University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2018 What We Don't See When We See Copyright as Property Jessica Litman University of Michigan Law School,
[email protected] Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/2018 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles Part of the Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Law and Society Commons, and the Legislation Commons Recommended Citation Jessica D. Litman. "What We Don't See When We See Copyright as Property." Cambridge L. J. 77, no. 3 (2018): 536-58. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. WHAT WE DON’T SEE WHEN WE SEE COPYRIGHT AS PROPERTY JESSICA LITMAN* ABSTRACT. For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder.