When you were a student, office hours provided an opportunity to ask in-depth questions and to explore points of interest with your professor outside of class. Penn Alumni Office Hours provides this same opportunity to alumni – without the required reading or threat of a pop quiz. These live, in-depth, and interactive webinars offer Penn alumni an exclusive opportunity to engage in dialogue with Penn’s renowned faculty on a variety of topics.

February 15, 2012
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. MST
Office Hours with Peter Decherney
Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet
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Copyright law guides filmmakers’ artistic decisions; it underlies Hollywood’s corporate structure; and it determines how audiences consume media. Since the widespread adoption of the internet in the 1990s, copyright law has begun to affect an ever-expanding range of media producers and consumers, including amateur video makers, file sharers, and internet entrepreneurs. As a result, even high school students now hold strong opinions about copy protection, the public domain, and other complex areas of cultural policy that had previously been the obscure domain of legal experts. Join Peter Decherney, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and English, for a discussion about copyright's influence over the art and business of film. Learn how copyright disputes involving Edison, Chaplin, Spielberg, and others shaped the studio system. And discuss how digital intellectual property is changing the industry today.

Additional resources:
Copyright Wars > Decherney reacts to recent Supreme Court case

Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood? > New York Times op-ed (October 4, 2011).