Copyright & Other Fairy Tales

'This is not a lighthearted book, but rather an inspiring tale that challenges the development of copyright. A detailed historical analysis of copyright leads to fundamental questions about the role of copyright in society. From a historical perspective a tale of failure blamed on commodification surfaces, but the book also offers perspectives on the future, i.e. a future with or without copyright as we know it. Maybe after all there will be a fairy tale ending for the reader.'- Paul Torremans, University of Nottingham, UK'Once the preserve of a few legal specialists, the wider implications of copyright law are more and more the concern of literary scholars and cultural analysts as well as of increasingly sceptical lawyers. Helle Porsdam is to be congratulated on assembling and editing this interesting collection of essays, which rightly opens up even further the debate on the cultural role of copyright law, one in which every one of us should participate.'- Ruth Towse, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands The present state of copyright law and the way in which it threatens the remix of culture and creativity is a shared concern of the contributors to this unique book. Whether or not to remain within the underlying regime of intellectual property law, and what sort of reforms are needed if we do decide to remain within this regime, are fundamental questions that form the subtext for their discussions. One opinion that manifests itself in the book is that we should not reject present copyright law altogether, but rather find ways to fit it to the new digital technology, whilst others take a more sceptical view. They argue, for example, that the solution to copyright-related problems is simply to give up on copyright law altogether. The life and work of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen presents an ideal focus and/or point of departure, giving the contributors a historical and well defined framework for their discussion of the various problems in relating copyright to cultural creativity.Copyright and Other Fairy Tales will be of great interest to scholars of intellectual property from a diversity of fields including law, economics, and cultural studies, as well as historians interested in the link between cultural creativity and the role of copyright in promoting (or preventing) such creativity.