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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    Small wonder that she's the go-to copyright and trademark expert for so many media outlets. Perhaps you heard her Planet Money segments on which superheroes are in the public domain:

    npr.org/transcripts/969512231

    Jenkins' flair for legal communications carries over to her scholarly work, of course, which is why her Open Copyright Casebook is a standard text for American law schools:

    pluralistic.net/2024/07/30/ope

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    Jenkins co-wrote the *Casebook* with her husband, the equally erudite and expert James Boyle. It's just one of their many fruitful collaborations; they are also the writing team behind *THEFT! A History of Music*, the greatest graphic novel ever created about the history of music, music law, music censorship, and the music industry:

    web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    Last year, Jenkins published Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an Oxford University Press title that fuses her scholarly and popular work in a generalist textbook on the legal framework for music that will forever change how you think about music. Now, a second edition, with a lengthy section on new music litigation, AI copyright fights, and the issue of uncompensated labor is available as an open access download:

    web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccop

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    *Music Copyright* weaves together the economic, cultural, political and artistic history of music, pulling on historic threads ranging from antiquity to medieval Europe to the age of mechanical reproduction to describe changing views of musicians, their audiences, and religious and political leaders on what constituted music, who was allowed to make music, and what music was *for*.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    In so doing, she firmly establishes the extremely *contingent* nature of our present-day norms around music, showing that the "natural" present-day assumptions about who gets paid, who pays, and when payment (or permission) is required are anything but, and are always in flux.

    For obvious reasons, much of Jenkins' text describes these changes in the context of the record, the radio, satellite transmission, P2P file-sharing, and digital sampling (along with a chapter on AI).

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    These examples are liberally illustrated with links to musical excerpts that bring the subject to life (these are presented as hotlinks in the ebook; if you're reading the print edition, you can use the book's companion website:)

    web.law.duke.edu/cspd/musiccop

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:03 AM

    Interspersed with these histories and analysis are lengthy, extremely on-point excerpts from *THEFT!*, her graphic novel history of music. These enliven the text as much as the music samples, making this textbook as entertaining as it is informative.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:04 AM

    These cases highlight the fundamental *incoherence* of music copyright, a system composed of improvised responses to new technologies, each layered atop the last in a messy pile that virtually no one understands.

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  • Cory Doctorowpluralistic@mamot.fr
    Aug 17, 2026, 7:04 AM

    Jenkins understands it, though. I've been reading, writing, and debating about this stuff since the late 1990s, and I learned something new on every page of this delightful book. This should be required reading for anyone who makes music, loves music, or cares about musicians and the arts more generally. It's a towering accomplishment and a brilliant read.

    eof/

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