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The UC Irvine Law Review (ISSN 2327-4514) was founded in the spring of 2010, during the inaugural year of the UC Irvine School of Law. We aim to promote exceptional legal scholarship by featuring contributions from a spectrum of academic, practical, and student perspectives. As the flagship journal of the UC Irvine School of Law, the UC Irvine Law Review is dedicated to embodying the values, spirit, and diversity of UCI Law in its membership, leadership, and scholarship. Please contact the Law Review at [email protected].
Volume 9, Issue 2, 2019
Articles
Fearless Girl Meets Charging Bull: Copyright and the Regulation of Intertextuality
This Article approaches the Fearless Girl/Charging Bull controversy as a case study in how copyright law regulates conditions of interaction between existing artistic works and new ones, in order to protect the value and integrity of the former without diminishing production of the latter. To assess the merits of sculptor Arturo DiModica’s legal claims in light of the policies underlying copyright law, I turn to the theory of intertextuality and the work of two narrative theorists—M.M. Bakhtin and Gerard Genette. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and Genette’s concept of hypertextuality are especially useful for understanding how the intertextual relationship between Fearless Girl and Charging Bull fits within the range of work-to-work and author-to-author relationships with which literary theory and copyright law are mutually concerned. Analyzing the Fearless Girl controversy through the concepts of dialogism and hypertextuality surfaces a clash between DiModica’s Continental view of copyright as a guarantor of authorial supremacy and the utilitarian orientation of U.S. copyright law, which gives authors less control over “second-degree” texts than DiModica would like.