea for the problems of the art economy today. Since 1971, speculation in the art market has ballooned, as has its wealth gap, mirroring broader economic inequities. Against this backdrop however, a younger generation of artists and curators have recently revised it towards redistributive ends. This paper considers these historical countermodels and emergent proposals to ask: What can we glean from the shaky history of the Artist\u2019s Contract and resale royalty legislation to theorize \u2013 and perhaps even draft \u2013 \u201cremedies for inequity\u201d today?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nora Slonimsky<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Assistant Professor and Director of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (ITPS), Iona College<\/p>\n

\u201cto save the Benefit of the Act of Parliamt\u201d: Mapping an Early American Copyright Claim<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

When Lewis Evans attempted to secure a \u201ccopy-right\u201d in the spring of 1755, he was about twenty years too early. A formalized intellectual property regime did not exist until 1790 and even then, it was extremely difficult to enforce. In colonial America, there was no comprehensive legislation for copyright or any other form of IP, a term that was just coming into use. And yet Evans sought compensation for his geographic labor through copyright recognition. A poor but respected \u00e9migr\u00e9 to Philadelphia, Evans was a mapmaker and surveyor whose bestselling work in A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America<\/em> became one of the most copied images of the eighteenth century.<\/p>\n

Conscious of the law, of commerce, and of cartography, Evans\u2019 pursed dual literary property protection in Pennsylvania and in England. While A General Map<\/em> was not solely the innovation of Evans \u2013 like most geographic texts of this period, it relied heavily on Indigenous knowledge and collaborative work \u2013 he was able to secure the political support and public reputation necessary to create his own extra-legal form of copyright. In doing so, Evans recognized separate legal, political, and economic jurisdictions across the British empire, nearly twenty years before the American Revolution. Those same boundaries, illustrated in A General Map<\/em>, intersected with, and even exacerbated, conflicting understandings of colonial and imperial authority. In that same twenty year period between the publication of A General Map<\/em> and its piracy around the Atlantic world, a dispute over ownership and originality developed outside the courtrooms of London or Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Break, 10:45 \u2013 11:00 AM (Pacific)<\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Keynote: 11:00AM \u2013 12:00 PM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jessica Litman<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

John F. Nickoll Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School<\/p>\n

What counts as authorship and who counts as an author?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Copyright Office and Patent Office have launched investigations into how copyright law should treat artificial intelligence. Responses to the requests for comments illustrate something that we often fail to attend to: repeat copyright players maintain longstanding assumptions about implicit constraints that copyright law imposes on both the expression that copyright protects and the persons entitled to claim it. Those assumptions are not and have never been as widely shared as copyright insiders believe, and many of them are not and have never been embodied in statutory language. Until forty years ago, the copyright statutes’ formal requirements offered courts and copyright lawyers tools to manage collisions between their expectations and what the statute might say or fail to say. Congress relaxed or eliminated most of those formalities in 1976. At the same time, it reformulated the law in broadly phrased and open-ended provisions. That has complicated the resolution of disputes about who counts as an author and what counts as authorship. Those disputes reveal tension between implicit assumptions and broad general statutory language, and have generated both poorly reasoned court opinions and sneaky legislative maneuvers to reaffirm or restore what proponents believe to be the natural order.<\/p>\n

\n

Day 2: April 30, 2021<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Panel 2: Histories of Labor and Intellectual Property, <\/strong>9:30 \u2013 10:45 AM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Commentator: Paul Goldstein<\/a><\/strong>, Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law, Stanford Law School<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Miranda Banks<\/strong><\/a>
\nAssociate Dean of Academic Affairs of Film and Television and Associate Professor, Department of Film, Television, and Media Studies, Loyola Marymount University<\/p>\n

Creative\/Agency: A Brief History of Hollywood Writers and Their Take on The Current Landscape of Creative Labor<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In April 2019, seven thousand American film and television writers fired their agents. With no end in sight to this stand-off between the Writers Guild of America and the Association of Talent Agents, the battle between these organizations serves as a touchstone to examine questions about the changing nature of creative labor in Hollywood, of the development of content creation for the screen, and of professional roles in Hollywood. My focus here will be on examining how writers perceive these changes within the industry and how by examining key flashpoints in the history of writers and their guild, we can better see how this off-screen drama between agents and writers is impacting on-screen content in the months and years to come.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Catherine Fisk<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law, Berkeley Law<\/p>\n

Brent Salter<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Stanford Center for Law and History, Stanford Law School<\/p>\n

