Copyright and Cultural Hierarchy: How the Law Shapes the Perception of Music
Dr Jiarong Zhang (Newcastle University)
Monday 5 April 2027 | 8:30 AM (London, UK) | Check your time zone
The presentation is based on a forthcoming monograph of the same title. It explores how UK copyright law has shaped a ‘cultural hierarchy’ of music, ascribing (Western) Classical music to ‘high culture’ and (Scottish) traditional music to ‘low culture’. Taking a socio-legal, critical, and interdisciplinary (i.e., law and music/cultural studies) approach, the research examines the following questions: (1) it reveals UK copyright law’s hierarchical protection accorded to different music manifestations and dissects it into the notions of originality, authorship, and fixation; (2) it examines how these notions changed the respective production paradigms (i.e., creation process, creatorship, creation form) of classical music and traditional music during 1770s-1840s; and (3) it analyses how these changes endowed each music genre with new aesthetic characteristics and thus ascribed it to either ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture under the modern system of fine arts. The analysis of the three interwoven questions constructs a model of how copyright law shapes the perception of music.
It stands as the first book-length, focused research to debunk the cultural hierarchy of music through a copyright lens. It therefore provides innovative insights into copyright law’s impacts on cultural production and perception. The presentation will be of great interest to intellectual property scholars, legal historians, (ethno)musicologists, and other researchers interested in the intersection between law and music.
Jiarong Zhang is currently a Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at Newcastle University (UK). Before this, she was an Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She completed her PhD at the CREATe Centre, University of Glasgow (Scotland). Jiarong’ s recent research centres on two streams. The first, IP Law and Cultural Production, examines the role of IP in cultural production through the lenses of cultural studies, critical IP theory, and copyright legal history. The second, IP Law and Emerging Technologies, focuses on issues of digital assets and cultural participation in the context of GAI.