The Centre for Innovation Law & Policy Workshop series

presents

Michael Birnhack

Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University

Colonial Copyright:

The Case of Authors’ Rights in Mandate Palestine

The talk discusses an early model of copyright globalization in the form of Colonial Copyright. Colonial Copyright is the widespread imposition of copyright law throughout the British Empire that took place when a foreign power exported its own legal toolkit and applied it to a territory and its people(s) previously unfamiliar with the idea of legal protection for creative works, at least not in the form we today call copyright. The notion of Colonial Copyright is developed through the intersection of three frameworks: legal transplants, legal colonialism and the particular subject matter of copyright law.

         The case study is that of Mandate Palestine (1917-1948). The first copyright law was the little known Ottoman Authors Right Act (1910), followed by British legislation (1920, 1924) applying imperial copyright law. The discussion queries the motivation to enact copyright law at the time – only a month after the establishment of the civil administration in 1920, and then the process of its reception. The law was first used by the British and by foreign players, namely the European Performing Rights Societies. The Hebrew Jewish community opted first for social norms of public shaming and turned to the law only in the mid-1930s. Among the Arab community, the British law was hardly used until the 1940s. The research is based on primary material found in archives in Israel and the UK, and attempts to draw a general picture about the state of Imperial copyright law in the early 20th century.
          
         Professor Michael Birnhack is professor at the faculty of law, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and is currently on a sabbatical leave as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. His research focuses on information law in several modes: its free circulation – under the heading of free speech; our control over personal information – i.e., privacy, and the commercialization of information, i.e., intellectual property. He has written on all these issues, and often about their intersection, such as the relationship between free speech and copyright law. He is interested in the cultural aspects of the law. In the past couple of years Michael is engaged in a legal history research on Colonial Copyright, which is the topic of the talk.

Light lunch will be served.

Sponsored by the Microsoft Law and the Information Society Project.

No RSVP is required. For more information, contact anny.vexler@utoronto.ca.