Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet by Peter Decherney (review)

The social impact of particular technologies is rarely forecast accurately. Even when we know what new machines can do, we are frequently surprised by what users choose to do with them. Even when the impact is predictable, the complexities of controlling it are rarely thought through in advance. Regulations - whether formal, codified laws or informal sets of social expectations - emerge in response to emerging technologies, not in advance of them. Would-be regulators thus become enmeshed in a perpetual game of catch-up, dutifully trying to fit a social harness onto the last disruptive technology even as the next emerges from some corporate R&D lab or basement workshop. The century-long battle over how to regulate the duplication of moving images is, as Peter Decherney's superb Hollywood's Copyright Wars makes clear, an especially spectacular example of this process.

The mere existence of motion picture technology was, Decherney shows, disruptive of copyright law as it existed in the United States around 1900. It was far from clear, for example, whether the new art form was primarily visual or primarily narrative, or even whether it was an art form - a creative work rather than simply a mechanical recording of nature - at all. Rival film companies built business plans on conflicting models of film copyright, lawyers espoused a wide spectrum of legal positions, and judges handed down incompatible rulings. Consensus emerged slowly, and often awkwardly. We are so used to the idea that copyright attaches to the motion picture as a whole, not to each frame individually, that it is hard to imagine a time when the question was seriously discussed. Decherney's first chapter ("Piracy and the Birth of Film") deftly recreates that time, however, and shows how the foundational assumptions about motion picture copyright - assumptions we now take for granted - first took form.

Subsequent chapters deal with subsequent challenges to the consensus about copyright that emerged in the early years of the film industry. "Hollywood's Golden Age of Plagiarism," for example, examines how court cases contesting whether a character (like Charlie Chaplin's iconic "Little Tramp") or a plot (like that of Harold Lloyd's 1925 hit, The Freshman) could be copyrighted clarified the line between imitation and theft. "Auteurism on Trial" examines the notion of artists' "moral right" to preserve the integrity of their work, as it played out in disputes over colorizing films and editing them for television. "Hollywood's Guerilla War" explores how the evolution of ideas about "fair use" linked the work of independent filmmakers like Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising) and Todd Haynes (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) to the fate of the emerging home video market. The last of the book's five substantive chapters, "Digital Hollywood," carries the story into the era of DVDs and YouTube and addresses the impact of copy protection.

The five main chapters of the book function as a series of tightly linked case studies rather than a single seamless narrative. There are significant leaps in chronology as Decherney moves from one key court decision to another, and the opening sections of some later chapters reach back to the pre-1914 era to set the context for events that unfolded decades later. The work as a whole assumes a familiarity with the basic outlines of the history of American film. Edison and Pathé, Chaplin and Keaton, Capra and Scorcese, all take their turns on the stage without elaborate scene-settings or introductions. Technological and legal concepts relevant to the story are, by contrast, introduced with clear, efficient explanations of how they work: The "Digital Hollywood" chapter, for example, includes a non-technical overview of copy protection mechanisms, and a concise summary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (no small achievement!). Hollywood's Copyright Wars conveys, throughout, an air of prodigious knowledge, lightly worn. Just how prodigious is evident from the extensive notes, which range across statutes, court decisions, studio...