Does News Have an Author? The Recurring Debate over Copyright for News
Résumé
Long before social media blurred the boundaries between producers and consumers of news, the question of whether news had an author haunted debates about literary property. News has often proven difficult to define. It has also tended to enjoy a vexed relationship to ideals of authorship prevailing in other realms. In Britain and the United States, attempts to copyright news in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often came up against the argument that news was not eligible for copyright because it did not have an author—it was collected rather than written. At the beginning of the twentieth century, news organizations began to make similar arguments, but for strategic reasons. They sought to exclude news from the realm of copyright in order to obtain protection from unfair competition and property law. In doing so, they argued that news lacked all the qualities associated with literary authorship, and for good reason: if news contained evidence of the mind of its creator, then it would be contaminated by invention and imagination. It would be fake. Literary and legal scholars have long been interested in how the rhetoric of original authorship shaped copyright law. A closer look at the case of news reveals how this rhetoric could vary by genre, complicating standard narratives about the expansion of copyright.