Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2007, American Culture Studies/History

How did people think about copyright in the nineteenth century? What did they think it was? What was it for? Was it property? Or something else? How did it function? Who could it benefit? Who might it harm? Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891 addresses questions like these, unpacking the ideas and popular ideologies connected to copyright in the United States during the nineteenth-century. This era was rife with copyright-related controversy and excitement, including international squabbling, celebrity grandstanding, new technology, corporate exploitation, and ferocious arguments about piracy, reprinting, and the effects of copyright law. Then, as now, copyright was very important to a small group of people (authors and publishers), and slightly important to a much larger group (consumers and readers). However, as this dissertation demonstrates, these larger groups did have definite ideas about copyright, its function, and its purpose, in ways not obvious to the denizens of the legal and authorial realms. This project draws on methods from both social and cultural history. Primary sources include a broad swath of magazine and newspaper articles, letters, and editorials about various copyright-related controversies. Examining these sources – both mainstream and obscure – illustrates the diversity of thinking about copyright issues during the nineteenth century, and suggests alternative frameworks for considering copyright in other times.

Committee: Philip Terrie (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2008, History

This study attempts to fill a gap in the historiography on the formation of American copyright law by exploring the specific historical nature of print culture in the late eighteenth-century which directly influenced copyright's development. Those who campaigned for copyright protection espoused its broad nationalistic implications in the wake of a socially and politically disruptive revolution, and its eventual legislative design recognized a distinct tension between private interests and the public sphere as it embodied the pervasive republican values of the early national period. This examination seeks to clarify how the conceptual architecture of copyright was initially framed in the United States in order to more insightfully and constructively address the question of the continued utility of its function established by historical precedent. The first chapter of this study argues that the earliest calls for copyright legislation in the United States immediately after the Revolution were inextricably intertwined with the efforts to construct a distinctly American national identity. As the dictates of print-capitalism were quickly becoming institutionalized, prominent copyright advocates argued that copyright was necessary both to protect the indigenous American authorial class and their labors from the widespread practice of literary piracy and to encourage others to participate in the craft of authorship. They argued provocatively – and successfully – that copyright laws would indeed serve as declarations of cultural independence from Britain, and would help establish America's cultural parity with the greatest powers in the world. Whereas colonial printmen played the most critical role in shaping American identity throughout the 1760s and 1770s by producing a deluge of literature in opposition to parliamentary imperial policies, I argue that the calls for copyright laws in the post-revolutionary period were an attempt by American intellectual writers to establ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Mancke PhD (Advisor) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Education History; History; Law

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2023, Theatre Arts-Arts Administration

Choreography is the creator's intellectual property and, therefore, ought to be treated as such. However, legal protection can be granted only if the Copyright Office deems this work worthy of protection. This research aims to examine the laws concerning claiming ownership of choreographic works through copyright protection. The objective of this review is to provide a timeline of showing when the concept of copyrighting choreography began to where it stands today. A legal analysis is conducted to determine whether the current system of copyright protection can be applied to choreographic works; and, therefore, how it affects enforcement. Case examples of choreographic infringement, ownership loss, and successful enforcement will be reviewed.

Committee: Arnold Tunstall (Committee Chair); Jodi Kearns (Committee Member); Colleen Barnes (Committee Member) Subjects: Dance

