 It's great to see you here in person and on on screen and various screens to join us to celebrate the wonderful Brent Salters lovely book, which we have a copy of here go get your own negotiating copyright in the American Theater 1856 1951. And I just wanted to just say a few words of thanks before we get started. So thanks to Stanford taps department of theater and performance studies and Matt Smith chair sitting sitting right there. We appreciate your support. Thanks to how around for hosting the live stream and in particular, Vijay Matthew and they are Rogers. Thanks to the ASL interpretation being provided by pro bono ASL Kevin de la Rosa, Susan Pacheco and Ashley Rodriguez, and thank you to the National captioning Institute and in particular, Jesse, yeah, do and forgive me if I am mispronouncing anybody. Okay, so let me just say a quick word about format. So, I'm going to say just a little bit of introduction here followed by Kathy Bowie, who's going to say more about Brent's scholarship. And then we will have comments by Derek Miller, Kara Swanson, Marla, Schweitzer and fully know and and then Brent will respond for a few minutes and we'll open up to questions. So I have the pleasure of introducing everyone. Kathy Kathy Bowie is a professor in the School of Law Society and criminology at the University of New South Wales. She is a co director of the International Society for the history and theory of intellectual property, and has among other things to include books, copyright creativity, big media and cultural value that just came out in 2021, and then co authored with fellow panelists, Jose Beito adventures in childhood intellectual property imagination, and the business of play, coming out with Cambridge press soon. Derek Miller is the john john L. Loeb associate professor of the humanities and associate director of undergraduate studies at Harvard, where he's based in the English department. He is the author of among other things copyright and the value of performance 1770 to 1911. And again, a whole bunch of other articles on theater history from a legal and economic perspective. With Brent, he co organized the first US conference on theater and copyright at Yale in 2018. Kara Swanson is a professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston. Her prize winning scholarship considers historical intersections among law science medicine and technology with particular attention to race gender sexuality and questions of property and intellectual property. Her first book is banking on the body the market and blood milk and sperm in modern America. And she has a new book in progress entitled inventing citizens race gender and patents. This Schweitzer is professor is a professor in the department of theater and performance at York University in Toronto. She's the author of a bunch of books, including when Broadway was the runway theater fashion and American culture. So transatlantic Broadway the infrastructural politics of global performance, and also blood tyrants and little pickles I love that name stage roles of Anglo American girls in the 19th century, which won the George freely freely memorial award from the theater library and she's a former editor of theater survey. And Felina white is associate professor of theater studies in the department of theater at Michigan State, where she was named the Michigan distinguished professor of the year by the Michigan Association of State She is editor of theater annual a journal of theater and performance of the Americas, and she's published a whole bunch of articles and her book plowed under food policy protest and performance and New Deal America received the CLR James book award from the working class studies organization. Jose beado is a reader in law at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. He is the Spanish national editor of primary sources on copyright 1450 to 1900 and online archive curated by Lionel Bentley and Martin Kretschmer. The book projects are landmark cases and intellectual property, and also adventures in childhood, intellectual property imagination and the business of play, which we just heard about because it is co authored with Kathy bowery. We'll leave it to Kathy to comment more on Brent's many talents as a scholar, I just wanted to take this opportunity, this moment of celebrating all things Brent to say a few brief words about how much Brent has mattered to law and history here at Stanford and here I speak on behalf of all of us who love and care about law and history at Stanford. Brent has been absolutely instrumental in everything we've done as a center in the years he's been here. I could take up the whole day today just talking about everything he's done so I can't but I'll you know mentioned a few. We drove our successful first time application for seed grant funding for a new digital legal history project. He and here I could just hear their endless details and this one alone he is the reason we survived and thrived during the hell that has been the pandemic. We're constantly brainstorming, you know, new things, including you know how do we involve students in our programming, which have all been wonderful. So I'll shut up because I want to leave time to talk about the book but you know from all of us really life without Brent is very difficult to imagine without your incredible creativity and your diligence and your passion and you're just all around kindness and wonderful here is a little something you don't have to open it now, but I want it to memorialized from all of us here, kind of a big little something. And with that please Kathy take it away. Hi, good morning, good evening, wherever you are. Look, I'm really, really pleased to have the opportunity to participate in today's event and this very worthy celebration of Brent's new book. And I'm going to just give some I guess an Australian background to Brent scholarship and very briefly talk about what the shadow of this Australian heritage brings to us that are studies. So I first heard about Brent when he was studying his undergraduate law degree in the early 2000s, but he already had a degree in performance studies at that point. And his law lecturers kept bringing me up saying you've really got to meet this guy. He's really interested in theater. He's fantastic in terms of history. He's involved in our digital humanities project here where there's a lot of digitization of early legal resources. You know, he's really interested in pursuing critical approaches to legal subject matter. And in the type of work that he does, he takes as little for granted as possible and really thinks deeply about the questions that need to be asked about that particular kind of social problem or issue. Brent went on and received the university medal and we spent a lot of time talking about PhD options and he was always torn between studying and law or theater studies, but in either school, if you like, or either in the discipline he was, he was obviously only particularly interested in pursuing historical approaches to the subject matter. Brent's first significant work on theater was published by a specialist Australian theater press in 2009, and that itself is a really mark of honour. I think it's probably the first legal scholarship that Enterprise had ever really published. And it's a really important press in Australia. In discussing it with him, I was really, really impressed by the way he was very deeply engaged with theater professionals as his informants. But he wasn't actually seeing them as informants where he was simply pillaging what theater professionals had to say and using that to, in a sense, pepper his legal analysis with insights. But actually was really taking it seriously and really thinking about and trying to understand the questions that the professionals had to ask about the world and then thinking about law's role in that. Of course, that led him to actually also understand that the way that a lot of intellectual property scholarship talks about authorship is very, very far removed from those kinds of concerns in a practical way. And I think the other thing that comes from being an Australian theater scholar was that he really understood that here one of the ongoing problems is how you survive as a theater professional. There's a lot of dark nights, there's very limited public funding and there's very narrow scholarship or sponsorship opportunities. And I think this is one thing that really impressed on Brent studying American theater. How are economic opportunities being created? What kind of creative