The Power of Assumptions and the Fragility of Labor Relations in the American Theatre<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As we look for examples of collective self-regulation in a gig economy, commercial theatre offers a century of experience with freelance work. Yet the Dramatists Guild and commercial theatre producers have negotiated collectively for nearly a century under a cloud of legal uncertainty created by the intersection of antitrust law and labor law that dates to the pre-New Deal era. As theatre begins to rebuild after the catastrophe of the pandemic, it is worth considering whether the crisis of 2020 could provide an opportunity to reconsider the four longstanding but unnecessary assumptions about antitrust, labor law, and copyright law that have shaped the organizational structures that mediate relations between producers and writers for the stage:<\/p>\n

Assumption #1: Playwrights, unlike actors or directors, cannot unionize under the National Labor Relations Act because playwrights are independent contractors.<\/p>\n

Assumption #2: Playwrights must have the legal status of independent contractors under federal labor law, lest they lose control of the copyrights in their work under the work for hire provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act.<\/p>\n

Assumption #3: Unionization of playwrights is not merely unprotected by the National Labor Relations Act (see Myth #1), but it is affirmatively prohibited by federal antitrust law.<\/p>\n

Assumption #4: The precarious legal status of playwrights as outlined in Assumptions 1-3 is necessary to protect their creative autonomy. Whatever economic security and stability writers could attain if the Dramatists Guild were a union and if there were real collective bargaining would be at the cost of dramatists\u2019 creative freedom, independence, and ability to prevent the rewriting of their work. In short, to be a real artist, a dramatist necessarily must run the risk of being impecunious.<\/p>\n

This article offers a detailed history, based on previously unavailable archival sources, of the origin of these assumptions, how writers, producers, and various intermediaries struggled to create a functional system in the face of legal doubt, and why it is time to abandon the assumptions about the significance of antitrust and copyright law in structuring relations between writers and producers.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter Labuza<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California<\/p>\n

The Art of the Deal Maker: David Susskind and Contracting Postwar Artist Culture<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lorraine Hansburry\u2019s play A Raisin in the Sun was a rare achievement for an African American playwright in the 1950s, as her Broadway play on race made her well known in drama circles and beyond. It was only natural for a producer to ask Hansburry to transform her play into a film. But in the trailer for the adaptation, you won\u2019t find Hansburry\u2019s name anywhere near it. Instead, the first person on screen is David Susskind, a man whose role in making the film, for all intents and purposes, came down to \u201cbuying the rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

This paper explores the strange affair of David Susskind\u2019s attempts to become a Hollywood artist, not through his own craft as a laborer but essentially as a rights poacher. Susskind was a talent agent turned television producer and on screen personality, known to almost every American with a set for his interviews with Nikita Khrushchev and Martin Luther King, Jr. But he dreamed of Hollywood and tried to break into the industry in the most curious way: trying to latch a ride onto the interest of other creative television writers. As writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling managed to transition from television to Hollywood, Susskind targeted their contemporaries to convince them to turn their rights over to him.<\/p>\n

The late 1950s \u00a0period of film and television became a fickle ground for rights negotiations, as scholars like Miranda Banks and Catherine Fisk have demonstrated. This paper examines one of the legal fictions of the era: how qualification as an artist had little to do with the actual production of labor. Susskind used control of contractual rights and publicity agencies to ensure that his voice became the artistic identity of works where his role was largely informal. In many ways, he became a representative of the industry\u2019s new kind of artist: the deal maker. The fact that Susskind\u2014who seemingly never once performed production work\u2014made Hollywood films this way suggests the pervasiveness of this new regime. By following some of his early productions through the early 1960s, I argue for understanding that the key transformation of postwar creative labor was not just one of rights and employment but of a new kind of deal making culture that emerged.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Minh-Ha T. Pham<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Associate Professor, Humanities & Media Studies, Pratt Institute<\/p>\n

#BalenciagaThailand: How Thai Social Media Users Made Balenciaga Pay for Copying the Sampeng Bag<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

My paper discusses one example of a larger phenomenon in which consumers are using social media to police and adjudicate incidences of fashion copycatting. As I explain in my book-in-progress, fashion trials by social media tend to reproduce hegemonic and racialized property relations through the unpaid informational labor of social media users. However, the case I will be discussing is unique in that Thai consumers’ online actions resulted in counter-hegemonic outcomes that challenged \u201cthe regime of the global brand.\u201d As I’ll explain, Thai consumers deployed memes and hashtags to exact informational, \u00a0cultural,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0economic costs from Balenciaga for the uncredited and uncompensated use of a Thai design.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Break, 10:45 \u2013 11:00 AM (Pacific)<\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Book Talk: 11:00AM \u2013 12:00 PM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anjali Vats<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Associate Professor of Communication, African and African Diaspora Studies, Boston College<\/p>\n

