Performance as Intellectual Property: The Rights of Performers, Composers and Playwrights in France 1890-1950

This open access book is a cultural history of lawsuits that explains the development of French performance rights from la Belle Époque, via the roaring Twenties, and into Post-War France.

It does so by analysing the ways in which performers, composers, and playwrights used French court rooms, newspaper scandals, and international conferences to claim their rights to create and control musical and theatrical performance.

In 19th-century France, composers and playwrights organised in member-run societies that successfully used authors' rights legislation to curb the power of theatre managers. Towards the turn of the 20th century, these so-called collective management organisations had transformed French cultural industries by building out structures of royalty collection and improving litigation practices.

From the café-concert culture in 19th-century Montmartre, the rise of modern celebrity culture and mass media, to the French governments' management of radio entertainment in the interwar period, the book traces precedent-setting litigation that defined who creates and controls performance.

The book challenges previous narratives that centre the individualisation of authors in the expansion of the international copyright regime, while neglecting performers. Instead, it reveals the ways in which the personality and individuality of performers have played a constitutive role in discourses about genius, technology, and legal categories.

Performance as Intellectual Property is for anyone interested in the emerging of modern European cultural industries and the relationships between intellectual property systems, creativity, and art.