Authorship and Copyright

First published in 1992, Authorship and Copyright traces the history of constructions of authorship as a legal reality. It offers an alternative to the two mainstream interpretations that have traditionally been assigned to authorship: the Romantic dialectical 'birth of the author' or the language-based post-structuralist 'death of the author.' Saunders examines the shortcomings of both schemes by arguing that they impose an arbitrary philosophical direction on the history of authorship and the law of copyright. Saunders addresses the issues relating to copyright and the construction of authorship as a legal status. Combining information and polemic, the author explores such matters as the historical and theoretical relations of copyright and the droit moral, the aestheticization of the law and the juridification of aesthetics, and the argument that authorship as a legal reality is a historically contingent and variable arrangement that cannot be separated from its cultural and juridical context. This book will be of interest to students of law, literature and philosophy.