Betsy Rosenblatt on Fair Use as Resistance

In this episode, Elizabeth L. Rosenblatt, Visiting Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, discusses her article "Fair Use as Resistance," which was published in the UC Irvine Law Review. Rosenblatt begins by describing the relationship between copyright and fair use, and how copyright creates a hierarchy of producer/deriver/user. Then she explains how literary theory upends that hierarchy, by describing producers, derivers, and users as all part of a continuum, in which each becomes the other. She then introduces Bakhtin's perspective on dialogic speech, and how it informs that relationship. In particular, she focuses on his concept of the "carnivalesque," in which hierarchies are temporarily overturned, but their authority is affirmed, by their own control of the way in which they are overturned. She compares the carnivalesque to fair use, which permits disruption of copyright rules, but contains that disruption by defining what is permitted and what is not. Rosenblatt is on Twitter at @221Betsy.

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