The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans<\/em><\/p>\n

Commentators:<\/strong>
\n<\/strong>Myisha Eatmon<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Assistant Professor of History, University of South Carolina
\nSonia Katyal<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Chancellor\u2019s Professor of Law, Berkeley Law
\nShobita Parthasarathy<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Professor of Public Policy and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
\nFei-Hsien Wang<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Associate Professor, Department of History, Indiana University Bloomington<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Day 3: May 7, 2021<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Panel 3: Legal Histories of Innovation , 9:30 \u2013 10:45 AM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Commentator: Lisa Larrimore Ouellette<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law and Justin M. Roach, Jr. Faculty Scholar, Stanford Law School<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Haris A. Durrani<\/a>
\n<\/strong>JD\/PhD Candidate, Columbia Law School and Princeton University (Department of History, Program in History of Science)
\nWinner of the 2020 Stanford Center for Law and History Graduate Student Annual Conference Paper Prize<\/p>\n

The Recent History of Free Space: Law, Technology, and the US Administrative State in the Global Cold War<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In summer 1963, Syncom II<\/em> became the first communications satellite to reach geosynchronous orbit, \u201cirretrievably located 22,000 miles in space and over South America,\u201d via a network of command stations in the United States, Nigeria, and South Africa. Around these technological practices, attorneys and other decisionmakers formulated a capacious legal idea with an apparently deep history in the so-called western legal tradition: \u201cfree space.\u201d In 1968, NASA attorney Robert F. Kempf articulated a version of the idea to a room of engineers, lawyers, and policymakers at the Fifth Space Congress in Washington, DC. Addressing a dispute about the patent on the method and apparatus which placed Syncom II<\/em> in orbit, he described \u201ca free space concept\u201d: Extraterritorial areas were free spaces in which all nations held rights to exercise \u201cjurisdiction and control\u201d over technological activities without interference. These areas included not only outer space and the high seas but also foreign territories and the electromagnetic spectrum. Kempf responded to a broader quandary that troubled US agency and industry decisionmakers as they operated technologies abroad during the Global Cold War: What was the relationship between jurisdiction, sovereignty, property, and territory beyond the perceived boundaries of the United States?<\/p>\n

The articulation of the free space concept within the US administrative state raises a fundamental question about the midcentury relationship between law, history, and imperialism. The concept invoked stories of property and territory that have occupied US legal historians since the origins of their discipline in this period. Historians have understood postwar legal approaches to \u201cglobal governance\u201d and the administrative state as shaped by apparently deep-rooted western legal traditions: property and regulation in the American \u201cfrontier\u201d; the \u201ccommons\u201d of Anglo-American waters, pastures, forests, and wastes; the \u201cfreedom of the seas\u201d and res communis<\/em> in the oceans; and terra nullius <\/em>and \u201ceffective occupation\u201d in US and European imperialism. The midcentury articulation of the concept alongside its histories invokes a genealogical inquiry: Did lawyers and others formulate the concept at the same time as they invented its past?<\/p>\n

I argue in the affirmative. I track genealogies of the free space concept by exploring legal practices and discourses leading to and following Kempf\u2019s articulation of it in 1968. His presentation followed work across the decade on disputes about whether NASA or Hughes Aircraft Company held title to the aforementioned patent. I suggest historians have inversely periodized the free space concept and its homologies. The history of empty, shared, or claimable resources on land and in watery spaces did not influence midcentury American approaches to global governance. Rather, the development of novel technologies in the Global Cold War, alongside reframed imperial ambitions and the rise of institutionalism, informed Americans\u2019 understanding of the western legal tradition. These developments led lawyers and others in US agencies and industry to imagine global governance with the abstract, spatial language of control over closed systems. They subsequently wrote the free space concept into the past, eliding the historical prevalence of variegated, diffuse approaches to property, jurisdiction, sovereignty, and territory.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Aileen Robinson<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Assistant Professor, Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford<\/p>\n

