Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Cultural Studies of the United States)

Jane M. Gaines examines the phenomenon of images as property, focusing on the legal staus of mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. Bridging the fields of critical legal studies and cultural studies, she analyzes copyright, trademark, and intellectual property law, asking how the law constructs works of authorship and who owns the country’s cultural heritage.

This provocative book examines the phenomenon of images as property, specifically mechanically produced visual and audio images from popular culture. By looking at legal texts - such as judicial opinions and stars' contracts - as cultural artifacts in their own right, and by offering a poststructualist analysis of these texts, Jane Gaines explores not only the legal but the cultural status of these icons. She discusses such legal questions as individual authorship of an image versus its corporate ownership and the right to privacy versus the right to publicity.