efforts are being supported? And in what proportions? And where do these opportunities actually travel to? And then thinking about then what the role of law is in all that, unpacking that. The second kind of Australianness I think that Brent still carries with him is his skepticism of rights analysis. Whilst the US and Australia are both settler colonial jurisdictions. In Australia, due to its Anglo common law sensibilities, this is unspoken recognition that there's a very unfinished, under designed and efficient nature of positive law. And in theater this translates into looking at social and professional networks, looking at industry relations, organizations, private ordering to judge the relative degrees of agency and also how those types of relations are made visible or not made visible in law. And what counts with what qualifications. So in other words with Brent scholarship law is always thought of something which is coming into being. The law that really counts is that that affects access to our culture, which is authored primarily by industry practices, the interact with the much more rarefied presentations of law. And I think history really matters here of course because it really exposes those connections as they're made and remade. So I'm really looking forward to hearing more with all these fantastic commentators that we've got assembled here today. So huge mark of respect to Brent that he has such a high caliber and really interesting group of people who are interested in talking about his work. And I'm very much interested to hear what everybody here has to say about his approach to theater history and what his book has found. So thank you Kathy, I think Derek you're up. Hello everyone. Good afternoon from where I'm sitting can I be heard here. All right, great. So my thanks to Brent for this occasion to celebrate him in this work to Amalia and Kathy and the howl round staff and at Stanford and everywhere else involved in supporting this. And to my fellow panelists I like Kathy I'm really excited to hear these varied responses to this work. We are here wonderfully to celebrate Brent and I think I want to take time to acknowledge that you will not find a more generous, rigorous, knowledgeable, energetic or warmer scholar than Brent Salter and it's been a real honor and pleasure being able to work around alongside and with him in various ways throughout more years than I can count at this point because the pandemic has made me unable to count time. So we are here to though not just to celebrate Brent but to celebrate this book that he's written, which is of course been mediated by many other personages, and which we are in the process of mediating together today in our interpretations of it. This book is a major contribution to our thinking about copyright in the wild, we might say about the development of the American theater about authorship and creativity, and about mediation and contracts. In my 10 minutes here of which I've already probably used one. I am going to first summarize the book something that I volunteered to do, because I knew the book would be so thorough and convincing that I was afraid I'd have nothing to add. And so I figured if I, if I took the summary that I would be covered for my 10 minutes at least. Then I have a few thoughts to offer some areas for further research in the form of essentially rhetorical questions and any graduate students listening please these would make magnificent dissertations, at least those areas Brent isn't already halfway through writing up himself. So, this book again is negotiating copyright in the American theater 1856 to 1951 by Brent Salter published by Cambridge University Press in 2021 in the Cambridge intellectual property information law series, and it has a lovely cover. The book about mediators about play publishers about brokers about pirates about producers dramatists and their associations, especially the dramatist guild, and along the way of course we see a fair number of lawyers plays as Brent notices from the get go to acquire a huge amount of mediation to go from a script to a production, and that mediation is transformative, these are not just middleman, these are mediators who are changing the form. And many of those mediators engage in copyright and the various contracts in complex ways, either through license or outright sale, or simply by setting the terms and norms on which any given value economic or control over elements in the script to production pipeline can be managed. The other thing that I think this book is about which which Brent himself doesn't foreground is strongly rhetorically in the introduction is, but this book does so brilliantly throughout is this is also a book about contracts if this book were even more sets out to be, and there's there's some discussion of mature and some of the footnotes including drawing on Marlisa's work. There's a version of this story that notes how important contracts are to copyright as well as legislation and litigation. The book knows this, it's telling us that story alongside that of the human and institutional mediators, we see along the way. How on earth does Salter managed to do all this. Well, through an almost unfathomable amount of archival research, which leads him to case studies of key institutions and individuals, and then in the part to an in depth look at the first part of the 20th century, particularly leading up to the minimum basic agreement of 1926, which set a floor for playwrights contracts with a certain class of producer, and then the battles with producers over the nature of the guild and its membership and its members claims in the decades that followed the first chapter is about play publisher Samuel French based in London and his son Thomas Henry French based in New York. The French is our exemplary mediators for the early part of this story because they ran a transatlantic business that emphasize taking plays from particularly the French market in translation perhaps through the United Kingdom to the United States in the US market. They ran both a print based market selling certain kinds of plays but even more importantly, a massive market in unpublished plays, and one of the many things this chapter works through. This is a very under determined summary of this book. And one of the many things this chapter works through is the way that French is using common law copyright claims in state courts to protect their foreign origin works and prevent the performances of unpublished works, all of which have very ambiguous status and American law and the period. The second chapter, then looks at the play pirate Alexander buyers he was a Chicago based entrepreneur who helped to facilitate unauthorized performances around the US, and like any good historian and writer, the word alleged appears a lot in this chapter, because it's really hard to make up what was really going on with buyers, though Brent has done his level best to pull the archive forward and think through the implications of in particular, the really muddy red record of you how buyers is using copyright copyright claims and various other kinds of claims in complex contradictory often kind of incoherent ways to assert control in places where allegedly likely he actually had none, and yet buyers was key to a lot of the operation of the American feeder in the latter decades of the 19th century, and Brent is thinking through how he's intersecting with copyright and using both working with and against copyright to distribute plays through the country. The third chapter then takes up play brokers talking particularly about Elizabeth Marbury and Alex Couser. They offer themselves as intermediaries, but particularly between playwrights and producers they help to promote work you can pay them to read work. They make connections to among playwrights directors producers and stars, and they set norms of compensation with the emerging area of film rights. And then we get a last chapter in part one about play producers focused particularly on the theatrical syndicate, the monopolistic cartel that ran theatrical production in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century early part of the 20th century, and then the Schubert's the brothers who fought the syndicate for monopolistic control of the American theater and more or less one and remain in control through a few years after the mid 1950s. When Brent's book stops. The syndicate and Schubert's chapter is focused on the diffusion of contractual control. On the one hand, the way that so many different entities