Ronan Deazley – författare

The regulation of the body provides an important concern in law, medical practice and culture. This volume contributes to existing research in the area by encouraging experts from a range of related disciplines to consider the legal, cultural and medical ways in which we regulate the body, further exploring how conceptions of self, liberalism, property and harm inform and influence contentious legal and ethical questions about what we can and cannot do to or with our own bodies.

The regulation of the body provides an important concern in law, medical practice and culture. This volume contributes to existing research in the area by encouraging experts from a range of related disciplines to consider the legal, cultural and medical ways in which we regulate the body, further exploring how conceptions of self, liberalism, property and harm inform and influence contentious legal and ethical questions about what we can and cannot do to or with our own bodies.

Taking as its point of departure the lapse of the Licensing Act 1662 in 1695, this book examines the lead up to the passage of the Statute of Anne 1709 and charts the movement of copyright law throughout the eighteenth century, culminating in the House of Lords decision in Donaldson v Becket (1774). The established reading of copyright's development throughout this period, from the 1709 Act to the pronouncement in Donaldson, is that it was transformed from a publisher's right to an author's right; that is, legislation initially designed to regulate the marketplace of the bookseller and publisher evolved into an instrument that functioned to recognise the proprietary inevitability of an author's intellectual labours. The historical narrative which unfolds within this book presents a challenge to that accepted orthodoxy. The traditional analysis of the development of copyright in eighteenth-century Britain is revealed as exhibiting the character of long-standing myth, and the centrality of the modern proprietary author as the raison d'etre of the copyright regime is displaced.

This book provides the reader with a critical insight into the history and theory of copyright within contemporary legal and cultural discourse. It exposes as myth the orthodox history of the development of copyright law in eighteenth-century Britain and explores the way in which that myth became entrenched throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this historical analysis are added two theoretical approaches to copyright not otherwise found in mainstream contemporary texts. Rethinking Copyright introduces the reader to copyright through the prism of the public domain before turning to the question as to how best to locate copyright within the parameters of traditional property discourse. Moreover, underpinning these various historical and theoretical strands, the book explores the constitutive power of legal writing and the place of rhetoric in framing and determining contemporary copyright policy and discourse.Ronan Deazley's book will be of interest to academics and practitioners of law and intellectual property. The work should also be of interest to those working in alternate disciplines such as literary and cultural theorists and bibliographers