Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and maintain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role (One that is largely unexamined by legal scholars) in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. Ann Bartow considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect. She proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal system by advocating for lenient copyright protections, and emphasizes the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when evaluating the impacts and action intellectual property laws hold in the process of creating cultural capital and what that means in the grander scheme of power relations.
Bartow speaks from a feminist perspective pointing out the substantial differences between men and women within the context of copyright law seeing the divides (which go overlooked due to more obvious and perhaps more pressing issues related to gender inequality) as fundamentally social. Bartow recognizes and brings attention to the infrastructure of copyright law as gender biased seeing it as unjust, contingent and imposed but also complicated in its solution.
Feminism seeks to empower women on their own terms. To value what women have done, what they have the ability to create and the methods they use to create. Copyright law was created to facilitate commerce; however they are created by men. The rigidity of copyright law, which protects only an individually created work, does not allow for the methods used by women’s creative endeavors to be recognized or legitimized for commercialization. Because of this Bartow concludes that women do not have the opportunity to seek royalties. The action of not pursuing commerce is then not voluntary. Creative industry sectors are dominated and controlled by men (i.e. publishing, film, television, theater, art dealing and music business). Consequently men choose what will be commercialized; they do so with a male established criterion setting the standard based on what men deem as worthy of commercialization, which Bartow suggests is gender biased when considering the different interests of both men and women.
The gender-linked social norm of collaborative engagement to create work suggests that if a woman seeks to obtain “individual authorship rights and attribute credit to their work” she then faces being labeled selfish and greedy (however I question who is doing the labeling, men or other women?).
Secondly if they do keep to the “collaborative norms” and do not seek to actively call themselves “sole authors” of a work, they loose the opportunity to gain recognition, control and the possibility of income. In not gaining this recognition and visibility in the commercialized domain, female work then is categorized and “typecast” in a way where it becomes less important within the framework of society. Female work looses its strength when comparing it to male created work because it is not shown in a light that showcases its force.
Women may need to adopt male views and strategies to succeed in male-dominated sectors, according to Bartow. However this then creates a form of overshadowing, a hierarchy that deems male “stratagem” better than or more effective than female methods. Copyright forces women to compare their work to that of men, to measure their work by male standards, on male terms. Bartow’s assessment of copyright analysis does seek to access the male world. She does criticize female exclusion from male pursuits. Creating a more lenient ideology of copyright laws, one that is not set by a male standard and places value on male interests and methods of creating work, allows female work to be valued, but also to have access to the process of definition of value itself. In this way, the demand for access to gain the right of copyright protection for “non-traditionally” accepted material also becomes a demand for change in how society views female interest. It becomes a legitimizing force which brings in the pursuits to create cultural and economic capital from the women’s point of view, from the standpoint of their social experience as women.
The issue with copyright law is not the gender difference but the difference gender makes, the social meaning imposed upon women through the technical wording and process of obtaining copyright—what it means to be a woman or a man is a social process and, as such, is subject to change. Feminist copyright law theory does not seek sameness with men. It instead criticizes what men have made of themselves, of their work— it points out the disparities in consumerism and the intermediate factors that attribute to a notion of male superiority in creative work. Bartow claims that copyright law must seek a transformation in the terms and conditions of power itself.
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