are controlling different pieces of a given theatrical property, the way that film rights come and require different types of intervention, the way that so many works are based on novels and that's yet the way that film rights that may belong to another individual, and the way all these different parties come and go in and out of their relationship to a work. And then we also get some wonderful discussion of the tensions between the authors and the producers artistic authority, which is going to become the key to part two. Part two kicks off with a discussion of the dramatist guild, the dramatist guild was the, well we'll just use the word guild because this is part of the story here what exactly is the dramatist guild. It's an association a trade association a term that that's also uses often that leads eventually to a, what is called the minimum basic agreement, it's a, this sort of standard baseline contract that most playwrights are using for a certain class of producer on Broadway and the producers are committing to use these contracts as the bare minimum. And some of the issues that immediately come up in the establishment of the minimum basic agreement, or whether or not first, the guild is an open shop that is to say anyone can come and go, and they're saying look we're not really closing off the American theater versus a closed shop that only people involved with them can work under these agreements are going to work with these producers. And then secondly the resistance from the Schubert's which becomes the key to the guild's story over the next three decades. So the other two chapters the last two chapters then focused on ring the spina a key case in which the legality of the dramatist field comes into question. Part of the first chapter on ring the spina goes into more detail about how the Schubert's were working with and around some of the minimum basic agreement by looking at the late hit of the 1930s hell's a poppin. In a way the Schubert's both gave over authority to the purported creators of the show, as well as constrained it in their resistance to using certain types of compensation or contract with those same writers. And then we get the story of ring the spina told in remarkable detail I learned so much from all of this book but here in particular it was a story that I was just thrilled to get all of these pieces. And then there was a literature producer who got into a big fight with his authors over the ability to insist on script changes. And then also the question of whether or not the guild had to arbitrate the disagreement between the writer and the producers. This led then to lawsuits that ended up raising fundamental questions about whether the guild itself was an illegal trust and issues are raised in this dispute about whether or they open or close shop about whether playwrights are selling goods their plays or their services about whether there existed realistic alternatives to the guild that you could actually work outside them in which case maybe they weren't as monopolistic as it seems. And about whether playwrights really were actually employees and thus perhaps unionizable or independent contractors. In the end, all these questions remained unresolved in a complex way that Salter lays out in wonderful detail. And they linger over the story of the remaining 60 70 years after ring the spina. The epilogue then talks about a lot of issues shifting forms of author payment lingering thread of antitrust suits, wider revenue sharing including with investors and mid rising costs, nonprofit community and high school licensing the consolidation of the publishing industry, Disney's Broadway production model that threatens to be more like film and the implications of streaming theater. I haven't given you a half of what's going on in this remarkable book. But that is a general overview of the shape of the story, this essential story about the development of the American theater that Brent's book tells. I see I have 30 seconds according to my time or I'm going to allow myself one quick minute here because I did everyone favorite summarizing this incredibly rich study. I have some questions. The questions not about what Brett has done but about what we should do now that we know this story. As the summary suggests, this is a magnificent book. It's tremendous in research and range. It's a wide and deep view of American theater during a key century of its development. The epilogue brings some of these stories into the present one story I wanted to hear more about was about play brokers and how their function gets divided among agents, literary managers, even in some ways MFA programs. How do we think about these mediators and their norm setting is their mediation essentially different. Are they playing the same roles, how some of these roles disappeared. So there's an amazing view here of the commercial market in the US particularly Broadway and touring routes. There's some view of other theater markets, especially as they connect to New York this discussion of the federal theater project and little theaters for instance. Now how do we think about copyright outside of the financially massive but in some ways culturally less significant commercial setting of Broadway. In high schools there's some discussion of that briefly in the epilogue summer stock community theaters theater in colleges or theater schools. The volume of plays written for these markets is quite large, even if the commercial value might seem relatively minor. I'd love to hear about how this story fits into the contraction of the theater industry in the US 1926 with a minimum basic agreement assigned is near the peak of theatrical production in New York. This is a decade after the drop in touring activity. So to think a little bit about the balance of power between producers and playwrights in the context of the expansion or contraction of the theater market, as well as the general US economy. And then lastly there's some wonderful pieces here about genre about the way that the Schubert's are thinking about reviews and how's it poppin. I think one of the challenges and implications of the story and Brent works so hard to get us there is to really de center playwrights from our story about mediation control and creativity in the American theater he doesn't get to the playwrights until part two really they're around the story but it's about everyone else first. Can we imagine a retelling of this story in a way that thoroughly de centers playwrights and recognizing their, the marginality of the writer to so many of the genres that were essential to the American theatrical ecosystem in the 19 late 19th and early 20th century. These are invitations that I think are coming directly from this remarkable text. It's a great honor and pleasure to celebrate this and to begin mediating this book's journey through our intellectual system. Thank you all. Thank you. I'm Carlos once and please. Hello all. I also want to add my thanks and especially congratulations to Brent it is a wonderful accomplishment to write a book it is a wonderful accomplished book to finish a book during a pandemic it is also just a wonderful thing to celebrate somebody's first book with them so congratulations and I'm so pleased to be a part of this. I've gotten from my introduction I have no experience in the history of theater or copyright. So when I read the book I read it from the perspective of business history and perhaps less obviously although I hope to make the connection from the history of technology. And then I also have some thoughts about it as someone who once upon a time practice copyright law and still teaches it. Starting with business history I just want to say what I especially like and cherish about this book is that it is a careful archivaly based business history of this 100 years of US theater and I just want to underscore that because I worry a little about the title negotiating copyright might cause some readers who should read the book who are interested in business history that need to understand business history in this period might miss it. Because what it offers to them. What we weren't necessarily thinking about theater or copyright is the rarity and the pleasure of having a legally trained historian and Kathy explained in Brett's multiple levels of training, doing a deep dive into contracts and showing the way in which paper and profits flow among writers producers theater owners and others in Brent's hands here copyright is only the starting point for processes that involve multiple mediators