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2008, Communication Studies

The purpose of this dissertation project was to explore the Chinese cultural perceptions of copyright and the Chinese historical understanding and social practices of innovation, fair use, and the public domain so as to provide a grass-roots approach to studying the recurring U.S-China copyright disputes. Guided by the theoretical frameworks of the theory of reasoned action, strategic and tactical resistance, and hegemony as well as Hofstede's individualism-collectivism cultural dimension, the researcher has conducted 45 in-depth interviews of Chinese copyright holders and consumers for data collection and used hermeneutics and thematic analysis to examine the data. The research findings are as follows: (I) Just a small number of the participants, who are lawyers, editors, and authors, offered complete and insightful understanding of the concepts under discussion while the majority who are university teachers, college and high school students, as well as business people and farmers demonstrated very vague understanding of the concepts. (II) Copyright piracy is so common in China that it is hard not to follow the stream. (III) As for the reasons for piracy, the study indicated that (i) the Chinese copyright legal system lacks a matching cultural environment; (ii) the levels of Chinese income and copyright awareness call for adjusted U.S. strategies of intellectual property rights (IPR) and flexible prices of intellectual property (IP) products at the Chinese market; and (iii) at odds with the modern concept of copyright are the Chinese tradition of sharing with one another, taking from others and the public without any sense of guilt, and disfavoring criminal litigation of copyright infringement as a result of the Confucian pursuit of social harmony. (IV) To awaken and enhance the national awareness of copyright protection in China, the study showed that: (i) if the government is really serious about copyright piracy, ordinary people will also take copyright protecti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Oliver Boyd-Barrett PhD (Committee Chair); Dominic Catalano PhD (Committee Member); Victoria Ekstrand PhD (Committee Member); Canchu Lin PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; International Relations; Organizational Behavior

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2007, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2021, Business Administration

In summary, this paper explored developments in creative intellectual property management, and then put into a plan a way to leverage such changes into an applicable 83 business model. The recent literature on creative industries, intellectual property, and related industry disruption was reviewed to paint an accurate picture of the state and future of creative intellectual property industries. The topics discussed in those articles were then synthesized into overarching lessons, including motivators for creative talent, consumer reactions to intellectual property protections, and guidelines for innovation in related industries. These lessons were then put into practice to formulate a business plan for a music publishing company. The business plan for Athena Publishing was based on insights derived from the literature review. It is broken into multiple sections: executive summary, industry overview, trends, business services, competition, management and operations, and operation milestones and financial projections. These were the most essential aspects of AP, and they encompass the business' overall strategy. AP was designed to use the knowledge acquired by the review to assist musical artists in their careers. The exercise of creating AP's plan was as valuable to reaching that goal as the initial literature review.

Committee: Paul Mass (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Instructional Technology (Education)

Learning never ends in the classroom. This dissertation is a mixed methods study exploring how Chinese fans continue to learn informally in cyberspace as they gain and practice knowledge of copyright via their online fan activities. Based on a large-sample online survey and in-depth qualitative interviews, this dissertation found that online fan activities have been the main channel through which Chinese fans gain copyright knowledge and have profoundly influenced their attitudes and actions towards copyright issues. Although generational differences influence the learning trajectories of fans, basic knowledge about rules for copyrights established by early fans have been disseminated and accepted as community norms. In this process, the state and the content industry policy changes have also influenced fans' attitudes about copyright issues. The findings also suggest that copyright advocacy is a fannish activity within the Chinese digital creative fandom. Chinese fans' copyright awareness, like the Chinese digital creative fandom itself, has developed under the influence of foreign culture. However, it is also driven by a natural enthusiasm for appreciating and protecting the creators in an environment where copyright infringement is rampant. Fans' multiple roles within the fandom make copyright advocacy relevant to most of the community members: they are fans of the original media products, creators of fanworks, and fans and/or friends of fanwork creators. These emotional attachments push fans to engage in copyright discussions and disputes online, which provide numerous learning opportunities for the participants. This research project investigated the nuances and heterogeneity of fans' concerns about copyright, providing new materials for discussions of copyright and fandom, as well as informal learning online. Plagiarism, as a sub-topic of copyright, is also addressed in this dissertation.

