Chancellor's Chair Lecture: "The Labor of Creation and the Law of the Workplace: Attribution of Collaborative Authorship"

Innovative firms and employees have long struggled over allocation and control of intellectual property rights and over the allocation of credit for creating work. Where creation is collaborative but labor markets value individual creativity, the legal challenges in balancing individual and collective attribution are considerable and the stakes are high.

Hollywood guilds, which are unique in American letters in having a worker-controlled process for deciding the meaning of authorship and for compensating creative workers based on guild credit determinations, offer important insights on a possible role for labor unions in the knowledge economy.

Catherine Fisk teaches and writes on the law of the workplace, legal history, civil rights, and the legal profession. She is the author of dozens of articles and three books, including the prize-winning Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Chancellor's Chairs are endowed positions awarded to a very small number of UCI professors across the campus who demonstrate unusual academic merit.