This chapter draws all the threads together, highlighting the profound impact that artificial intelligence is likely to have on the landscape of intellectual property. It summarizes the core arguments of the book and sets out the author’s proposed strategies for adapting intellectual property law to the age of AI. By embracing these approaches, the chapter argues, one can ensure that intellectual property law continues to protect human creativity and innovation in the digital age.

This chapter explores the overall significance of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it became associated with authorship, the fine arts, and nature in ways that helped produce a new form of cultural nationalism. The Romantic idea of genius supported new versions of both autonomous individualism and national identity, as readers identified through the genius of representative “great men” with the nation. Genius in this way simultaneously individuated and connected, playing a key role in the formation of national high cultures and canons as well as the overall creation of a liberal democratic social order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, genius also became increasingly associated with wild and sublime nature, naturalizing these newly emerging forms of social identity and laying the groundwork for the landscape of genius.

A capitalist market has been part of modern Russian literature since at least the early nineteenth century. Even during the Soviet era, the market was never entirely abolished. But when socialism fell in 1991, capitalism rushed in. This chapter focuses on the economic, social, and aesthetic consequences of the market in post-Soviet Russian literature. The book market boomed just as thick journals and legacy critics lost cultural authority, and as readers, publishers, and writers were pulled towards bestselling imports, largely western pulp. Drawn by success and fascinated by new forms, many authors innovated genre conventions, authorial performance, and audience interaction, using misdirection, mystification, and online and social media, among other strategies. Others mobilised the terms of capitalism to mount a critique of the illusory values of the new market society.

The age of devotion is a descriptive designation for the period commonly labelled medieval, when the majority of literary texts were produced for devotional purposes. In the Russian context this extends roughly to the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter outlines and illustrates three approaches to the study of this literature: synchronic, diachronic, and dynamic. The synchronic approach emphasises features that are broadly characteristic of the age as a whole, such as the religious milieu (Orthodox Christianity), the language of high culture (Church Slavonic, in various interactions with East Slavonic), the medium of transmission (manuscript rather than print), and the problem of authorship (the prevalence of anonymity, the role of the scribe). The diachronic approach has produced various attempts to identify distinct periods in literary development. The dynamic approach emphasises the mutability of literary texts, such that it is necessary to view a work as a field of variously realised textual possibilities.

In a prior study, one of the authors uncovered a striking degree of imbalance with respect to rates of copyright registrations between men and women. Although women made up roughly half of the population between 1978 and 2012, they authored only one third of all registered works. If the U.S. Copyright Office is to properly “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” then we must seek to understand what may be contributing to lower rates of creative authorship and copyright registration by women. This chapter discusses several factors that may contribute to the historic inequality in rates of copyright authorship by men and women. Far from exhaustive, the chapter provides a snapshot of some of the structural and economic factors that may discourage authorship by women. Specifically, the authors consider whether the gender disparity in rates of authorship is reflective of gender dynamics in other intellectual property holdings, property ownership more generally, and gender disparity within various creative professions.

Although the 13 United States courts of appeals are the final word on 99 percent of all federal cases, there is no detailed account of how these courts operate. How do judges decide which decisions are binding precedents and which are not? Who decides whether appeals are argued orally? What administrative structures do these courts have? The answers to these and hundreds of other questions are largely unknown, not only to lawyers and legal academics but also to many within the judiciary itself. Written and Unwritten is the first book to provide an inside look at how these courts operate. An unprecedented contribution to the field of judicial administration, the book collects the differing local rules and internal procedures of each court of appeals. In-depth interviews of the chief judges of all 13 circuits and surveys of all clerks of court reveal previously undisclosed practices and customs.

This chapter examines Lucian’s Erotes to explore qustions of authorship and agency. It explores how questions about authorship operate differently for erotic and non-erotic works and the ways in which erotic discourse is more amenable to anonymous or masked authors. The chapter shows how according Lucianic authorship to this text enriches our understanding of other texts by Lucian. It examines how the Erotes functions to critique normative sexual discourse and suggest that in the comparison between men and women as love objects the text underlines the tiredness and conventionality of this debate and the rhetorical tropes that are employed in it. By contrast, this reading of the Erotes seeks to locate the critical frisson of the text (its ‘kink’) in its discussion of the magnitude of male appetite and the way the text correlates sex and the divine.

It has long been argued that digital textuality fundamentally alters familiar conceptions of literary authorship. Critics such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Mark Poster have articulated a conception whereby the interactive affordances of digital textuality level the playing field between author and reader. Rather than consuming the text passively, readers become “coauthors,” actively creating a unique narrative through their interactions and narrative choices. While these bold prophesies may not have materialized, digital textuality has worked to challenge the model of individual authorship. This chapter looks at two contemporary practices that serve to promote and “normalize” group authorship: fanfiction and social reading. It provides a literary history of collective authorship and analyzes the pressure that fan sites like FanFiction.net and An Archive of Our Own are putting on our conventional means of evaluating literary excellence, notably by challenging conceptions of originality and distinctiveness. It also considers how another facet of digital reading – social reading, as practiced on sites like Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter – is creating new feedback loops between authors and readers, facilitating the development of new “interpretive communities,” and working to undermine the centrality of the solitary genius and the solitary reader to literary production and reception.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter provides a brief and accessible account, not just of Goldsmith’s life and literary career, but also of the ways in which he was perceived by his contemporaries, often as intellectually lightweight and somewhat foolish. That perception is questioned here, as is the traditional biographical presentation of Goldsmith as long-suffering and put upon. He is presented here rather as a survivor and a literary success. The tradition of biographical writing is also briefly sketched.

There is a critical tendency to see Goldsmith now as a dramatist, a novelist, perhaps an essayist – with seldom more than a nod to the actual format in which much of his work was done, and without which he quite possibly would have starved. Goldsmith wrote, willingly, in both forms simultaneously, while apparently fending off personal ambivalence about both. Goldsmith’s wide-ranging periodical and reviewing work is accepted as helpful to the Goldsmith scholar, in that it allows us to theorize the development of his interest in the stage, in French literature, in aesthetic theory, in orientalized subjects, and, though in more indirect ways, in fiction as well. This chapter demonstrates that his career is an exceptional window into the importance of periodical writing to individual authors as well as the culture of reviewing writ large.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

This contribution attempts to reconstruct the lost voices of Roman freed persons by focusing on the performative function of literary texts, rather than on their authorship. A study of the performative function of texts considers the contextual motivations of an author’s decision to cite, (re)phrase, and frame freed person’s words, and allows for a nuanced deconstruction of certain passages that might otherwise be labeled merely “elite discourse.” The texts chosen for this analysis are Cicero’s correspondence with Tiro, Tacitus’ historical works, and a letter written by the freed man Timarchides as quoted by Cicero in his oratio against Verres. Ultimately, the contribution’s goal is to suggest a methodological approach that – to some extent – rehabilitates literary texts as evidence for the freed person’s voice, and to argue that the value of literary sources when trying to recover this voice lies specifically in the tension between the public limits of freed persons’ (discursive) agency on the one hand, and the range and inventiveness of their self-representation in the context of their own or their patron’s trust network on the other.