Fair Use and Gendered Norms

Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina School of Law, is publishing “Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law,” in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law. Here is the abstract.

Copyright laws are writtenand enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control overthe resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people arepredominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largelyunexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economicinequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways inwhich gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critiqueof the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyrightprotections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economicdisparities between women and men when evaluating the impacts and performanceof intellectual property laws.

Download the entire article from SSRN here.