(Copy)Rights and Wrongs: “El Cantante” and the Legislation of Creative Labor

Chapter 6 engages questions about intellectual property, aesthetics, and creative labor through an analysis of the copyright infringement claims filed by Rubén Blades, who wrote the initial verses of “El Cantante,” against Fania Records. The chapter challenges the claim to individual authorship in favor of joint authorship, highlighting how US courts risk disenfranchising coauthors in favor of protecting individual authorship, thus failing to account for the collective and collaborative process of creation during the social life of a song. The chapter shows that scholars must engage debates about the ways in which creative subjects, whether as individuals or communities, are constituted in part in relationship to both the legal sphere and the market.