BOOKISH: Sister spit, bony boys and good, old-fashioned teatime

This week in Bookish: Boys with strange bones, tea-drinking tours and the Sister Spit tour comes to Penn.

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BOOKISH: Sister spit, bony boys and good, old-fashioned teatime

POSTED: Thursday, April 19, 2012, 5:00 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Each week, Nina Willbach puts together a rundown of book-centric events. This week: boys with strange bones, tea-drinking tours, and the Sister Spit tour comes to Penn!

Thursday, April 19

The Original Sneeze

The first film to ever be copyrighted was a five-second clip of a man sneezing. The man, Fred Ott, was one of Thomas Edison's assistants and his sneeze marks the beginning of the long and complicated relationship between motion picture and copyright law. When Fred Ott's Sneeze was filmed in 1894, Edison—a man obsessed with patenting his inventions—presumably knew that along with the artistic possibilities of motion picture technology was also the reality that it could be copied. By attaching his name to these precious five seconds, he set the copyright precedent for films to come. As technology advanced to create feature-length pictures, copyrighting allowed actors and film crews to benefit from their sales. Over 100 years after Edison's film, it seems technology has now created a world that's arguably surpassed the notion of copyright. Whereas copyright once created an incentive for distribution and sales, today's possibilities for distribution, from youtube to flip-cam, have left copyright concerns in the dust. Peter Decherney's new book Hollywood's Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet chronicles this history, examining the ways Hollywood has attempted to control and adapt to changing copyright law. A leading thinker in the study of cinema, Decherney was named an Academy Film Scholar in 2009 and currently teaches cinema studies, English and Communication at UPenn.

6 p.m., free, Penn Bookstore, 3601 Walnut St., upenn.bncollege.com

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