Aman Gebru (University of Houston Law Center) has posted Communal Authorship (University of Richmond Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
A literary or artistic expression created by an individual author fits neatly in the copyright system. Many of the rules were developed with the sole author in mind. Thus, copyright law struggles to govern expressions generated by teams. But even in such scenarios, recently developed joint authorship rules have addressed complicated ownership questions. In contrast to solo and team-authored works, the copyright system fails in a third category, what this Article labels communal authorship. The Article uses four case studies—hackathons, memes, dance crazes, and traditional cultural expressions—to explain the mismatch. It describes communal authorship as having the key features of numerosity, informality, temporality, and intentionality—features that make the applicability of copyright law challenging. The large-scale nature of the collaboration, the absence of a central figure with creative control, the dynamic nature of the work, and the strong norm of sharing, make communal authorship unique. The mismatch between copyright law and communal authorship results in confusion which in turn discourages creative expression and enables some to appropriate value created by others. Through the communal authorship theory, the Article offers a novel analytical framework to examine the governance of communally authored works which are and will continue to be important forms of expression, especially in digital platforms.
