Muse 2 the Pharaoh

Reclaiming the Black Body : Prince, Intellectual Property and the Rights of Publicity

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Episode notes

With the estate taking down fan works, commentary on what Prince should or shouldn’t have released, or even opinions about “what he would have wanted” there are important angles that are missing from the conversation. Of course Prince is very much known as someone who was all about ownership as well as artists being in control of their own intellectual property, but no one quite goes into why. More than his own reasons, his stance is also part of a larger conversation around the agency of Black people and Black people reclaiming their own bodies whether that’s their physical bodies, or their own bodies of work. In this episode, we dive deeper into the history of intellectual property rights, copyright and trademark law and their intersection with Critical Race Theory with special guest Anjali Vats.