February 2008: Peter Decherney

Peter Decherney, University of Pennsylvania

"Auterism on Trial: Hollywood's 'Moral Rights' "

Respondent: Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania

Friday, 22 February 2008

6:30pm-8pm

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 420

Directions to TUCC

From Douglas Fairbanks to Steven Soderberg, the U.S. legal system has treated Hollywood filmmakers as a special category of artist. When  feature films have been translated to new media, from two-reel serials to home video, courts have consistently offered filmmakers unusually broad authorial protection for their works. In this presentation, Professor Decherney considers some of the reasons that filmmakers, and the Directors’Guild  of America, in particular, have been able to achieve special legal status, and considers some of the implications of their lofty perch for film on the internet.

Peter Decherney is assistant professor of Cinema Studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American, and he is currently at work on a history of Hollywood and copyright law.

Paul Saint-Amour works on Victorian and modernist literature, with special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. He is currently at work on an edited volume, Modernism and Copyright, and a book-length project entitled Archive, Bomb, Civilian: Modernism in the Shadow of Total War.