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Fresh
Look at Intellectual Property Puts Borrowing, Sampling
and Plagiarism in Historical Context
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 The
Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary
Imagination (Cornell University Press, June 2003),
written by Paul K. Saint-Amour, a professor of English at
Pomona College, addresses the current status of copyright
law, along with its political and personal consequences, and
explores the somewhat problematic issues of intellectual
property, plagiarism, and originality, placing recent
high-stakes copyright issues in historical context.
News events such as the court battle of the Copyright Term
Extension Act (CTEA), which extends copyright terms by 20
years, the patenting of the human genome and of genetically
altered seed lines, and controversies over literary parody
have increased public awareness of intellectual property
law.
 Saint-Amour
focuses on the period 1830-1930 as a time when literature
became aware of its status as intellectual property and
began to include this realization in the various aspects of
character, plot and structure. He revisits major works by
Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, among others, highlighting the
ways in which authors in this period were masters of the
“art of scissors and paste,” borrowing material from other
published works without acknowledgement. Other primary
sources include Victorian political economy, and periodical
articles about plagiarism, nineteenth-century poetic cantos,
and the minutes of the 1876-78 Royal Commission on
Copyright. All of these texts serve to suggest the
intriguing question: Would art from this period have
survived the copyright laws of the new millennium?
“The property-status of language is a central and
under-theorized feature of modernity in Western print
cultures,” Saint-Amour claims, “and the literature of the
period of copyright’s consolidation registers this nascent
status.”
Saint-Amour is a professor of English at Pomona College. He
received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and his
undergraduate degree from Yale. His articles have been
featured in the James Joyce Quarterly, the Henry James
Review, Modernism/Modernity, Diacritics, and
Nineteenth-Century Literature. The Copywrights is
his first book.
To request a review copy of the book, contact Jonathan Hall
at Cornell University Press at
jlh98@cornell.edu.
For more about Saint-Amour, read his Pomona College
Faculty Profile.
Pomona College is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts
institutions, offering a comprehensive program in the arts,
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Its
hallmarks include small classes, close relationships between
students and faculty, and a range of opportunities for
student research. |
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