Ronan Deazley

Privilege and Property : Essays on the History of Copyright

Read for free online: this volume conceives a new history of copyright law. Privilege and Property is recommended in the Times Higher Education Textbook Guide (November, 2010).

Photography, copyright, and the South Kensington experiment

Reviews the development of UK copyright law in the 19th century concerning photographs of works of art in public collections. Discusses the project at South Kensington Museum to sell photographs of works of art to the public at cost price, and the introduction of copyright protection for original photographs under the Fine Arts Copyright Act 1862. Considers the parliamentary debates on whether photography was worthy of copyright protection. Examines whether lessons should be learned now that digital technology offers the opportunity to improve public access to works of art.

Trouble with The Trouble With Ownership

In his seminal essay, ‘What is an author?’, Michel Foucault draws structural links between the emergence of a nation state that engages in ideological control and penal regulation of the press with the persona of the modern author, writing that, historically, the ownership of a text ‘has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors . . . to the extent that authors became the subject of punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive’. It is Foucault’s concept of ‘penal appropriation’ and its link with authorial property which lies at the heart of Jody Greene’s recent work: The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730. Although Foucault himself located his observations ‘at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century’, coinciding with the emergence of the concept of droit d’auteur within the French legal system, Greene finds echoes and evidence of his paradigm in various of the regulatory measures which governed printing and publishing in pre-Restoration England, in the provisions and the enforcement of the Licensing Act 1662 which (intermittently) sought to regulate the content of the English press until its lapse in May 1695, and, perhaps most controversially, within the ideological framework of Britain’s first copyright Act, the Statute of Anne

Copyright, Licences, and Statutory Fraud

The article examines the practice of some commercial image libraries of asserting an unqualified right to payment for any use of images held in their collections. Assessing the legitimacy of these demands for payment requires exploration of the interplay between the law of copyright, contract and statutory fraud. A better reconciliation of the interests of commercial image libraries and the users of images is recommended.