IP intersects with semiotics – creates boundaries to dissent
Sonia Katyal, Jan 06, American Legal Scholar and current Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Research at UC Berkeley School of Law, Semiotic Disobedience, Washington University of Law Review Volume 84 Issue 3, https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180&context=law_lawreview#:~:text=This%20Article%20defines%20semiotic%20disobedience,for%20public%20use%20and%20expression. AN
Viewed through this prism, intellectual property law is no different. It creates boundaries that enfranchise certain types of speech at the expense of others. And, in doing so, it enables certain types of legal and illegal dissent, conferring legitimacy on some types of speech through the prism of fair use, but often excluding other types of expression from protection. Drawing on insights both from media and semiotic theory, I argue that intellectual property law tends only to protect appropriative expression that occupies the extreme poles of audience interpretation—works that either adopt, oppose, or completely transform the cultural meaning of an original commodity. Because the law fails to protect appropriative works that fall short of these poles, the marketplace of speech remains locked in a perpetual dance of opposites rather than protecting true expressive diversity. Rather than expanding the marketplace of protected speech, as the First Amendment attempts to do, intellectual property law tends to narrow its boundaries, thereby expanding the boundaries of the prohibited marketplace of speech instead.