Branding Culture: Fictional Characters and Undead Celebrities in an Era of 'Transpropertied' Media

• Author: Daniel Downes
• Pages: 246-267

246

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Branding Culture: Fictional Characters

and Undead Celebrities in an Era of

“Transpropertied” Media

 

 : This chapter explores changes in intellectual property law

as part of a changing media ecology that began during the 1970s in which IP

law is a medium of control in the digital age. It will be shown that the exten-

sion of copyright, trademark, and rights of publicity to ctional characters

and authors helps set the boundaries of economic and social expression in

the global media environment of the twenty-rst century in a process de-

ned by the author as transpropertization, whereby dierent types of IP pro-

tection overlap.

The mechanism or communicative practice associated with this new

ecology of information is branding, which is evolving from a technique of mar-

keting to an informal medium of control alongside these changes in the law.

: Ce chapitre explore les changements du droit de la propriété

intellectuelle en tant qu’écologie changeante des médias, débutant dans

les années 1970 au cours desquelles le droit de la propriété intellectuelle

devient un moyen de contrôle dans l’ère numérique. Il sera démontré que

l’expansion du droit d’auteur, des marques de commerce et des droits de

publicité sur les personnages ctifs et les auteurs aide à créer les limites de

l’expression économique et sociale dans l’environnement médiatique mon-

dial du 21e siècle dans un processus déni par l’auteur comme « la transpro-

priation », qui se produit lorsque diérents types de propriété intellectuelle

se chevauchent.

Branding Culture • 247

Le mécanisme ou la pratique communicative associée avec cette nou-

velle écologie de l’information est la création de l’image de marque, qui s’est

développée à partir d’une technique de marketing jusqu’à devenir un moyen

informel de contrôle en parallèle aux changements du droit.

A. INTRODUCTION

On 28 October 2009, a public reading of a unique literary collaboration was

staged at Toronto’s Bathurst Street Theatre.1 Expatriate Canadian Dacre

Stoker and American screenwriter Ian Holt took elements from Stoker’s

great-uncle Bram Stoker’s unpublished notes to his 1897 novel Dracula and

wrote an ocial sequel entitled Dracula the Un-dead.2

The publication of Dracula the Un-dead and its public performance by

the authors and various actors in period costumes is of particular interest

to both media and intellectual property (IP) scholars because the sequel

was written, in part, “to right the wrongs done to Bram’s original classic.”3

To answer the question of what wrongs had been committed, the authors

apologize to their literary audience for “losing the copyright and control of

Bram’s magnicent and immortal story for almost a century.”4

While it may seem counterintuitive to hear a writer reclaiming owner-

ship of copyrighted and, indeed un-copyrightable material, Stoker’s use of

the language of ownership and control in describing both his own and his

ancestor’s work is consistent with what might be described as the contem-

porary ecology of IP.

There is a deeply ingrained tendency to talk about various forms of ex-

pression as property, to think of the free market as a natural environment,

and to think of many, perhaps all, forms of human interaction as fungible

and translatable to economic relations. But, we must ask, in what ways

is our understanding of IP historically contingent and how is that under-

standing related to social, economic, and technological conditions in the

creative industries?

1 “Dracula the Un-Dead — A Dramatic Reading w/ Original Music Premieres in Toronto”

MODA Entertainment (28 October 2009), online: http://modaentertainment.blogspot.ca/

2009/10/dracula-un-dead-dramatic-reading-w.html; see also Dracula the Un-dead: The

Ocial Site for the Sequel to the Original Classic, online: www.draculatheun-dead.com/

Dracula_the_Un-Dead/Home.html.

2 Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt, Dracula the Un-dead (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2009).

3 Ibid at 413.

4 Ibid.