The Innovation Law & Theory Workshop
and the Law & Literature Workshop
Co-present
Mark Rose
Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Place: Solarium FA2, Falconer Hall, 84 Queen’s Park
This paper considers the relationship between the formation of the public sphere in early modern England and the inauguration of modern copyright law in the Statute of Anne in 1710. It suggests that in Areopagitica, John Milton’s 1644 tract arguing against licensing of the press, one can find an early sketch of the social form that Jűrgen Habermas calls the “bourgeois public sphere” and that in the Statute of Anne this social form is given concrete reality.
Mark Rose is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published many books on a range of subjects from Shakespeare to science fiction, including Heroic Love: Studies in Sidney and Spenser; Shakespearean Design; Spenser’s Art; and Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction. His study of the emergence of copyright in eighteenth-century Britain, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1993. In addition to writing on the history of copyright, he frequently serves as a consultant and expert witness in movie and television matters involving allegations of copyright infringement.
Copies of the workshop paper are available upon request: centre.ilp@utoronto.ca
Please RSVP to: centre.ilp@utoronto.ca or 416-978-3724
www.innovationlaw.org
A light lunch will be provided
Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Law, Technology and Culture
