ONLINE BOOK PRESENTATION: Discussion on the book Brent SALTER, Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856-1951 (5 May, Stanford-ONLINE)

 

(Image source: Cambridge University Press)

Please join us for   The Stanford Center for Law and History and the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford will co-host a book talk with author and Stanford Center for Law and History Fellow Brent Salter: “Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856-1951". Commentators for the event include Derek Miller (Harvard), Kara Swanson (Northeastern Law), Marlis Schweitzer (York Theatre), Jose Bellido (Kent Law), and Ann Folino White (MSU Law). The event will be chaired by Amalia Kessler (SCLH Director and Stanford Law) and Kathy Bowrey (UNSW Law).

The book talk will be in-person (Room 320D, Stanford Law School) and live streamed at the HowlRound website here, on Thursday, May 5, 12:40 – 2:00 PM (Pacific).

To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the link to the event.

ABSTRACT

The book is a historical account of how creation is negotiated in the American theatre. It is also about how the American theatre has structured its industry relationships and how industry stakeholders, and in particular dramatists, have responded to these structures through industry customs and collective organization. The research seeks to explain how stakeholders who controlled the transformation of the dramatic work from the playwright’s manuscript to the theatrical stage asserted expansive power over theatrical creation between the mid nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. These stakeholders (mediators of the American theatre) evolved in different forms: for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental. They included theatrical agents, transnational publishers, producers and managers that emerged and formed combination businesses, and government programs established during the New Deal. Instead of situating copyright law at the center of legal authority structures in the American theatre, the book explores how labor relationships, administrative structures and processes, control over material resources, informal guild expectations and minimum contracts, and other professional norms, all shape how theatre-makers relate cultural production to the more nebulous space of a realized theatrical performance on a stage.

More information can be found here.