as Derek just explained who shift over time, and are constantly using contracts to define their relationships. And then also what this history teaches is that his contracts are much less stable than lawyers might assume and then the historians might assume these uniform contracts that eventually come up the minimum basic exist always alongside private arrangements and all kinds of heterogeneity and Brent also shows us how contracts with regarding one particular show can change during the show's run. So, here we have a history of theater that is undistracted by the dazzle of what happens on the stage, or even the drama of the courtroom where that patent attorney and I loved it when the patent attorney showed up that patent attorney ring is trying desperately to recoup his losses Brent keeps our attention on those paper flows passing from hand to hand, and always and each transfer both in the written agreements and in the practices that he so artfully shows evolved in this network of repeat players are constantly trying to make sure that Brent calls the triumvirate of authorship ownership and control right that's what we're always thinking about. And he also never lets us forget that even the contracts that he's following that nothing on paper really has ultimate authority over what appears on the stage. The script as Derek just said doesn't have ultimate authority but the contracts don't either who's performing in which cities with which lines, what music, always under negotiation always through practices as well as formal agreements. And as business historians I'm sure that people will think about this history in comparison to that of other copyright intensive businesses I'm thinking about the map makers brand McNally that Catherine Fisk has investigated, or other stage based businesses like Dance and I'm thinking of and the crowds work, but I also want to step outside the, that may be obvious comparisons to think about businesses like the railroad. Because in the same decades that Brent's talking about the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century American railroad companies were competing for physical spaces the routes between cities and that's one of the things I really like about Brent's book is he constantly reminds us that physical spaces the theaters the routes for tours, where you store the unpublished manuscripts matter even though we're talking about this ephemeral thing performance and intellectual property and immaterial form of property but that physical space and property do matter. The rail companies are also competing for physical spaces they're experimenting with vertical and horizontal integration. They're also trying to control the movement of goods, not from writer to stage but from farm to table, not in the 21st century artisanal slow food system at all but in a very mechanized industrialized efficiency maximized sense and railroads historians have showed us did this with considerable government intervention including access to free or cheap land adjustments to tort law regulatory agencies and Brent's history begins 1856 with a government intervention the revision to us copyright law that added public performance rights to dramatic works. After that start off the history that Brent tells us is really devoid of government intervention I just want to underscore that right we don't see government subsidies or regulatory structures, and we also find that copyright law itself is curiously absent. Brent's periodization and periodization of course is important to how historians tell their stories is not by revisions to the copyright act although he does tell us of revisions in 1870 and 1897 and 1909, each of which at that time formally gave play writers more control. His periodization is instead in part one, as we just saw by mediators, which groups of successful businessmen were shaping the theater business to suit themselves for series of decades, and then part two, by the guild by its agreements and brings in conclusive litigation. There's also food for thought here for historians of technology, because as I read the book. Brent really helped me think about a play as in so many ways, like a technological innovation, which multiple historians have showed us usually involves numerous inventors making contributions and then a massive network of lawyers and financiers and business people that work together to make it a feature of our daily lives and I'm thinking of here of classic 19th century inventions like the light bulb, right useless without electric substations power lines light fixtures, and the telephone is another example. And for those sorts of inventions, both human nature and intellectual property law prioritizes selection of one creator. Like Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, for example, who is assigned to an innovation that really require multitudes and Brent showing us that plays are no difference there is a playwright but plays also have this tension. So I celebrate Brent's investigation into the performance of a dramatic work with care and attention to its social construction and a network of actors, and how that construction he shows us includes law and legal actors. Give some much less pride of place than a history of copyright law might give them. And that brings me to copyright, and how Brent's book has made me think about how copyright law is taught and talked about. In some ways his history supports traditional framing of copyright law right copyright law makes the author paramount you have to identify one that entities assumed and supported by the law public performance rights dramatization rights are consequential. But in other ways, Brent really provides an alternative phrasing of copyright law copyright law is often taught including by me as a history of copying technologies a form of combined technology and business history. And while Brent discusses the complicated history of both unpublished manuscripts and public publish scripts, and talks about the power of owning printing plates by French and son of the 19th century and the significance of the new technology of film. What's striking to me in this history is that these technological changes were not the crucial flux points of Brent's story again, he periodizes by business form and intermediaries not by technology of copying or dissemination. So, I would add to that decentering of copyright that Derek just talked about a decentering of technology of copying in this history. And the other thing that I noticed that was missing in this history and not missing in like, oh my goodness where is it should be there is what I was not seeing was the great copyright cases that we use to teach us copyright law, including Nichols versus universal pictures about the non literal copying of a play and community for creative non violence versus read about independent contractors versus employees. They're absent from principle, I know Brett knows about them they're there in the footnotes but they're not what he's talking about the case he uses the fulcrum, the ring case. What Brent is all about base the difference between independent contractors and employees. So I went and looked at CCN V do they talk about this in this that's the 30 years later where the Supreme Court addresses that very question, and they don't even cite to the ring case. So what Brent taught me with that is that there's a legal history of negotiating copyright in the theater that is quite distinct from the traditional development of copyright law as we usually teach it. And again underscores the minimal role of copyright in what is a copyright dependent industry. If my students want to work in the entertainment industry Brent's teaching me they need to know a lot more about copy contract law than copyright law and they better also learn any trust law and whatever law. And just quickly to conclude my few questions. What I'd like to know about more about in Brent's future work is first of all that post 1976 world that the epilogue addresses, and what struck me about that epilogue was that the continuity much more than change the same clash is the same negotiations between parties happening, even with this. What we usually think of as a very large shift in copyright law so that I thought was very interesting in terms of understanding copyright today are there really so few changes in practices that are a result of that law. And I also want to ask about the role of race and gender in this history. It was so striking to me that women show up as powerful play brokers at the turn of the 20th