McCutcheon, Jani --- "Making art from words: the picturisation adaptation right in copyright law" [2020] ELECD 90; in McCutcheon, Jani; McGaughey, Fiona (eds), "Research Handbook on Art and Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) 11

Book Title: Research Handbook on Art and Law

Editor(s): McCutcheon, Jani; McGaughey, Fiona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Making art from words: the picturisation adaptation right in copyright law

Author(s): McCutcheon, Jani

Number of pages: 15

Abstract/Description:

This chapter explores the picturisation right under copyright law, the right to transform words into pictures. This right navigates the intersection between the literary and the visual, and moderates how characters, scenes and stories can be, to borrow from Shakespeare, ‘bodied forth’ in graphic form. The right correspondingly calibrates artistic freedom to interpret text and demands a careful consideration of the relationship between art and language and the differing implications of literary and visual appropriation. This has immediate consequences for numerous artistic derivative works, including the burgeoning genre of graphic novels, comics and cartoons, and fan art. This chapter investigates the origins, rationale and scope of the underexplored picturisation right and interrogates how copyright law processes this relationship between text and artistic image. In considering the differing implications of literary and visual appropriation, the paper also demonstrates how the picturisation right directly confronts the idea-expression dichotomy in copyright doctrine, and helps us understand the copyright work as an immaterial construct capable of traversing different media.