Translation, Copyright & Authority
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Alan Cunningham
Alan Cunningham (LLB, LLM, PHD) is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester School of Law. Has previously held positions at Queen Mary, University of London, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, Berlin. His research interests lie at the intersections between law as it relates to a variety of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices and law and information technology, with intellectual property legal issues and questions of ownership and use being a common thread.
Abstract
The UK copyright law regime presents the right to adapt as the sole, authoritative instrument in matters of legitimising translation; a legal “Big Other” conferring an otherwise unreal objective commodity status on what are instead always only ever individual and subjective acts of translation. Drawing primarily on the work of Theo Hermans, and the experiences of poet Jack Underwood in unsuccessfully attempting to formally translate poems by Mascha Kaléko, this article argues for (a) the development and (at the very least) implicit recognition of deviationist and subversive translative replies within – or at the very least alongside – the traditional UK legal schema and (b) a softening of the UK right to adapt by application of the integrity moral right to translations. In addition, a deeper quasi-Ungerian notion of institutional change that accommodates both principles (e. g. legitimate translations can, of course, be argued to exist, to which copyright accords) and counterprinciples (there are also, however, in the long term only multiple acts of translation, some preferred and commoditized, some existing outside that sphere, less functional and more creative/expressive but no less important and not to be prevented for those reasons) can also be advanced. Finally, a much broader critical point regarding the nature and role (or non-role) of law in the context of creative practices more generally can also be presented.
About the author
Alan Cunningham (LLB, LLM, PHD) is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester School of Law. Has previously held positions at Queen Mary, University of London, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the Node Centre for Curatorial Studies, Berlin. His research interests lie at the intersections between law as it relates to a variety of contemporary artistic and curatorial practices and law and information technology, with intellectual property legal issues and questions of ownership and use being a common thread.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Law and Borders: Territory, Space and Time between Diversity and Protection
- The Law and the Line: The Literary Mirroring of a Paradigm
- Half of a Yellow Sun or the Quest for (and Repression of) New Boundaries in Post-Colonial Nigeria: An International Law Analysis
- Freedom’s Frontiers: The Travails of LGBT Travelers
- Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self
- Donʼt Ask Us for Lex. Body Exhibition and Forms of Exclusion
- Research
- A Revenger’s Tragedy
- Translation, Copyright & Authority
- Semantics of Chaos: Modernity, Law and the Commons
- Tubal, Shylock, and the Myth of Venice
- Law Meets Literature: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide Studies
- Literature, Art and the Democracy to Come: A Legal Approach to The Danish Girl
- Book Reviews
- Dale Barleben: Staging the Trials of Modernism. Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness
- Lucky Belder Helle Porsdam: Negotiating Cultural Rights. Issues at Stake, Challenges and Recommendations
