The book looks at how copyright laws are perceived within the graffiti and street art subcultures, and how artists and writers view certain creative aspects of their own practice. By drawing on the author’s ethnographic research and fieldwork, the book gives voice to the main actors of these communities and highlights their feelings and opinions towards issues which until recently they have often felt far from their everyday life and practice. This book, in other words, brings the ‘voice from the street’ into the debate over the legal (and non-legal) protection of street art and graffiti. The monograph also touches on related and complementary issues, such as the ‘gallerisation’ and economic exploitation of these forms of art (e.g. via merchandising) and the curious similarities between the graffiti and advertising worlds. The book includes inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives, showing how different disciplines can interact. The ethnographic research carried out by the author gives the monograph a strong empirical touch, thus providing insight and perspectives from the street art and graffiti subcultures.

This chapter considers how intangible assets that businesses develop, such as inventions, designs and brands, as well as business ideas and information, can be protected pursuant to Australian intellectual property (IP) laws. It identifies that various IP rights are protected by statute, while others are protected pursuant to common law. It explains that some forms of intellectual property require businesses to apply and register for protection before an IP right can be claimed, such as designs, patents and trade marks, while others, such as copyright, dont require any application or registration. The chapter highlights that an array of IP rights can be used to protect different aspects of a business’s goods and/or services. For example, a business’s product might have a patent that attaches to it regarding how it works, a registered trade mark protecting its brand name, and a design for its appearance. The more IP rights that can be used to protect a particular good or service, the more defiant the good or service will be to imitation and competition.

This chapter looks at the period 1700 to 1820, one of profound change in Ireland as technological advances coupled with social and educational developments deeply influenced the intellectual and literary landscape. In the six and a half centuries since the invention of printing many new technologies affected the creation, distribution, consumption, and enjoyment of printed texts. Innovations and developments in printing, typefounding, papermaking, and marketing contributed to the advance of literary culture. The rise in education from the eighteenth century created an audience for literature in its many forms. Imaginative writing developed and attracted new audiences as literacy expanded among different cohorts. The newspaper provided the most comprehensive medium for the dissemination of information. Literacy was not necessarily a requirement as evidence shows that one newspaper could be shared among readers and read aloud to groups of listeners. Print advertising, an eighteenth-century innovation, increased the market for literary works.

A dozen editions of Tolstoy’s collected works were published while he was alive (the twelfth was being prepared when he died). His wife, Sophia Andreevna, prepared seven of these; his disciples – most notably, V.G. Chertkov – arranged for the publication of his banned writings abroad. In 1918, Chertkov secured Lenin’s affidavit for the publication of “everything that Tolstoy ever wrote.” After Lenin’s death, and especially after the 1928 centennial of Tolstoy’s birth, the corpus of the Jubilee Edition was shaped by Stalin’s state decree. First projected to exceed 100 volumes, the Jubilee Edition funneled down to 90 volumes. This chapter signposts the difficult history of the distinguished edition during the three decades of Stalinism (1928–58) that it took to publish it, while explaining its structure and key principles. Despite its ideologically marred editorial format, the Jubilee Edition – which remains the most complete and professionally executed extant edition of Tolstoy – is an extraordinary achievement. The chapter concludes by discussing the tasks of the newest 100-volume edition, started in 2000 under the auspices of the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, its ultimate purpose being to restore and expertly annotate all of the texts from Tolstoy’s pen.

How do you read a patent and what subject matter is patentable? What is the purpose of a patent? Who is an inventor on the patent if work is done by many people on the project? What is the process of obtaining a patent in my country and globally? Read this chapter to see how you could lose commercialization rights to your own invention. When exactly does an invention or idea become patentable? Once you own a patent, how can you make money from it? What is the process of licensing and the key terms that should be negotiated in such a license agreement? What is the use of a copyright or a trade secret in biotech? What exactly constitutes patent infringement ? These questions and many others are addressed in this chapter on intellectual property.

Using Joyce’s oeuvre as a sample case, Robert Spoo’s chapterenvisions a new global commons.From James Joyce’s lawsuit against Samuel Roth in 1927 to the decisions in the case between Carol Schloss and the Joyce Estate in 2000s, Joyce has served as the exemplar of issues around copyright in modernist literature. Following his recent history of American protectionist copyright law and public domain, Spoo first maps out the new possibilities for critical readings and publication following the passage of Joyce’s works into the public domain, following the expiration of copyright in most European Union countries on January 1, 2012. He will then sketch the recently emerged contradictions of international public domain. In response to this situation, which he calls “tragedy of the uncoordinated global commons,” Spoo will follow the precedent of Ezra Pound’s 1918 proposed statute to reform US copyright law, which combined perpetual, exclusive copyright with expansive compulsory licenses that required fixed royalties on sales, and offer a proposal for the global circulation of literature based on a reworked notion of the earlier US practice of “trade courtesy.” The chapter closes by arguing that a fertile public domain, in which creative resources are made accessible through cooperation and sharing, is essential to the future of modernism and of modernism scholarship.

