Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture
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Edition
Second Edition
Year of Publication
2026
Pagination
iv, xxvi, 449 pages
ISBN
9798190119510
Description
This is the open access, full-color, second edition of Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an introduction to the legal, economic, aesthetic, and technological forces that shape the music we love. It has no connection to Oxford University Press, which published the first edition. You have probably heard stories where one musician is accused of copying another’s song. By the time you finish reading this book, you know what the law might say about it. You will have explored how a society even comes to think of music as something that can be owned: the cultural, technological, economic, and legal prerequisites of the system. You will have traced out the history of the great technologies that affected music, from musical notation―the invention of writing, musically speaking―through to the printing press, the player piano and phonograph, the radio, the internet, and generative AI. You will have thought through how we set up incentives to make, and to distribute, the music all of us love. How can society ensure that the next great composer or performer devotes her time and talent to that task instead of something else? How can we set up a system that gives creators control of their work, and yet still leaves free the genres, styles, techniques, and other building blocks that make up the musical commons, upon which all artists draw? Along the way, you will get to think about the law, culture, aesthetics, and economics of an art form that touches us more profoundly than we know. One benefit of this book is that it will show you the master patterns repeated again and again in the history of music. To paraphrase an old saying: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often harmonizes.
Disciplines
Intellectual Property Law | Law
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Music--Copyright, Music--Law and legislation
Recommended Citation
Jennifer Jenkins, Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture (2026)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_books/41
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.