Giancarlo Frosio, Reconciling Copyright with Cumulative Creativity

“The evolution of copyright has attracted scholars of formidable polish,” wrote W R Cornish in 1981, citing the works of T E Scrutton, Augustine Birrell, W S Holdsworth and Benjamin Kaplan (Intellectual Property: Patents, Copyright, Trade Marks and Allied Rights, 1st edition, p 293 note 1). The subsequent four decades have seen a further rich flowering of scholarship on the history of copyright, as can be most readily sensed from perusal of the Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law edited by Isabella Alexander and H Tomás Gómez-Arostegui and published by Edward Elgar in 2016. The still more recent books reviewed here add fresh levels of depth, perspective and debate to a subject which is very far from exhausted. Its inter-disciplinary nature and interest can be seen by looking at the respective authors’ academic positions: a media historian, a historian of dramatic and musical art, two...

Art · Art history · Copyright law · Cornish · Creativity · Discipline · Intellectual property · Law and economics · Library science · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Art History and Market Analysis · Classics · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law