Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law
41 Pages Posted: 18 May 2006
Abstract
Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largely unexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyright protections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when evaluating the impacts and performance of intellectual property laws.
Keywords: Copyright, intellectual property, gender, women, feminism
JEL Classification: K1, K2, K3, K4, K10, K30, K19, K49
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation