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- Title
Publish the Picture at Your Peril: Visual Ideas and the Commercial Apparatus of Life Magazine.
- Authors
Schwartz, Joshua S.
- Abstract
In the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine's business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life's publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine's images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.
- Subjects
TEXAS Instruments Inc.; INTELLECTUAL property; PERIODICAL circulation; ADVERTISING revenue; CONSUMER goods; HAZARDS; BOOK illustration
- Publication
Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, 2021, Vol 20, Issue 2, p301
- ISSN
1537-7814
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S1537781420000821