For all of the rhetoric about the central place of authors in the copyright scheme, our copyright laws in fact give them little power and less money. Intermediaries own the copyrights, and are able to structure licenses so as to maximise their own revenue while shrinking their pay-outs to authors. Copyright scholars have tended to treat this point superficially, because – as lawyers – we take for granted that copyrights are property; property rights are freely alienable; and the grantee of a property right stands in the shoes of the original holder. I compare the 1710 Statute of Anne, which created statutory copyrights and consolidated them in the hands of publishers and printers, with the 1887 Dawes Act, which served a crucial function in the American divestment of Indian land. I draw from the stories of the two laws the same moral: Constituting something as a freely alienable property right will almost always lead to results mirroring or exacerbating disparities in wealth and bargaining power. The legal dogma surrounding property rights makes it easy for us not to notice.

中文翻译：

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当我们将版权视为财产时，我们看不到什么

对于所有关于作者在版权计划中的核心地位的言论，我们的版权法实际上给他们的权力和金钱都很少。中介拥有版权，并且能够构建许可，以最大限度地提高自己的收入，同时减少支付给作者的费用。版权学者倾向于肤浅地对待这一点，因为——作为律师——我们认为版权是财产是理所当然的；财产权可自由转让；产权的受让人站在原持有人的立场上。我将 1710 年的《安妮法令》与 1887 年的《道斯法案》进行了比较，后者创造了法定版权并将其整合到出版商和印刷商手中，后者在美国撤出印度土地方面发挥了重要作用。我从这两条法律的故事中得出相同的寓意：将某物构成可自由转让的财产权几乎总是会导致反映或加剧财富和议价能力差距的结果。围绕产权的法律教条使我们很容易不注意。