Blogging about race, authorship, and law

[rivkat]

I once bollixed an interview by not having anything worthwhile to say about the subject of race and intellectual property law.  I still don’t think I have much to say, though I can point you to Kevin Greene, who’s doing interesting work about the role of black artists in American copyright law, here and here.  His work ties into the cultural appropriation debates on LJ, which have often asked questions about artistic choices.  Looking at it from a legal angle increases one’s focus on the material consequences – the empty bank accounts, the records that didn’t go gold, etc. – of appropriation. 

As Greene points out, lots of important IP cases have African-American plaintiffs and/or defendants.  I’ve been thinking about copyright and gender, and both race and gender matter in the important Supreme Court case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.  2 Live Crew mocked Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman with a version of their own, and the Supreme Court concluded that the “big hairy woman” in the latter offered parodic commentary on the “pretty woman” in the former.  Here’s a question: When you imagine the respective women described in those songs, what race are they?  Would it matter to your view of the song if Orbison were singing about a woman of color?  Or if 2 Live Crew were singing about a white or Asian woman?  (The lyrics mention that she’s got an afro, which is a cultural clue – but then so is 2 Live Crew’s racial composition.)

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Both "bald-headed" and "big hairy" are in there, in different verses.

Julia Roberts is indelibly associated with that song, I agree. Though I bet people thought of the pretty woman as white even before that.

[yahtzee63.livejournal.com]

You are undoubtedly right, at least insofar as white listeners go; I don't know if listeners of color would have had different assumptions. But for myself, I cannot remember the bleak and lonely days Before Julia.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

My hypothesis -- though I admit, it's based on pure supposition -- is that people think of the girl (or guy) a song is about as the same race as the race of the singer, by default. But maybe that's completely bogus and really what's going on is that people often imagine someone of their own race, which might often produce the same result because of racial patterns of listening. MTV/music videos also affect this, since now we often are given a specific body to associate with the subject of the song.

[the_rck]

It's hard to say about other listeners. One of my friends in college (she's now my sister-in-law) was Chinese American, and she told me that she had real trouble thinking of herself as attractive because she wasn't white and because, even if she were, her features didn't conform to the cultural standards of beauty that she'd seen all her life.

In my opinion, she was (and still is) quite attractive, but even though she knew that she'd internalized a false message, I don't know that she ever really managed to get rid of the feeling that she could never be attractive.