Copyright consciousness: Musical creativity and intellectual property in Turkey By DaveFossum. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025. 296 pp.
Year: 2025
Type: paratext
Abstract: In Copyright Consciousness, Dave Fossum shows how artists, administrators, and state institutions collectively shape the meaning of copyright in Turkey's music world.Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic and archival research, he approaches copyright less as a code of law than as a dynamic terrain where creative practice and legal reasoning meet.The book is an ethnography of legality in motion: it examines how musicians, judges, and cultural officials make law sensible through argument, rumor, and performance.Copyright here becomes a social idiom through which people negotiate authorship, fairness, and value.Fossum demonstrates how copyright's failures-its perceived gaps, contradictions, and ambiguitiesare not simply dysfunctions but generative conditions for legal meaning itself.The book opens with vivid scenes: collecting-society members lament "discarded rights" with a wordplay between telif (copyright) and telef (wasted); an industry leader calls copyright a "matter of liberty"; and musicians criticize copyright's Western individualism (pp.1-3).Fossum treats these scenes as evidence of a broader vernacular legality, that is, a moral and aesthetic field where ideals of justice, creativity, and national belonging converge.Drawing on sociolegal theories of legal consciousness (pp.3-15), he tracks how actors experience the gap between "law on the books" and law in practice, and how that gap helps people imagine Turkey's place in the world.This double awareness of law as both an external standard and an internalized aspiration becomes central to Fossum's account of how legality acquires affective life.Copyright Consciousness unfolds across six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion.The early chapters trace the genealogy of copyright reform within Turkey's modernization projects; the later ones turn to contemporary disputes among musicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats.The book moves fluidly between courtroom ethnography, policy archives, and the everyday politics of collecting societies such as the Turkish Musical Work Owners' Society (MESAM).Fossum's materials, including interviews, media transcripts, and legal documents, bridge
Source: American Ethnologist
DOI: 10.1111/amet.70038
Author: Fulya Pinar
Institution: Middlebury College
Language: English
Topic: Intellectual Property Law
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417512151
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