Legal Stories

Gregory Steirer is Associate Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Dickinson College and the author (with Alisa Perren) of The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood.

• Table of ContentsDedicationList of Illustrations AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: The Modern Copyright Era’s Foundational Legal Infrastructure: Short Copyright Duration and Copyright FormalitiesChapter 2: “Only the Chessman in the Game of Telling the Story:” Warner Bros. v. CBS, the Idea-Expression Dichotomy, and the Principle of Iterative Textual DerivationChapter 3: From Yog-Sothery to Property: H. P. Lovecraft and the Making of the Cthulhu MythosChapter 4: When Is a Copyright Not a Copyright? Unfair Competition and Cartoon and Comics Characters in the Modern Copyright EraChapter 5: Conan, the Syndicate: Informal Contracting and the Making of Narrative-Based PropertyCoda: What Comes After? Toward a Periodization of U.S. Intellectual Property LawNotesBibliographyIndex

“Legal Stories is detailed, careful, and nuanced. To my knowledge, no other book-length work has given as much serious attention to the ways in which copyright law—not just as a general idea, but as a specific legal institution with particular and idiosyncratic requirements and repercussions—has shaped the expansion of transmedia/franchise storytelling.”—Shawna Kidman, author of Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood