K.Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author, Routledge, 2020, 228 pp, hb, £36.99.

Kathy Bowrey's illuminating new book pursues a narrative that draws equally from legal history and literary chronicles of the late nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries. In so doing, the book makes a salient point: in the field of copyright law, there is no legal history without cultural history. The progress of this field of law has been determined by the way cultural products have been commodified via markets generated by emerging technologies, from the printing press to the gramophone, and from the cinema to Netflix. Legislative and judicial innovations have played an important role, but must be placed in this wider context. As Bowrey states, her task is to ‘trace how the “culture industries” came to be perceived as “copyright industries” connected through the idea of authorship’(1). Early in the book, Bowrey sketches a pre-history of copyright law in the literary and dramatic fields, with a noteworthy analysis of John Milton's legal arrangements with his publisher, a member of the Stationers’ Company. Milton's stationer appears to have recognised a form of literary property in Milton's poems, even prior to the first copyright legislation: The Statute of Anne 1710. Along with statutory copyright came the emergence of the English novel. Literary copyright disputes became more prevalent in the eighteenth century, with Samuel Richardson complaining about unauthorised editions and imitations of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1741). Moving to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bowrey opines that hero worship of novelists contributed to debates over legal reforms to copyright. That Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo advocated for an international authors’ rights law is a well-known story in copyright lore. In her third chapter, Bowrey breaks new ground by turning her attention to the inventive English-language novelists who came in the wake of Dickens, pioneering the novelistic genres of crime, mystery and thriller, such as Hugh Conway (1847-1885), Fergus Hume (1859-1932) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). In their lifetimes, these figures were viewed through the lens of the then prevalent ‘great man theory of history’, solidifying a narrative of the celebrity author as copyright evangelist. Bowrey relates that the burgeoning popularity of their detective stories and novels of intrigue crossed national boundaries. Eventually, with international recognition of copyright, post-Berne Convention (1886), such authors could benefit from lucrative global sales, as well as newly exploitable commercialisation and licensing revenues for dramatic adaptations. Bowrey's archival research is impressive – it imbues her study with analytical weight, including her parsing of the personal papers of the author and copyright enthusiast Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853-1931). In chapter four, Bowrey explains that the British Empire, then at its zenith in terms of scale and reach, was crucial to the spread of copyright law across the common law world. The Imperial Copyright Act of 1911 brought the minimum standards of the Berne Convention into national law, not just in the (then) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, but throughout the empire, becoming the basis for national copyright law in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other post-colonial states. The exploitation of works of authorship via international copyright within the English-speaking world saw London and New York emerge as twin dominant publishing domains. A booming, globalised export market for books had a dramatic impact far from the imperial capitals. Local publishers struggled to compete with these imports, and many went out of business, creating a vicious cycle that tended to weaken local publishing markets in the global south. On this, there is a post-colonial sting in the tail. During the 1930s the South African singer Solomon Linda was recorded singing the part-improvised ‘Mbube’. The recording eventually made its way to the US, becoming the basis for ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ which was incorporated into the 1994 Disney film The Lion King. In what might be described as a subversive use of imperial copyright, in the early 2000s the estate of Linda, who was originally not credited, were able to take advantage of the reversion clause in the Imperial Copyright Act 1911 to make a ‘David v Goliath’ copyright claim against Disney (the 1911 Act being the relevant law at the time when Linda recorded ‘Mbube’). Disney settled the claim with Linda's heirs, which saw Linda credited as one of the authors of the song, and his family receiving royalties. The concluding chapter of the book brings the story up to the modern day, with an argument that 21st century artists such as Margaret Atwood, Radiohead and Banksy who at times appear to resist commodification of their art, are ultimately not ‘anti-copyright’. Atwood has participated in self-publishing and with experimental presses, but emphasises the author's right to control and be paid for her work. Radiohead left their record company EMI in 2007 and distributed their album ‘In Rainbows’ via their website, on a ‘pay as you like’ basis. At the time this was seen as a boldly experimental, even anti-industrial move; but with hindsight, it can be viewed as a piece of savvy marketing on the band's part. Subsequent releases by Radiohead have reverted to a more traditional, though still independent, model. Banksy may assert that ‘copyright is for losers’ but he still asserted his moral right to be credited as an author in his collection Wall and Piece (2006). Bowrey notes that the traditional idea of copyright still resonates. This is so even in our era of disruption, with artists like Taylor Swift, who does not own the copyright in the master recordings of her early albums, aiming to take back control by re-recording the albums and directing her fans to stream and download the new versions. In her conclusion, Bowrey reflects on the growth of the ‘author as brand’ – a period in which the commodification of the author-artist figure occurs via the law of trade marks almost as much as via copyright law, bringing together the philosophical underpinnings of these two aspects of intellectual property. Bowrey's contextual study demonstrates that the agency of authors is crucial. The relationship between copyright and commodification can work to the advantage of at least some artists where they are able to use it to authorise distribution of their works in the market. Yet, this does not take away from the acute danger that the conglomeration of publishing and distributional power by huge platforms such as Disney, Spotify, Apple and Google leaves many twenty-first century creators in a position where their authorial agency is difficult, if not impossible, to exercise. With her new book Bowrey makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the link between copyright law and the creative industries. One aspect of this contribution is analytical: the profound connection she draws between the legal and literary texts serves to illuminate the material. The other significant contribution is empirical: the stellar archival work Bowrey has accomplished adds substance to a growing body of legal research that aims to assess the impact of the law on the arts sector. Crucially, by foregrounding the concept of literary authorship prior to her examination of copyright's ownership rules, Bowrey unlocks a space for other scholars to enter in the coming years. In other words, this is a substantial piece of work that is likely to become an inspiration for follow-on scholarship by the next generation of copyright academics.

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