century in that one chapter, and then I really never heard of again and the story that's all about men in different roles. And race of course is simply absent from the book. When we all know and I know Brent knows this, that it was not absent from the spaces and power structures being discussed. So what was the role of racial identities and the shifting law of race in America in this story and I look forward to future work by Brent and others on these questions. So next we have Marles and forgive me I don't know if you say Schweitzer Schweitzer so you could tell us for giving me. Oh sure it's Marles Schweitzer. Thanks. Hi everybody. Thank you again to all the organizers of this wonderful event today. And I'm so thrilled to be here celebrating the publication of Brent's book. Congratulations Brent. You've written a wonderful, as I'm sure you're hearing, deeply researched book filled with rich insights on the complicated dynamics that shape the modern US theater industry from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. All of the book's primary focus, at least according to his title is dramatic copyright, as befits his publication in the Cambridge intellectual property and information law series. It brings into sharp focus the often hidden or underappreciated individuals institutions associations and related entities that made Broadway, Broadway, that influence the wider formation of the American dramatic canon, and informed competing ideas about the labor of playwriting, digging deeply into trade journals business records case law theater archives and more. The book skillfully explains how competing stakeholders influenced which plays were or were not produced in the United States, and subsequently which artists entered or found a place in the canon. I come to this book as a theater and performance historian with a particular interest in the intricacies of theater management and the technological innovations that supported the formation of transnational networks at the turn of the 20th century. So what excites me, particularly about negotiating copyright in the American theater. What I view as one of its greatest achievements is its focus on these cultural intermediaries or mediating stakeholder stakeholders and I know. It doesn't necessarily appear very much in this text but you can also sort of think through some of the borders writing on cultural intermediaries. And these are the agents and the lawyers, the publishers the accountants the bureaucrats the office clerks, and the others who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring words on a page on to the theatrical stage. In our theater histories the contributions of these individuals go unseen or unacknowledged. And this is perhaps not surprising part of the job of a mediator is to remain hidden from view as part of the job. The historical spotlight shines brightly on actors and actresses playwrights directors impresarios, the flashy individuals who live in the public eye and cultivate celebrity. Their artistic achievements were and are understood as achievements in large part because the public is trained to admire skilled acting, or a well written play and artfully directed scene. I wonder that so much of the history of the American theater has focused on these prominent figures and their contributions. But what Prince spoke so brilliantly documents is that there would be no American theater without these same agents lawyers publishers accountants bureaucrats clerks and other mediators. I call these stakeholders mediators, as they do not only facilitate the process of production from page to the stage, but transform the work into the material performance. The ability to transform the original script is how mediators assert economic and artistic influence over theater creation. So the script is merely a blueprint for performance that's and end quote there script is just a blueprint for performance it needs to find its way into the hands of a producer or director and actor or designer before it can be realized and presented to an audience and mediators make this happen. And Brent's book shows us just how they did it. And, as I'm sure we're hearing and and Derek summary I think really brought to the floor. It is no small task to cover a century of negotiations background conversations and legal battles, and Brent's approach is appropriately varied and exhibits incredible facility in not only analyzing but analyzing and synthesizing primary sources. Some chapters zero in on specific litigation cases stovepipe had or hell's it poppin others track changes in formal agreements between managing bodies and dramatic guild, or follow the multi stage journey of a single like the lonesome pine from author's pen to motion picture, or in one of my favorite chapters offers a jaw dropping view of the extensive acts of piracy committed by one Alexander buyers. And so I think in the, the range of methodologies there's something for theater historians to really grab grasp a hold of. The book is so rich in detail and diverse its methods it's really impossible for me to do justice to the twists and turns in a few minutes. So what I would like to do is just highlight a few observations that I found surprising, or illuminating, and perhaps they are not new to others but for me I was like, Oh, this is really exciting. There is so much drama here. And then I found it fascinating that what gave the play publisher Sandwell French and sense, such a competitive advantage over their rivals in the middle, middle late 19th century was not just the vast repository of plays, but their possession of the physical plates used to print these plays and their access to storage space. And so he writes quote with business interests in London and New York, French had an advantage over publishers because he had the physical space to store theatrical material across the Atlantic, monopoly over the plates to print plays, and the capability to administer the multiple jurisdictions and quote. And so this strategy strikes me as not too dissimilar from that used by companies like Amazon today, control the material control the storage space that fulfillment centers control circulation and control the market. And it seems like Samuel French and sense made themselves indispensable and were everywhere. Continuing with Samuel French, I found it striking that the idiosyncrasies of international copyright law in the 19th century actively discouraged publishers from printing the place that they had secured the rights to. So by keeping a play as an unpublished manuscript publishers like French maintained control of copyright. And once the play was published existed existed as a material object that others could purchase. And it became vulnerable and was much more difficult for publishers to control their interests. So I think this of course explains why they needed so much storage space because they needed to maintain these on pop these plays it in an unpublished form. Just as a side note I also think the whole conversation about memory doctrine the fact that from much of the 19th century, an individual could attend a performance, go home, write down everything they had heard from memory, go back to the performance the next evening, come back and repeat this process multiple times and produce a script and then produce a performance, and they can do all of this without reaching copyright. I know Derek you've also written about memory doctrine I just think it's fascinating and I'm thinking scholars who studied like memory studies. I think there are many inter interdisciplinary connections that that particular little tidbit alone might prompt. This is something that the Derek has mentioned, and others have mentioned to the chapter on brokering theater. I was struck by the discussion of the cultural influence wielded by play brokers like Alice Couser and Elizabeth Marbury to powerful women who still in my view haven't received a complete historical do. And I was really again echo echo Derek and Kara and wanting to see more about these figures and this aspect of the industry. As Brent writes quote as the broker is a central character determining taste, their influence goes beyond the economic to the aesthetic, the ability to reshape the work of the dramatist to shepherd it through the production process. So Marbury and Couser established dominance within the industry, not just by cultivating good relationships with playwrights and managers, which was of course integral to their success, but also by recognizing how to best meet the financial and artistic needs