Committee: Greg Kessler (Committee Chair) Subjects: Asian Studies; Education; Intellectual Property

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Music

In March 2015, a jury awarded Marvin Gaye's estate nearly $7.4 million, finding that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams infringed on Gaye's 1977 song, “Got to Give It Up,” with their own 2013 hit, “Blurred Lines.” The highly publicized federal copyright lawsuit has raised concerns about the ramifications of this outcome for the legal protection of music and the future of artistic creativity. The question underlying this case, as in much of federal copyright litigation, involves negotiating the putative similarities and differences between expressive works. Although the court system has developed methods designed to assist triers of fact in such legal analysis, the unpredictable outcomes of these cases illuminate the problematics of this task. Triers of fact may hear testimony from expert witnesses, whose specialized knowledge, skill, and experience is intended to inform the decision-making process. The results of such testimony, however, are not only insistently variable, but they also reflect unsettled debates over how, and by whom, musical identity can best be defined. Given this situation, how should we understand the historical and contemporary role of the musical expert witness in American music copyright litigation? Drawing on research methods from musicological and legal scholarship, the present dissertation examines extant court records and judicial opinions of prominent cases chronologically from their origins in the mid-nineteenth century through to recently-decided lawsuits. In situating the role of the musical expert in the context of the legal similarity inquiry and considering their contributions to it, the study reveals the essential role that experts have historically played. It then recasts contemporary problems with case outcomes as a result of the similarity inquiry itself and looks to expert testimony as one potential area of reform. Such study of musical expertise sheds light on the courtroom as a forum for musical experts, particularly co (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Graeme Boone PhD (Advisor); Charles Atkinson PhD (Committee Member); Guy Rub SJD (Committee Member); Mark Rudoff MM (Committee Member) Subjects: Law; Music

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2014, Music Ethnomusicology

What do you value most about your voice? As ethnomusicological studies of the voice expand, so must our understanding of what voice even means. Voice must entail more than just a sonic phenomenon, but must also relate to ideology, to our very identity, even. This thesis will fuse ethnomusicological and legal perspectives to explore how American and, to a lesser extent, international copyright law and other legal mechanisms protect more than just a musician's economic interest, but also his very identity. I will explore the right of publicity and the concept of moral rights and how they relate to voice and identity. The right of publicity is a musician's right to protect his identity as well as his copyrighted works while moral rights is the right of a musician to prevent certain uses of his work even when he has assigned the copyright of that work to another. This thesis will suggest a theoretical framework for investigating the voice as an intangible legal marker of identity. I argue that the voice protected by law is positioned as both sonic and metaphorical agent and encompasses not only the act of vocalization, but inaction as well. In my model, the positive voice is the manner in which we express our ideology by speech or by action. It requires affirmative action and intent on the musician's part. The negative voice, however, is the idea that we can also speak loudly through our silence. Sometimes silence is merely the absence of sound, but sometimes it reflects an ideological stance on a particular issue. Sometimes we are given the opportunity to affirmatively act, but we choose not to in order to communicate our opposition to a concept, decision, course of action, or some other ideological position. These “statements” are every bit as vital to a musician's identity and integrity as their affirmative actions are. One example of this concept is demonstrated in Tom Waits' lawsuit against Frito-Lay. In that case, a Waits sound-alike was (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Katherine Meizel PhD (Advisor); Kara Attrep PhD (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Media and Communication

Copyright is in theory a neutral legal instrument, but in practice copyright functions as an ideological tool. The value of creative content in culture vacillates between the rhetorical poles of progress and profit within copyright law. This study is an ideographic rhetorical critique of copyright. Ideographs are rhetorical containers of ideology that publics use to define various aspects of culture. Some ideographs are contained within the dialogue of a topic. I argue five terms that make up the ideographic grammar of copyright: public domain, fair use, authorship, ownership, and piracy. The public domain is the space where copyrighted material enters when the term of protection expires. The public domain expresses the ideology that creative material belongs to the people who consume content. Fair use is the free speech exception to copyright law that allows for certain types of infringement. Fair Use is the ideology in which the use of creative work belonging to others must be fairly represented. Authorship is how an author creates content and how an audience consumes it. Authorship is an ideology focused on progress towards the process of creating content as motivated by an author. The question at the center of authorship is who controls content: the author or the public. Ownership takes the question of authorship one-step further by invoking material property. Ownership is the embodiment of the idea that management, control, and profit of copyright are more valuable than original creation. The Corporate Public is focused on ownership of content, because ownership is a legal condition of property where a person or group can profit. Piracy, which appears most often in any discussion of copyright law, is an intentional theft of copyrighted work(s). Piracy is a battleground between content theft and the people who publicly resist copyright.

