Owning the Body
Owning the Body
Creative Norms in the Tattoo Industry
Aaron Perzanowski’s research on the tattoo industry provides one illustration of this phenomenon. Despite generating billions of dollars in annual revenue, the tattoo industry rarely relies on formal assertions of legal rights in disputes over copying or ownership of the creative works. Instead, tattooing is governed by a set of nuanced, overlapping, and occasionally contradictory social norms enforced through informal sanctions. But tattoo artists opt for self-governance despite the fact that their creations fit comfortably within the scope of copyright protection. This chapter offers a descriptive account, drawn from qualitative interview data, of the social norms that have overshadowed formal law within the tattoo community. It also provides a set of complementary cultural and economic explanations for the development of those norms.
Keywords: intellectual property, law, norms, copyright, tattoos, creativity, markets, self-governance, communities, incentives
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