of actors managers and playwrights. So Couser for example cultivated close connections with managers who turned to her for advice on which of the many plays in her brokerage would make good vehicles for star performers. And so her artistic, her artistic interest and paste influenced what made it onto the stage as well of course as her business acumen, and she used her awareness of managerial needs to nudge writers to revise their place accordingly. So thinking about her position or these brokers and their role in the history of Broadway theater and the American theater more widely I think is really exciting. And finally, just to highlight a wonderful detail and to sort of, again, underscore the facility with which Brent moves between sources. I love this little detail the comparison of the original sketch of Austin strong with with the one that appears in playwright George, it's a sketch of Austin's made by Austin strong of George Middleton, and it appears in multiple sources. The original sketch created in 1927 during tense negotiations between the Schubert's and the dramatist guild strong depicts playwright George Milton as a St. George figure fighting the Schubert dragon. And in the version that then later appears in Middleton's autobiography, the word Schubert has been blotted out so it's just St. George fighting the dragon. Because of course this attack this offers evidence of Middleton's own position and his inability to or hesitation to anchor the Schubert's. And as Brent concludes the images reveal two understandings of authority that have become hallmarks of the ongoing negotiations in the American theater by the mid 20th century, and quote. And so this a sense of looking to imagery to identify these incredible complex tensions, I think is really illuminating and again offers excellent example for historians of how to work with primary source primary sources. So I could go on and on to identify other moments of insight like this I think this book is really a treasure trove for theater historians and, and the methodologies it presents I think are really innovative and important. A few quick things I've also questions I just want to echo what Kara was saying in terms of gender and race. I'd love to see more about how that has influenced this this whole history for further further research. Conversations around the depth of the author sort of more theoretical conversations and how or whether that informed any of the histories, particularly the later 20th century. And I'm also really curious about what other kinds of under examined materials might further complicate this wonderful series of dramas in this period so that's all I have to say for now but there's so much more congratulations Brent on a really fantastic volume. Thank you so much. Next we have and Salina. You would think I'd be quicker on the unmute button after two years of this but alas. I will risk repetition, because I agree with everyone that this is an absolute wonderful addition to the historiography of theater business and, and for my concerns, labor and labor practices. Um, so I'm going to give some kudos for some global aspects of the book has a for laying out the significant power exercised by quote unquote non creative, or the ancillary players in the theater industry. The work is off considered mundane and thus hugely under examined, but you have revealed so much to us by just taking a measured look at their investments, and their cleverness. I also want to celebrate celebrate Brent's extensive archival work. It is like a medley of business records and briefs and cataloging of manuscripts that catalog of manuscripts is really just so illustrative in such a compact way that it, it's absolutely impressive. And as well as media and so forth and so on and and through this really fascinating astute pairing of primary sources he creates a rich portrait of what he calls these mediating businesses and practices, and shows us how they shape plays and as well as playwrights artistic control and compensation, despite these formal copyright protections that we assume that playwrights possess, particularly you know when, when in our, our theater history, we, you know, we can hear Beckett saying any dispensing with my stage directions is a violation of my play. It's so famous and so strong, and to see these mediating forces really ships perspective on on the power playwrights are assumed to possess. I also want to congratulate Brent on his style. I mean that is some crisp prose it, and there's engaging footnotes right that take the conversation all these new directions and I love a good footnote. And the organization of his narrative itself gives readers a really clear view into the legacies of compromises and rulings and laws that occurred throughout the 20th century, which rendered the dramatist guilds legal standing very ambiguous and it's bargaining on behalf of playwrights week at best. And finally, in terms of these sort of global aspects of the work. I am most impressed by how measured your account is of those enterprising individuals who cultivated artists, particularly playwrights dependency on cysts on the very systems that they created it. And they are clever buggers indeed, but you also historicize them with some empathy with some understanding of the system in which they, they are apart and participating in. So, as you can tell, I find this book invigorating. But I want to highlight just a few things based on my particular interests. First, your discussion of the federal theater project, and its bureaucracy and relief priorities, and how it ultimately left it to the playwrights like john Brownwell to secure the royalties due to them. For me this calls out for future research not just on those individual playwrights I know you're working on john Brownwell and I'm excited to see that work come out. But for for how these mediating institutions here I'm thinking the newspaper guild and the dramatist guild and the federal theater living newspaper unit itself are assigning authorship, particularly in the living newspaper unit, because the only person that comes out an author of the living newspapers is Arthur Aaron, who it's by Arthur Aaron and the writers of the living newspaper unit. Everyone else's left unnamed. And so I'm really, really curious about the assignation of authorship there, given to the director of that unit. So, thing to early in the book, right this is literally page one footnote one. I love a footnote. The larger implications of rent study of are becoming apparent to me. So at this point he's discussing scholars occupation with intellectual property rights that playwrights have been assumed to control he's going to disabuse us at those assumptions. Well as the the desire that non writer creative collaborators this is the term that Frank uses such as actors and desires right are trying to grab on to what they assume is the power that's available to them through copyright. So Brent spoke clearly advances debates on this subject by focusing on the ways that copyright law has accommodated and been used or ignored to limit the risk and maximize profit of those gatekeepers facilitators mediators of performance, such as play brokers publishers theater owners and producers to the direct diminishment of playwrights artistic control and economic benefit. In this instance, Brent suggests exciting future lines of inquiry into the life cycle of a single play in production, right, I have this dream vision now, where we have this author in the script, and we go to casting director and union representatives and and we see the life of, something other than cats right from from the idea through those through those high schools and elementary school productions please elementary school productions of cats. But this, the understanding of those transformational forces and the proliferation of mediating forces across individuals across the 20th century is astounding, all the way through to the disnification of Broadway in which it is, you know, Mattel, that's probably wrong but it doll makers are involved in a in in this in this process of production. So I have a dream life cycle of performance. Get that done along along these lines. I'm also thinking about the intersection of Brent's research with my own even more directly. And I'm still chewing on the underlying assumption that text based contributions right the, the writer creative collaborators those who make text based contributions to a play are recognized as more relevant and more lasting, at least in terms of claims to intellectual property