Watching Hollywood spin off new films in well-received movie franchises – think 2023s Fast X (also known as Fast and Furious 10) – is a reminder of that powerful yet intangible economic force known as ‘intellectual property’. Whether all consumers (audiences, in the case of action series like the double-digit Fast and Furious) realize or care that it is intellectual property that largely propels the production for the next ‘blockbuster’ is unlikely, but film studios certainly know it. Sony’s recent attempt to launch a franchise with Madame Web (2024), a Spiderman franchise spin-off, had a relatively poor opening weekend at box offices in the United States. The immediate effect was a public, media alert to the likely fate of other potential Spiderman spin-offs. This alert was not mostly focused on the aesthetic or entertainment loss of Madame Web failing to excite the US box office, but on the loss of leverage of the franchise’s intellectual property.
Thoughts therefore turn to the relative dearth of education about intellectual property rights. Education, that is, about why they exist and how they work, and who benefits from them, and the methods by which those corporations and those individuals benefit. Education in our high schools and in our colleges. In Western societies, we can trace the birth of the idea of intellectual property (IP) back as far as the early fifteenth century, with the emergence of laws in Europe designed to issue patents; but, it is in 17th and early 18th centuries that the notion of intellectual property truly takes shape. Of particular interest, is the Statue of Anne (1710) which contains such memorable provisions as:
That from and after the tenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and ten, the author of any book or books already printed, who hath not transferred to any other the copy or copies of such book or books … shall have the sole right and liberty of printing such book and books for the term of one and twenty years (Statute of Anne)
It strikes me that in all modern higher education in literature, drama, film and music little was said of who owned the results of their creative labour. When in the mid-1990s emerging contemporary digital culture opened up the reach of the creative efforts of individuals and of creative industries companies, still IP was not a feature of the teaching of movie making or playwriting or game production. Nor is it today. Sure, it is mentioned. Sometimes there are even entire college classes devoted to it. But do we teach it enough – given how much IP highlights the value of creative practice and the given the considerable worth of the creative industries to almost every national economy? In the eighteenth Century, when the modern industrial economies of Europe were only just emerging, intellectual property rights related to creative works was a newish idea. But not now. Exploring and teaching and researching any result of human creative practice reveals a multitude of values. Some might argue about the aesthetic worth of Fast X and Madame Web; but no one would question their realized (or unrealized!) economic value.
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