Reading list: poetry and copyright norms

Evan Nelson, Unacknowledged Legislators: The ContemporaryPoetry Community’s Quasi-Regime of Intellectual Property, 91 N.D. L. Rev. 634 (2015).

Abstract:

Intellectual property grants artificial monopolies to authors, and this practice has long been justified as an economic bargain necessary to encourage new authors. However, many creative communities thrive without intellectual property protection. These communities have been described as intellectual property’s negative spaces. This Note navigates those negative spaces by the light of the contemporary poetry community’s efforts to discourage thieving and encourage transformative copying. The community does so though there is little money in poetry, and thus little to animate an economic justification for intellectual property protection. Observing how one community considers intellectual property without an economic underpinning will help the legal community make informed decisions as intellectual property continues to navigate the creative sea of changes of the twenty-first century.