Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language

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 considering how best to locate copyright within the parameters of traditional property discourse. 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.

On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775)

Taking as its point of departure the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695, this book examines the lead up to the passage of the Statute of Anne 1710 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 1710 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 labour. 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 to exhibit the character of long-standing myth, and the centrality of the modern proprietary author as the raison d'etre of the modern copyright regime is displaced.

By our tongues united? Irish and Scots language contact in rural Ulster

This article suggests that the impact of long-term language contact between the languages of Irish, Scots and English in the province of Ulster led to a hybridisation of accent which challenges traditional ethnolinguistic differentiations - namely, the myth that Catholics and Protestants can be differentiated by their accent. The digitisation of archive recordings from the Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English (TRSHE) permitted a detailed phonetic analysis of two speakers from Atticall, a rural townland in the Mourne Mountains with a unique geographical and linguistic setting, due to the close proximity of Ulster Scots and Irish speakers in the area. Phonological features associated with Irish, Northern English and Lowland Scots were garnered from previous dialectological research in Irish, English and Scots phonologies, which aided with the interpretation of the data. Other contemporaneous recordings from the TRSHE allowed further comparison of phonological features with areas of Ulster in which linguistic interaction between Scots and Irish was expected to be less prevalent, such as Arranmore, Donegal (primarily Irish) and Glarryford, Antrim (primarily Scots). Accommodation theory and substrate/superstrate interaction illuminate patterns of phonological transfer in Mourne, Arranmore and Glarryford English, supporting the conclusion that accent in contemporary Northern Ireland is built upon a linguistic heritage of contact and exchange, rather than political or ethnolinguistic division