rights. I question the implication regarding non writer and specifically actors contributions as more ephemeral, given the plentiful anecdotal evidence of actors improvising lines and workshop rehearsals that appear then in subsequent scripts or actors making performative choices such as a gesture and intonation a bit of physical humor that are then distilled into writing of stage directions and character descriptions, for which a playwright enjoys copyright as limited as that privilege might be. I also think about whether to characterize the securing of a subsidiary right for actors by their union actors equity in the late 1950s whether it should be characterized as a success. This was a right negotiated in response to the transformation of off Broadway from an experimental non commercial playgrounding and you of course site course line eventually in the second half of your work. The transformation of it from an experimental playground into one of Broadway's primary proving grounds, and that negotiation, of course, was with the producers associations not with the playwrights, and provides only for actors to receive compensation if they are not given a bona fide offer to appear in the commercial production. So, equity, the actors union called it quote an important recognition of the artistic contributions made by actors to the development of the dramatic work and quote. I think this comp compensatory measure or if it's a success by the 1970s actors equity is pushed playwrights to sign off rights in the play to the actors who are appearing in these were workshop productions so much so had the nature of playwriting of shifted. They're not now as equity is is trying to get playwrights to sign off and they do. They're not dealing with the producers they're going directly to the playwrights here and it reminded me so much of the reconfiguration of royalty to recoup producers and investors expenses prior to playing paying the playwrights. So equity goes after the playwright in the interest of the actors, because as all these those economically insecure scrambling because it can't gain further traction with the producers. This results in that 1981 lawsuit involving Michael Weller and David Mamet and four other playwrights, which results in a settlement that's favorable to the writers. The changing practices of playwriting from 1950 but following copyright in in the change of law and 76 alongside those organizational changes and business practices from hiring actors to perform already written roles or star vehicles which has different contractual forms obviously than the rank and file to hiring actors for developmental workshops raises questions for me about when and whether actors are interpretive or generative authors. In the current state so frankly, aesthetic compromise serves as a condition of entry into the industry, whether the intentions of these mediating businesses or institutions were collaborative or exploitative or opportunist. Those with control over the resources, including the unions that represent all of the, all of the various creative collaborators and their associations, those of control those access to the resources materials and knowledge of theatrical production as Brent has beautifully argued also because incredible artistic control. So, life cycle of a play, and please write the second half of this history. Thank you so much. And last but not least, Jose, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Brent congratulations is fantastic is a fantastic achievement. I want to start by my comments with the questions I had when I began reading the book and the questions where what does this book offer to from a legal perspective. What are the images of law that emerge from the American theatrical experience. And what is the effect of the book on intellectual property scholarship. Starting from a history of ideas approach the soldiers book shows how the economic and the legal are where couples with property and contract how the political and the legal systems were also tied through bureaucratic and associative routines. The negotiation and the ongoing struggles to constitute narratives about the past have always been at the stake. In a sense, the task of a legal history is to trace the ways in which narratives we take for granted are also constructed and a strategically deployed drawing on it as everybody has already highlighted on extensive archival research. The book offers many original insights and therefore it's outstanding. One need only to skim through the book and so how pain is taking the work was. I was also particularly stuck by some food notes. And then I had one food note that it was food note 108 on page 127 that I was really fascinated by the food note that food note for me reflects academic scholarship at its best thorough interesting and open to question. Did people read contracts as meticulously as soldier does. The relationship between soldier and the archive. Even if I intended the irony is that the book reads like a play divided in different parts. It is a theoretical performance of different elements with conflict climax and the drama of litigation. I can acknowledge this point when he says that the Schubert's could not have written the script any better themselves. The book is designed to tackle the problem of finding new ways of thinking about copyright. As a historical account more interested in practice and the reality of copyright on the ground, or in the theater, rather than in legal criticism. The theatrical contract eventually emerged as the main protagonist, the central actor in legal communication, and is a battle ground. For instance, the basic contract was the outcome of full committees drafting for several weeks, word by word, close by close. The existence of theatrical contracts be negotiated, archived, litigated and standardized. One could arrive at the conclusion that the theatrical contract became a device for legal creation that in turn enable the creation of a fiduciary structure or an industry to flourish. To understand the centrality of negotiation. The type of social institution takes the center stage on Salter's book and is the organization. This is remarkable because some historians have indeed defined characters, such as Owen Davis as the epitome of the organization man. Certainly the desire for an organization, the impetus for association and the formation of a community or a guild depended on the specific narrative being conveyed and stimulated in the negotiations. Negotiations are defined in dynamic terms as fluid processes and as spaces where a certain exchange of positions could take place. I don't pay attention to these missions or businesses more than historical trajectories. I read the book as an anthropological account in which contracts and organizations are not only important for what they said, but also for what they did the historicity. The ways in which they were triggered and promoted and the rituals through which they were discussed, controlled, archived, negotiated, operationalized and strategically situated. Law and more specifically copyright law appears in Salter's book as moving or oscillating between two different poles, as being and as an operation. The distinctive aspect of this way of conceiving law lies in its capacity to grasp this elusive character between the conditions that are both complementary and necessary. For many, if not most legal scholars, law is just a right you claim. It is a matter of understanding things correctly and it is often seen as entirely separate from its historical context. But Salter shows its movable character, its elusive character as the book leads us through different gateways and through a constant refocusing. What makes copyright law worth studying, worth to be studied is not only what has been done in its name, but also what has happened within it. The book quickly steps away from the bullet point legislative history and moves to a more nuanced story of how theatrical copyright in North America was discussed and negotiated. With the idea of expectation copyright reflects, according to Salter, the aspirational normative project about what a rights framework ought to be. In this scenario law emerged as a device in a specific horizon that has both a functional and a fictional dimension, a space of desire that takes Salter's book into a bureaucratic territory of mundane practices that brought the script into performances, transforming works into collections. I had also a quote, but I think Marlys had already mentioned the quote, so the script is like the