Robert Spoo

Copyright Protectionism and Its Discontents: The Case of James Joyce's Ulysses in America

This Note traces the history of the American copyright in James Joyce’s Ulysses and argues that the required formalities under the 1909 Copyright Act (in particular, the manufacturing clause) and the novels status as an immoral or obscene work combined to destroy Joyce’s chance of securing such a copyright within months of the book’s initial publication in France in 1922. The choice of Ulysses to illustrate a problem that confronted many foreign-based writers has several advantages. First, as a consequence of its early notoriety and subsequent fame, Ulysses has attained a nearly iconic status in modern culture that gives its less familiar identity as intellectual property an intrinsic interest. Second, the case of Ulysses provides unusually detailed insight into the protectionist features of U.S. copyright law in the years before the advent of more cosmopolitan legislation regarding literary property. Finally, the failure of American copyright law to protect Ulysses at the outset engendered a complicated history that has rendered the work’s present copyright status an enigma and a source of controversy. Since it is often claimed that Ulysses is protected by copyright in the United States, and since these claims have a chilling effect on the activities of present-day publishers, scholars, and readers, a clarification of the copyright status of Ulysses in America is badly needed.

Intellectual Property and Vietnam’s Higher Education System

Four major challenges face Vietnam’s higher education system in the area of intellectual property (IP). These challenges are significant because, more than ever before, Vietnamese academics are generating copyrighted writings, textbooks, and teaching-related software; potentially patentable inventions, medicines, and processes; and other valuable materials. The challenges are the following: (1) the need to develop, among faculty and students, a greater understanding of economic and moral IP rights in academic research; (2) the need to expand the teaching of IP, both in the general university curriculum and in pre-professional programs; (3) confusion over the ownership of IP rights within Vietnamese universities; and (4) the need for institutions to enhance their internal business capacity to commercialize faculty-created IP by means of technology licensing offices or similar means. The chapter concludes that faculty-generated IP can play a significant role in furthering autonomy and decentralization in Vietnam’s universities by rewarding individual and institutional initiative with economic benefits. Moreover, to the extent that faculty inventions can be commercialized and tested by the rigors of the marketplace, IP can provide a form of quality assurance within universities that is concrete and measurable.

An Untiring Scholar and a Generous Spirit: Remembering Joseph A. Kestner

Joseph A. Kestner died on 24 August 2015, at his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was 71. He was an internationally recognized scholar of Victorian literature and art, adventure and detective fiction, and the interdisciplinary ties among the novel, film, painting, and opera. During his thirty-seven years with the University of Tulsa, where he was McFarlin Professor of English and Professor of Film Studies, he inspired colleagues and students with his learning, wit, and joie de vivre. His remarkable gifts for lecturing and mentoring earned him numerous teaching awards, including Oklahoma Professor of the Year, given by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and the University of Tulsa’s prestigious Outstanding Teacher Award. His unbounded vitality and generosity made him a beloved teacher, colleague, friend, and community leader. An untiring scholar, Kestner published more than a hundred books, articles, and essays, and he lectured frequently in the United States and abroad. With the rare ability to turn old and new enthusiasms into lasting scholarly contributions, he wrote and spoke prolifically on topics as diverse as Jane Austen, Pre-Raphaelite painting, narrative theory, Italian and German opera, James Joyce, Sherlock Holmes, and the British female detective. He had the unique capacity to teach and delight readers of all kinds; whether appearing in Papers on Language and Literature or in Opera News, his articles brought freshness and insight to his chosen subject. He was invited to lecture at many prestigious international venues, including the City Art Gallery in Leeds, England, and the Tate Gallery in London. At the height of his career as a literary scholar, he decided to branch out and pursue his passion for film and film genres, and he was instrumental in establishing the film-studies major and department at the University of Tulsa. This new endeavor provided him with new outlets for mentoring. In addition to preparing numerous Ph.D. candidates for careers in literature departments, he devoted himself to helping undergraduates obtain internships and other positions in film and related professions. Born in Horton, Kansas, and raised in Albany, New York, Kestner earned his B.A. from the University of New York, Albany, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he devoted equal study to English literature and to classical languages and culture. After appointments at Princeton University and the City University of New York, he came to the University of Tulsa in 1978 and immediately established himself as a dynamic scholar, teacher, and dissertation advisor. His teaching style combined profound learning, irresistible wit and entertainment, and a booming voice with which

Introduction: Futures of Fair Use

This Introduction previews significant questions posed by the various essays contained in the special “Futures of fair Use” issue of Law and Literature. Does the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law have a future? For many legal scholars, copyleft activists, and cultural producers the answer is an emphatic No. Because Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act frames fair use according to four loosely-worded and unweighted “factors,” the practical dimensions of fair use must be determined on a case-by-case basis — often, in contentious instances, by way of expensive infringement suits. Users who lack the resources for such suits confront a “copyright clearance” culture that puts all discretion in the hands of the rights holder, giving even the most frivolous takedown notices and cease-and-desist letters an aura of final authority. Meanwhile, content owners are looking to neighboring regimes — contract, privacy, and trade secret law, among others — to fill whatever gaps fair use leaves in the edifice of intellectual property. Internationally, the absence or near-absence of a fair use doctrine in countries with a moral rights tradition has complicated international harmonization and has led to efforts by major international organizations to ignore or eliminate fair use. And one could argue that the most practical innovation from the copyleft — the Creative Commons flexible license — represents a retreat from fair use by those best equipped to defend it: where the user-oriented fair use doctrine mitigates copyright regardless of the creator’s preference, Creative Commons lets a work’s creator micro-manage the terms of its reception and reuse.The “Futures of Fair Use” special issue of Law & Literature aims to capture the energy of these debates and to consider what initiatives might come next in policy, scholarship, and practice. The word futures in the title does several kinds of work. It marks the fact that the statutory, precedential, and practical futures of fair use are volatile and still evolving, as are the methodologies and disciplines that will shape our study of fair use in the coming years. But just as importantly, it indexes a sense that futurity, or the question of what the future is to be, is always entailed in fair use — that fair use is one of the apertures through which the futures of fresh creation, expressive latitude, and individual and cultural property can enter and be foreglimpsed. In debating the future of fair use, that is, we are always debating which of many possible futures, and conditions of subsequent future-making, will be summoned into being by our statutes and practices. The optic of futurity opens fair use to broader questions than are typically asked of it — questions about the relationship between myths and norms, personhood and property, law and haunting, sovereignty and citizenry. Finally, the term futures also marks our resistance to the “recency bias” that afflicts much law and humanities scholarship. We are interested not only in the futures of fair use as seen from the vantage of the present but also in the futures past of the doctrine: its past senses of what it augured; whether these were futures that came to pass or were superseded; and whether superseded futures might, as in the case of the Fair Use Best Practices movement, be reawakened in the present.