Possessing Illusions: Ownership and the Patent in 19th Century Performance Magic<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Performance magic has long, since the 18th<\/sup> century, been a wellspring of innovative tricks, illusions, and inventions.\u00a0\u00a0Magicians drew upon burgeoning scientific theories (microscopy, mesmerism) and new technologies (magnetism, electricity) to create haunting images and compelling shows.\u00a0\u00a0While the inherent wonder of a new technology, the strength of the magnet, for example, formed the core of many tricks, the entire enterprise of magic often traded on secrecy.\u00a0\u00a0By the mid-19th<\/sup>\u00a0century, many magic tricks were copies and editions of one another, changing the entire illusion through a mirror, a cloth, or a simple lever.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Patents, and subsequent battles over intellectual property rights, formed a large part of internal wars between magicians from the 1860\u2019s through the 1930\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Patents and lawsuits became an essential component of performance magic as performers attempted to retain their illusions for themselves.\u00a0\u00a0This talk explores the relationship between secrecy, technology, and possession through two significant illusion-makers,\u00a0\u00a0John Henry Pepper, the creator of the eponymous Pepper\u2019s Ghost, and John Nevil Maskelyne, the oft-reviled head of the Egyptian Hall.\u00a0\u00a0Stemming from research into the cultural history of popular performance and science, I explore the relationship between intellectual property, legality, and ownership in the mid-Victorian era.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kara W. Swanson<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Northeastern University<\/p>\n

Race, Gender, and the True Inventor<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

United States patent law has limited patents to true inventors since 1790, sanctioning false inventors with patent invalidity. This Article uncovers the surprising use of false inventors to obtain patents in defiance of this requirement, arguing that some true inventors chose to risk this sanction as the best means of monetizing their invention. They did so in the context of systemic racism and sexism, using white male false inventors as a form of covering, a strategy to hide their identity in order to increase their chance of patents and profits. The Article argues that the true inventor requirement was originally interpreted loosely, allowing white businessmen to develop the practice of using false inventors as a convenient means of allocating patent ownership. The practice was then adopted by white women and Black women and men to reduce bias and stigma that hindered invention commercialization. Using historical methodology to read the silences of the archive \u2013 the true inventors missing from the patent record \u2013 the Article demonstrates how some marginalized inventors strategically interacted with the patent system in ways that covered their identity in the patent records, the most official and prominent record of American inventiveness. It further argues that the resulting overrepresentation of white men in the patent record facilitated appropriation by patent from marginalized inventors, a practice with origins in slavery and coverture. This raced and gendered history, encompassing both covering and appropriation, has had consequences that reverberate to the present, in the form of depressed participation in invention and patenting and losses to marginalized communities, measured in the current severe underrepresentation of white women and BIPOC in patenting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Steven Wilf<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Anthony J. Smits Professor of Global Commerce, University of Connecticut School of Law<\/p>\n

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fictional Characters (and Copyright)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What do pictures want? Echoing the famous question posed by art historian W.J.T. Mitchell, this article interrogates that query within the skein of copyright law. The creation of a fictional character means seeing a possibly singular, inert image as having a past and a future, a panoply of emotional responses and, significantly, desires. Fictional characters are not copyrightable per se. Rather, protection stems from expression of those characters in copyrightable works. To determine whether fictional characters have reached the threshold of complexity worthy of copyright, courts inquire how well a character has been delineated.<\/p>\n

For nearly a century, copyright has relied upon traditional round character literary analysis which looks at a character\u2019s distinguishable features from the audience\u2019s point of view. Recently, flat protagonist criticism examines whether the character serves as a proper vehicle for the author\u2019s story. This article takes another approach\u2014asking what the image is trying to tell us about its own absences, needs, and emotional lacunae. Beyond establishing protection, we need to query what protagonists are unworthy of copyright. I argue that stereotypes should be held to stricter scrutiny as creating insufficiently desiring characters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Break, 10:45 \u2013 11:00 AM (Pacific)<\/em><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Book Talk: 11:00AM \u2013 12:00 PM (Pacific)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Gerardo Con D\u00edaz<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Assistant Professor in Science and Technology Studies, UC Davis<\/p>\n

Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America<\/em><\/p>\n

Commentators:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Christopher Beauchamp<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
\nMark Lemley<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>William H. Neukom Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
\nXiaochang Li<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Stanford
\nKara W. Swanson<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History, Northeastern University<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Working with Intellectual Property: Legal Histories of Innovation, Labor, and Creativity Third Annual Conference of the Stanford Center for Law and History Virtual Event: April 23, April 30, May 7, 2021 Cosponsored by Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology and Program in History & Philosophy of Science, Stanford University Note: titles of papers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-259","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nConference Panel Abstracts - Working with Intellectual Property: Legal Histories of Innovation, Labor, and Creativity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/conferences.law.stanford.edu\/legal-histories-of-innovation-labor-and-creativity\/conference-panel-abstracts\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Conference Panel Abstracts - 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