The gender gap in copyright is staggering – the aff marginalizes creative women

From an international perspective, copyright registries are rare. Because the U.S. Copyright Office has maintained a copyright registry for decades, it provides a potential wealth of information on copyright ownership over time. Unfortunately, unlike USPTO data, the Copyright Office does not share its data in a publicly available bulk format. Despite this challenge, Professors Robert Brauneis and Dotan Oliar performed an extensive empirical study of gender, racial, and age patterns in U.S. copyright registration from 1978 to 2012.84 Their analysis shows interesting differences in both the types of works and registration rates for various groups.85 They found that White authors are substantially overrepresented, accounting for nearly 80% of registrations or 116% of their proportion of the general population.86 Interestingly, Black authors are even more overrepresented, accounting for 14–15% of all registrations,87 or 120% of their proportion of the general U.S. population.88 Latinx authors had the lowest registration rate, accounting for less than 10% of all copyright registrations, a rate only 44.6% of their proportion of the general U.S. population.89 Brauneis and Oliar also found that members of different races and ethnicities differ substantially in the types of work they register.90 For example, White authors predominate in dramatic works and software, while Black authors predominate in music and drama, and Latinx authors predominate in music and movies. Asians and Pacific Islanders were the strongest in art and software and weakest in music and drama,91 while those who identified as Jewish were associated with a high per-capita rate of registrations, mainly of textual works.92 With regard to gender, Brauneis and Oliar found that two-thirds of registered authors were male but that this gender gap differs across types of works. 93 Female authors also increased their representation over time.94 Still, the proportion of registered female authors remained at less than the proportion of women in the labor force.95 The fields least dominated by male authors were art and text, while the fields most dominated by men were movies and software.96 The degree to which female authors were increasing in representation varied by type of work97 and was driven mainly by textual works.98 A number of scholars analyze the intersection of copyright law and gender from a feminist perspective, and some conclude that the doctrines and the institutions that apply it have done so in a way that undermines women’s creativity. Professor Shelley Wright conducted an early feminist analysis of copyright law, focusing on two genres that were denigrated despite—or perhaps because of—significant contributions from women: the English novel and needlework.99 She concludes that creative women have been marginalized by ideologies surrounding the artistic process such that women authors and artists are not recognized as creators of “art” but rather of “crafts” and “domestic arts” below the minimum threshold for legal protection.100 Copyright law’s economic and moral rights, by contrast, are more individualistic and patriarchal, such that protected categories of art become “masculinized.”101 Other legal scholars suggest that copyright tends to exclude female forms of creativity and knowledge.102 Copyright laws thus have an impactupon whether women are treated equally to men in copyright-related contexts.103 Copyright doctrine’s focus on individual author control over works may also interfere with feminist use of collaborative authorship or relational structures104 rather than ensuring dynamic audience participation in the creative process.105 Similarly, copyright law provides lesser protections for derivative works, such as fan fiction and art, that are often produced by and for women.106