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"This book explores how the business of play and the development of modern intellectual property evolved together, and alongside concerns about children's consumption becoming a legitimate source of revenue and profit. Or, in other words, how that industry and children's special attachment to it gradually emerged. In so doing, it considers the paradox in the relationship between the growth of intellectual property and the presumed innocence of childhood that initially underpinned controversies about the construction of the child as a consumer. As is apparent throughout the book, our main argument is neither moralistic nor regulatory. Rather, our concern is to explore how, since the late nineteenth and through to the twentieth century, attempts to come to terms with this paradox were embedded in many issues and contexts. In tracing those entangled relationships, we think it is possible to see how modern authorship, entrepreneurship and even the child as a consumer, all came into simultaneous existence through a process of the mutual conferring of reality"--
List of contents
1. Commercialisation and the Innocent Child; 2. Books, Toy Books and the Artfulness of Consumption; 3. Instructions for a Successful Boy; 4. Animated Properties; 5. Licensing Gone Wrong; 6. The Rise of Merchandising Agencies; 7. Troubles at the British Broadcasting Corporation; 8. Conclusion: Unsuitable for Children.
About the author
Jose Bellido teaches law at the University of Kent (UK). He is particularly interested in the history of intellectual property law and has additional research interests in legal theory, evidence and legal history. His most recent book project as editor and contributor is Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law (Hart Publishing, 2017).Kathy Bowrey is a legal and cultural historian interested in how cultural commodification operates on a global scale. Her most recent works include Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author, (Routledge, 2021). She is a Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property.
Summary
Adventures in Childhood looks at the business of play and the development of modern intellectual property rights as they evolved in the twentieth century. In doing so, the book explores the paradoxical relationship between exploitation and innocence and the controversies that underpin the construction of the child as a consumer.
Foreword
This book shows how intellectual property turned the family into a market while, simultaneously, the market became a family.