Copyright is a body of law that impacts upon the production and circulation of commodities that helped define Australian culture. The chapter provides an overview of Imperial copyright laws that conferred rights on British subjects living in British dominions. Australian colonial copyright laws and the first Federal law are then discussed in light of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886). Both before and after Federation, Australian copyright laws remained nested within the framework of Empire, until the passing of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). How the placement of Australian law within Empire impacted upon Australian creators is explored in relation to the artist and illustrator, May Gibbs (1877-1965). Race is more difficult to account for in Australian copyright history. How Protection and Assimilation areas laws restricted artistic expression and the enjoyment of copyright is explored with reference to Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira (1901-1959).

Copyright perspective: Topics like protection under the Software Directive as well as the Database Directive are dealt with in particular. Moreover, aspects of the trade secrecy directive are also touched upon. Centered around the existing human-focused approach, the chapter also seeks to develop new ways to strike the balance between information society needs on the one hand (free access to works) and copyright protection and incentives for AI-created works on the other hand.

Neuroscientific studies of the creative process reveal that artistic ingenuity is not the black box the law supposes it to be. These studies explode several popular myths about art and artists—myths that courts have used to justify their failure to truly interrogate creativity. The courts tend to believe in the creativity of novices, romanticizing the artistic potential of children and the mentally ill. Instead, the science reveals a strong correlation between expertise, learned skills, and creative output. Western societies assume that creativity arrives in a flash of insight, often when the artist is not even thinking about the project at hand; the truth is that creative breakthroughs take sustained effort and motivation. Rather than being incapable of outside understanding, various aspects of creative thought—including the generation of new visual imagery—can now be identified via changes in brain chemistry. The chapter uses copyright cases concerning a variety of works—from fine art to photography to Barbie dolls—to illustrate the flawed ways in which courts try to discern artistic creativity and how they might be reconceptualized in light of neuroscientific discoveries.

This chapter details what a better understanding of the creative process should mean for copyright law. Instead of continuing to avoid any rigorous analysis of creativity, courts should investigate authorial motivation and solicit expertise to help diagnose the presence of the required “creative spark.” These changes would bolster copyright’s role in incentivizing the production of creative works while avoiding awards of copyright to unoriginal artworks. The chapter also explains how to recalibrate design patent law in light of what we understand about audience perception of design. The trier of fact should examine whether a design choice makes the design easier or harder for audiences to process. Design choices to be simpler, more prototypical, or more congruous are already likely sufficiently rewarded by consumer choices in the marketplace and should be presumed to lack the originality needed for design patent protection. Through a series of visual examples from actual design patent cases, the chapter explains how, by analyzing the effect of a design choice on visual processing fluency, courts can stop treating all design differences the same.

Copyright’s test for infringement takes a uniform approach to aesthetics by treating all audiences and modalities of creative expression the same. We now know that this is not how aesthetic judgment works. The chapter describes how the law can be reformed to take differences in audiences and artistic media into account. The chapter also responds to potential objections to the use of neuroaesthetics in this legal context. A better understanding of how audiences perceive art, if implemented in the right manner, can help protect both economic and non-economic values embedded in copyright law in a more transparent way.

The Introduction sets out the central premise of the book: a sea change in our understanding of the human brain has deep, unexamined implications for intellectual property law. The Introduction begins to build the case for this argument by providing a brief description of the techniques used to detect the biological mechanisms attendant to different thought processes. It connects these techniques to the relevant actors whose perspectives structure the book’s three main parts: artists, audiences, and judges. Neuroscientific lessons for intellectual property law should be approached with a mixture of hope and caution. The hope comes from replacing some of the mistaken hunches about artists and audiences that have shaped intellectual property law for decades. The caution comes from a need to avoid junk science and neuroscientific theories that could do damage to the underlying aims of copyright, patent, and trademark law.

The current test for copyright infringement requires a court or jury to assess whether the parties’ works are “substantially similar” from the vantage point of the “ordinary observer.” Embedded within this test are several assumptions about audiences and art that neuroaesthetics—the study of the neural processes underlying aesthetic behavior—calls into question. To illustrate the disconnect between the law’s understanding of aesthetic appreciation and the reality of our reactions to works of art, the chapter explores a recent high-profile copyright matter involving the rock anthem “Stairway to Heaven.” Under current law, no effort is made to select jurors with the same listening or viewing tastes as the target audience for the original work—in this case, fans of classic rock. Nor can expert witnesses aid the jury’s understanding of that target audience. Instead, the assumption seems to be that we all appreciate works in the same indescribable way and one person’s reaction is as good as another. In truth, the basic biology of aesthetic reaction changes markedly depending on familiarity, experience, and even gender, contradicting copyright law’s one size-fits-all-approach.