blueprint. I was also fascinated by that type of paragraph that really caught me. So now the specific questions that the book prompted me. One of the interesting factors that the book is one of these interesting features of the book is how it investigates the workings of copyright across the theatrical production change. It emphasizes the role of mediation that has been highlighted by almost all of you as a key historical component in making theatrical work, and this theme runs throughout the whole book. I was struck by how the semantic spectrum of mediation in his book, mediating stakeholders, mediating interests, mediating businesses, mediating actors, mediating brokers, mediating structures, mediating expertise, and mediating facts are present in different instances in the book. Perhaps the most interesting connecting element to mediation is a product of power, a trust, or as Salter mentions mediating power. In other words, the influence to circulate, connect, interpret, and negotiate. Can we imagine North American theatrical production without the powers? I think some of you have already answered that question as well. No, obviously the answer is we cannot imagine North American theatrical production without these mediators, without these power structures embedded in its administration. There are interesting references to infrastructures, but my question refers to the impact not of mediators themselves, but of the specific media technologies that characterize the 20th century, and that are mentioned incidentally in the book, and there are three typewriters, table, and films. It is true that there are some reference to the effect of documentation, such as registration, catalogs, and archives, and the illusions that they generate. It is also true that the book looks at films considered as subsidiary rights. What is not so clear to me is how technologies reorganized the way theatrical contracts were conceived and indeed made. In other words, the vital momentum was achieved because of the speed in which contracts were made by cable, because manuscripts were typewritten, or plays were made because film rights were sold. So that was one of my questions that is moving from the mediation as a human being to the speed and to the technological mediation. In addition to asking whether media has a particular role in this account, I was also interested in the specificity of legal history. The inflation of reference to contracts, business, negotiation, and arrangements led to me the question of the very notion of law itself. Is this vision of law particularly dependent on a North American vision? The quest, the ambition to secure a deal, the effect of federal law, the dignity of theatrical stakeholders that survived throughout the book appeared to me as cultural coordinates that reflect a certain entrepreneurial disposition. The celestial backdrop and its historical ramifications are largely part of the North American historical experience that was also marked by this tension between Hollywood and Broadway. To a foreign reader like me, the book discusses a theatrical tradition in a particularly rich way. But more interesting to me is that it offers a distinctive mode of thinking about copyright law, which is seen as transactional entrepreneurial, full of assumptions and imagination underlying legal claims. What is the significance of the book for intellectual property and scholarship? For me, at least it offers a distinctive way of getting around law and move away from the fascination characteristic of legal scholarship on property and a way to handle the complex link between law and history. In that regard, I was less interested in the specific national narratives, but in the connections between, for instance, the guild and foreign copyright societies such as Sassem, there are references in Solter's book about the way Middleton used his knowledge of French copyright. But my question is, to what extent these European forays in the early 1920s were crucial to this historical sequence? To what extent some knowledge in the way the French or the British drama displayed the trade was know-how that served and was transformed in the impetus, for instance, of the American guild. Although we are reminded that the guild is a trade association and not a union, I was also interested in questions of membership. I was fascinated by the whole conversation about close-up and really captured me and made me think about how membership grew, how it materialized in a list that was used as a leverage point. Yes, it was perhaps one of the basic ingredients for its success. The issue raises questions to me about how news and rumors and gossip circulated and how commitment is also an effect of the coordination of information and the basic PR. So I have all these questions about what exactly, what type of factor was fundamental for the formation of the guild? Was it litigation that triggered the arbitration mechanism? Was it the arbitration mechanism? Was it the coincidence with the actresses? Was it the guild's efficiency? Was it the members that started seeing it as an investment? I guess the answer is the combination of all of these factors, but I was interested in trying to tease them out and trying to think about the formation of a list and its dissidents, obviously. Not only the Schubert's, but others, and also what were the factors that were, according to Solter, more important for its formation. And just one question to conclude is, I think, has also been evoked by some of the commentators, what this tradition entailed today. Solter's effort to uncover an alternative legal history shows that the current narratives are still bound up in the assumptions, in the mythologies, and in the twilight zones that haunted its protagonists, particularly the rhetoric built around copyright and antitrust. And in a sense, one can see how arguments often give way to either skepticism or fundamentalism. What really strikes me about this is how we might escape this trap if we consider the human desire for narrative and to push the specific historical agendas. I was interested in what is next in Solter's research, is there a subtext in the book that is aimed at affecting the way in which we consider the relationship between law and theater. Thank you. Thank you. So we were clearly too ambitious, we wanted to hear from all these brilliant people and we did and you gave us a huge amount to think about. But I fear we are kind of at the end of the time here, unfortunately. So, all I can do at this point is say thank you. And now I would just like to express my deepest gratitude to you all, and one of the things that is so exciting seeing so much work come out in the areas that I've cared about for a long time. I know that you've cared about for a long, long time, this discipline is just how so much exciting scholarship is happening in these areas, these interdisciplinary areas at the moment and how we're starting to form communities. And I want to particularly thank Derek for his leadership, his extraordinary scholarship in really, really paving the way for this field going forward and the extraordinary conversations I hope will follow in years to come and fall to all of you for your generosity today. I look forward to continuing these conversations. Stay on for longer. Yeah, we messed up the time there, but it was incredibly generous and there's so much to think about as far as just my notes that I've taken here. The next projects, yeah, that have come out will hopefully deal with a lot of the issues. I'm working on big projects on the federal theater projects at the moment, multiple projects and a lot of them are on underrepresented groups in the multiple and copyright relationships in those spaces. And on thinking about an integrated legal history of labor in the American theater more carefully so central place of authority being going forward over creativity being labor and thinking about the relationships between all of these industries and their origin stories and access to these extraordinary private archival collections and here I want to really thank the drama skill of America and other organizations for their generosity and commitment to to preserving these private collections, which we will learn so much more about our histories our theater histories our legal histories our labor histories. So that's the next exciting stage of big legal and labor history of the American theater leading on to this. Thank you. It's overwhelming and I'm just extraordinarily grateful for your generosity. Thank you. Thank you so much.