Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero by Ezra Claverie ISBN 9781496851307, 9781496851338, 9781496851291, 9781496851321, 1496851307, 1496851331, 1496851293, 1496851323, 978149685131 instant download

Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero by Ezra Claverie ISBN 9781496851307, 9781496851338, 9781496851291, 9781496851321, 1496851307, 1496851331, 1496851293, 1496851323, 978149685131 instant download

In films based on characters published by DC Comics or Marvel Comics, no plot element recurs more often than a villain who tries to copy the hero’s powers—from technological trade secrets to alien DNA—thereby threatening mass destruction. But no other Hollywood genre obsesses over copying or warns that copying will lead to apocalypse. Copyright Vigilantes explains why. This book argues that Hollywood superhero movies reflect their own mode of production, specifically the comic-book publishers’ dependence upon work-for-hire contracts, which deny human creators the copyright to their work, and the Hollywood studios’ anti-piracy rhetoric, which frames video piracy as an apocalyptic threat not to their profits but to the security of the United States of America. After the introduction of DVDs in the late 1990s, superhero movie franchises quickly became a reliable source of profits, yet during the same period, bootlegging and peer-to-peer file-sharing seemed to threaten these profits. The narratives of superhero films reveal the studios’ alternation between wonder and apocalyptic dread. The DC-Marvel duopoly depends upon work-for-hire contacts to expropriate copyrights from creative workers, and this use of copyright meshed neatly with Hollywood’s anxiety about unauthorized duplication and dissemination. The result is a film genre where action heroes routinely defend intellectual property by force. Against claims that duopoly films seek to assuage public anxieties after September 11th, this book argues that they work even harder to assuage corporate anxieties about a changing marketplace.