Richard L. Schur

Despite some annoying errors of law, both general and case-specific, this is a thought-provoking look at the ways in which intellectual property law has reinforced and interacted with the subordination of African-Americans. Schur connects real property with intellectual property as grounds of conflict between groups, so that there’s a direct connection between property in one’s person (freedom from slavery) and commodification as a strategy to survive and maybe even profit from American culture. Schur still doesn’t quite seem to embrace the idea that stronger IP rights would be a good idea, in terms of racial justice. And indeed, strong IP rights within a system that’s still racially biased won’t be much help to artists forced to contract away their rights. He argues that hip-hop aesthetics, full of sampling and irony and unfixed/multiple meanings, fails to be recognized as legitimate by current IP law, and that this is both a mistake and a raced mistake.… (mehr)