Romantic authorship in copyright law and the uses of aesthetics

Scholars of the arts as well as scholars of copyright law – especially in the US – have for decades struggled to kill off the ideology of Romantic authorship, though it is far from clear precisely what it consists of, or why and to whom it poses such danger. The situation brings to mind film historian Tom Gunning’s memorable observation in a different context that the persistent attacks ‘begin to take on something of the obsessive and possibly necrophilic pleasure of beating a dead horse’ (1998, p. xiii). This chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part critically examines the idea that the myth of Romantic authorship is deeply ingrained in copyright law and has propelled its expansion. The second part explores the broader but related issue of how insights from the humanities can usefully inform copyright scholarship. Taking as its starting point Roland Barthes’ famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ it argues that it is extremely demanding to find common ground, for even though the disciplines overlap conceptually they are fundamentally at cross-purposes epistemologically. I maintain that we must first identify where the aims and practices of aesthetics and law actually converge, and deem it to be in the area of interpretation and evaluation, which is obviously one of the core competences of scholars of the arts, and also something that courts resort to at the infringement stage.