Join us for a book talk with Jennifer Jenkins, author of Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, exploring how copyright shapes the music we love – from historical influences to modern challenges. James Boyle will facilitate our discussion.
April 10th at 2pm ET / 11am PT
REGISTER HERE
Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture is an interdisciplinary introduction to the economics, history, and law that shape the music we love. The book has an innovative design, combining accessible prose with timelines, infographics, flowcharts, and excerpts from a graphic novel. Through a series of chapters that take readers step by step through the fundamentals of copyright and creativity, Jennifer Jenkins clarifies basic concepts, lays out an engaging history, points out cultural effects of legal rules, and tells scores of stories of great musical controversies, past and present. The book is paired with a series of Spotify and YouTube playlists, so that readers can listen to the material under review. The end result is neither dry nor obscure. And this is as it should be, because the legal rules surrounding our musical culture are both important and captivating.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
JENNIFER JENKINS is a Clinical Professor of Law teaching Music Copyright and Intellectual Property at Duke Law School and Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its Arts Project – a project analyzing the effects of intellectual property on cultural production. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of the open coursebook Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (6th ed, 2024) and the graphic novel Theft! A History of Music, a 2000-year history of musical borrowing and regulation, and the author of numerous academic articles on intellectual property issues.
JAMES BOYLE is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. His newest book is The Line: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Personhood, MIT Press 2024, which is also available for free under a Creative Commons license. Professor Boyle joined the Duke faculty in July 2000. He has also taught at American University, Yale, Harvard, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He was one of the original Board Members, and eventually the Chairman of the Board, of Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work. He was also a co-founder of Science Commons, which aimed to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and has served as a member of the board of the Public Library of Science.