Parchment, Pixels, & Personhood: User Rights and the IP (Identity Politics) of IP (Intellectual Property)

This Article challenges copyright's prevailing narrative on personhood, which has typically focused on the identity interests that authors enjoy in their creative output. Instead, the analysis explores the personhood interests that consumers possess in copyrighted works. Drawing on a wide range of examples-from flag burning as copyright infringement, the "Kookaburra"c ontroversy, and the crowd-sourced origins of the Serenity Prayer to the reported innumeracy of the enigmatic Piraha Amazonians, the apocryphal source of ancient Alexandria's Royal Library and the unusually fragile nature of digital media-the Article advances a Hegelian refutation to intellectual property maximalism and a theory of copyright that recognizes the crucial link between identity politics and the legal regime governing the monopolization and control of cultural symbols and creative works.