Committee: Michael Butterworth Ph.D (Advisor); Victoria Ekstrand Ph.D (Committee Member); Joshua Atkinson Ph.D (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Law; Rhetoric

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2013, Comparative Studies

Given the world is increasingly driven by technology, it should come as no shock that art museums are working to increase their online presence. Many museums have maintained websites since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but recently these museums are seeking to digitize their collections in order to make them publicly available for Internet users. While smaller museums struggle to find the finances and expertise to commit to this task, larger institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art maintain the financial wherewithal to begin such massive undertakings. However, the question remains as to why any museum might wish to make their highly-prized collections publicly available online. The impetus behind museums' “going online” results from the European histories of aristocracy and connoisseurship from which the museum emerged, and the struggle of American museums to make good on their missions to service “the people” in spite of such historical influence. The Internet has been viewed both skeptically and liberally as a means to complete this mission, but the consequences of “going online” remain intertwined in the present formation of the public's understanding of the Internet its liberal use of content. At best, it is currently possible to look at the previous trajectories of both these institutions, the museum and the Internet, in order to begin to tease apart some of the merging areas of discourse. At first glance, it may seem that the two are not so different, which may in fact prove true, but even the most gentle investigation under the surface of these two institutions will show great dissimilarities in their discourse and methods of control. The Internet and the museum may in fact be at ideological odds with one another, and yet that has not prevented their inevitable merger. The museum has traditionally functioned by leveraging controlled access to the content of its collections as legally manifested through copyright, while the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Philip Armstrong PhD (Advisor); Kris Paulsen PhD (Committee Member); Allison Fish PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Education; Arts Management; Comparative; Technology

PHD, Kent State University, 2011, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

Paul E. Werner, newspaper publisher, printer, industrialist, was as ruthless as other businessmen of Gilded Age Akron. His story and that of his company exemplifies the “Rags to Riches” American Dream. Lured by steady income from printing, Werner built his family business from a tiny concern in 1873 into a thriving multi-national company by 1894 by acquiring competitors and establishing offices in 20 cities across North America and Europe. Werner printed everything from newspapers and commercial stationary to books, magazines, art, and reference works, including the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition). His once vast, multifaceted business collapsed in 1909 after Encyclopedia Britannica sued the company for copyright infringement, and disappeared by 1914. This dissertation examines the printers of Akron in the nineteenth century, particularly Paul E. Werner, and their place in the history of Akron and demonstrates how Werner is typical of printers of the Gilded Age. Second, it compares Werner to contemporary printers of Cleveland, building upon Russell Duino's 1981 dissertation and Walter Sutton's work on Cincinnati Printers. Finally, it explores intellectual property rights and international copyright infringement as it pertains to Werner's ultimate financial downfall. In an era of micro-histories, this study contributes to Akron's business history by demonstrating the economic significance of printing, and providing another perspective for understanding how industry fosters urban growth and prosperity. Werner's business incorporated, in direct competition with contemporary printers, new merchandising techniques that enticed readers to acquire his books. Secondly, a careful study of Werner's business practices will provide insight into the financial realities of late nineteenth century printers and book publishers, and will contribute to our understanding of the book in Gilded Age America. Lastly, this dissertation will set today's battles over intellectual pro (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Jameson (Committee Chair); Kevin Adams (Committee Member); Kevin Kern (Committee Member); Diane Scillia (Committee Member); Robert Trogdon (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Intellectual Property; Regional Studies