The New Copyright Manifesto: The Case for Reparations for African American Music Artists

In the dramatic opening of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels warned that "[a] spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of communism." 1 My intellectual property scholarship was the first in the legal academy to highlight that a specter has long haunted the American music industry-the specter of racial inequality and rampant appropriation of the creative works of African American artists.The striking inequality of the treatment of Black artists is an old problem and yet a very current one, given the length of copyright terms.Old music greatly outsells new music. 2 As the frenzy of music catalog sales continues, new harms arise as Black artists who were never compensated or undercompensated are victimized once again.Black artists experienced commercial exploitation and IP expropriation of their works from the inception of the American music recording industry in the early twentieth century. 3This treatment stemmed from a complex web of inequitable industry contracts, copyright formalities, and contractual fraud. 4 The deprivation of