Contested Culture

The Image, the Voice, and the Law

By Jane M. Gaines

Foreword by Alan Trachtenberg

360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4326-0
    Published: November 1991
  • E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6164-6
    Published: November 2000
  • E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6575-5
    Published: November 2000

Cultural Studies of the United States

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Awards & distinctions

1992 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize in Film, TV and Video Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country's cultural heritage.

Reviews

"This is one of the first efforts, and certainly the most ambitious and sustained ones, to bring the methods of poststructuralist literary criticism to the study of a whole field of legal doctrine, that of intellectual property law. The results are fascinating and richly rewarding."--Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School