Please join us for a book talk with author and Stanford Center for Law and History Fellow Brent Salter: “Negotiating Copyright in the American Theatre: 1856-1951.”  The hybrid event is co-hosted between the Stanford Center for Law and History and the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford. Commentators for the event include Derek Miller (Harvard English), Kara Swanson (Northeastern Law), Marlis Schweitzer (York Theatre), Jose Bellido (Kent Law), and Ann Folino White (Michigan State Theatre). The event will be chaired by Amalia Kessler (SCLH Director and Stanford Law) and Kathy Bowrey (UNSW Law).

The event will also be stremaned at the HowlRound website.

Current guidelines do not allow us to bring food into events. For those who attend in-person, however, lunch will be provided at 12:20PM, 20 minutes before the talk at Room 320D, Stanford Law School.

We also ask all those who attend in-person to comply with current Stanford event guidelines which can be found here.

To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event.

Abstract:

The book is a historical account of how creation is negotiated in the American theatre. It is also about how the American theatre has structured its industry relationships and how industry stakeholders, and in particular dramatists, have responded to these structures through industry customs and collective organization. The research seeks to explain how stakeholders who controlled the transformation of the dramatic work from the playwright’s manuscript to the theatrical stage asserted expansive power over theatrical creation between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. These stakeholders (mediators of the American theatre) evolved in different forms: for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental. They included theatrical agents, transnational publishers, producers and managers that emerged and formed combination businesses, and government programs established during the New Deal. Instead of situating copyright law at the center of legal authority structures in the American theatre, the book explores how labor relationships, administrative structures and processes, control over material resources, informal guild expectations and minimum contracts, and other professional norms, all shape how theatre-makers relate cultural production to the more nebulous space of a realized theatrical performance on a stage.