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Abstract
Authors, musicians, photographers, and other content creators currently have unprecedented levels of access to production and distribution networks. The disruptive rise of digitization and the internet have undermined monopolies previously enjoyed by creative industries. Yet, the intricacies of copyright law remain an enigma to the typical content creator. Throughout the three-hundred-year history of statutory copyright contentious debates over its justification and scope have yet to be resolved. A focus on suggestions for policy reform in previous literature has further obscured copyright's most intractable philosophical problems. Rather than suggesting a set of reforms, this dissertation argues that a fundamental problem in copyright law is an incomplete theorization of creativity and creative labor.Previous frameworks used to theorize copyright have encountered difficulties in legitimating individual creativity while contextualizing its relationship with the socio-cultural and political economic aspects of creative labor. Adapted from economic anthropology, the theory of ritual economy provides an alternative framework capable of legitimating individual contribution through a twin emphasis on worldview and process. Ritual economy opens new vistas of historical exploration that suggest a return to the primary evidence left by content creators of how they interpreted and used copyright in practice.This dissertation will focus on three early American content creators: Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Foster, and Mathew Brady. It conceptualizes ritual economy as a framework that can both challenge theoretical inconsistencies in the dominant historical discourse and utilize historical scholarship to inform further theoretical understanding. Fundamentally, this research seeks to address a problem of access and a problem of understanding. Access to a history of copyright from the content creator's perspective may help to challenge a discourse that inherently marginalizes creative labor. Understanding how creativity materializes in a capitalist, market-driven system may help content creators better manage ownership of their work. Theoretical understanding of the creative process and the creative worldview is still incomplete, and historical work has the potential to inform a more complete understanding. As the intersection of the law, political economy, and creativity, the history of copyright is an ideal place for that work to begin.