Copyright consciousness: Musical creativity and intellectual property in Turkey By DaveFossum. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025. 296 pp.

In Copyright Consciousness, Dave Fossum shows how artists, administrators, and state institutions collectively shape the meaning of copyright in Turkey's music world. Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic and archival research, he approaches copyright less as a code of law than as a dynamic terrain where creative practice and legal reasoning meet. The book is an ethnography of legality in motion: it examines how musicians, judges, and cultural officials make law sensible through argument, rumor, and performance. Copyright here becomes a social idiom through which people negotiate authorship, fairness, and value. Fossum demonstrates how copyright's failures—its perceived gaps, contradictions, and ambiguities—are not simply dysfunctions but generative conditions for legal meaning itself. The book opens with vivid scenes: collecting-society members lament “discarded rights” with a wordplay between telif (copyright) and telef (wasted); an industry leader calls copyright a “matter of liberty”; and musicians criticize copyright's Western individualism (pp. 1–3). Fossum treats these scenes as evidence of a broader vernacular legality, that is, a moral and aesthetic field where ideals of justice, creativity, and national belonging converge. Drawing on sociolegal theories of legal consciousness (pp. 3–15), he tracks how actors experience the gap between “law on the books” and law in practice, and how that gap helps people imagine Turkey's place in the world. This double awareness of law as both an external standard and an internalized aspiration becomes central to Fossum's account of how legality acquires affective life. Copyright Consciousness unfolds across six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. The early chapters trace the genealogy of copyright reform within Turkey's modernization projects; the later ones turn to contemporary disputes among musicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats. The book moves fluidly between courtroom ethnography, policy archives, and the everyday politics of collecting societies such as the Turkish Musical Work Owners’ Society (MESAM). Fossum's materials, including interviews, media transcripts, and legal documents, bridge music studies and legal anthropology, showing how copyright's institutions regulate not only creative labor but also the moral hierarchies of modernity. The result is a textured portrayal of how musicians, bureaucrats, and cultural elites come to understand themselves as both subjects and authors of the law. At the heart of the book is the claim that Turkey's copyright regime cannot be understood through the binary of “incomplete modernization” versus “Western transplant.” Instead, Fossum argues, it has generated its own copyright consciousness: a reflexive and affective field in which legality is locally authored. Chapter 1 traces this through the 2015 Apple Music licensing delay, reframing “failure” narratives as echoes of older reformist desires to synchronize with Europe. At once mundane and politically charged, this opening scene captures how a global corporate impasse can crystallize local anxieties about civilization, progress, and legitimacy. Chapter 2 turns ethnographic, showing how judges, lawyers, and hoteliers debate what counts as “civilized musical practice,” developing a fourfold schema—normative, pragmatic, critical, and culturally intimate—through which copyright becomes a measure of moral standing. Chapters 3 and 4 examine how ideas of authorship and authenticity emerged historically within state folklore institutions. By defining türkü (traditional Anatolian folk songs) as collective and authorless, early cultural bureaucrats excluded vast repertoires from copyright while reinforcing the moral authority of state curation. Fossum reads these archives and interviews with widely known figures such as Neşet Ertaş and Nida Tüfekçi to show how “authenticity” itself became a legal instrument, a means of distinguishing national culture from commercial modernity. Here, Fossum makes a striking contribution: he reframes the folklorization of Turkish music not as the state's withdrawal from modern property regimes but as its reinvention of them. In so doing, he suggests that anonymity becomes a juridical category that stabilizes collective identity while displacing creative ownership. The final chapters bring these insights into the present. Chapter 5 follows debates over how to compensate arrangers of folk songs, situating disputes about “original contribution” within Turkey's lingering ambivalence toward collective creativity. Chapter 6 centers on the public controversy over “Kiziroğlu Mustafa Bey,” a folk song turned political campaign anthem. Fossum reconstructs the episode—ranging from television debates to MESAM registries—to reveal the legal and moral limbo of the collector (derlemeci), whose labor lies between documentation and invention. By tracing how a 16th-century ballad resurfaces in a 21st-century election, Fossum shows how copyright law continually reanimates older moral arguments about originality, inheritance, and the ownership of the past. The “Kiziroğlu” case, he argues, epitomizes how formal law and everyday legality continually recalibrate each other: people draw on legal idioms to make moral claims even when those claims lack enforceable rights. In the conclusion, Fossum ties these threads together: copyright in Turkey has not merely governed musical production but has reshaped the categories of authorship and ownership. He names this the culturally intimate dimension of legality, where frustration with the law's failures becomes part of national self-understanding (pp. 196–98). Here, he suggests that law's very incompleteness becomes a familiar social feeling and a recurring idiom through which citizens articulate belonging, pride, and disappointment. Turkey thus emerges not as a belated adopter of European law but as a key site for rethinking how global legal forms acquire local affective charge. Fossum's greatest strength lies in how he retools legal consciousness for a domain that anthropology has rarely treated as a legal world. His double fluency in sociolegal theory and ethnomusicology allows him to move between linguistic analysis and institutional ethnography with precision. Tracing the semantic careers of authorship (telif), collection (derleme), and originality/distinctiveness (hususiyet), he shows how legal categories become tools for thinking about creativity and selfhood. The result is an ethnography of law's audibility: we hear legality not only in exclusively legal arenas but also in the vocabularies of composers, folklorists, and administrators. Fossum thus designs what might be called an “acoustic jurisprudence,” in which sonic metaphors such as echo, resonance, and improvisation illuminate the law's iterative and performative life. Methodologically, the book models an ethnography of law beyond the courtroom, combining participant observation, policy analysis, and textual interpretation in ways that recall Laura Nader's injunction to “study up.” Fossum's long engagement with copyright offices, ministry officials, and musicians’ unions allows him to trace not just what law dictates but how it circulates through rumor, paperwork, and song. The treatment of the “Kiziroğlu” controversy is especially striking, because it shows how a seemingly minor media spectacle becomes a parable of authorship's instability in neoliberal Turkey. The book's weaknesses are few but worth noting. At times, the density of historical and institutional detail dulls the ethnographic immediacy. Some early historical sections rely more on documentary synthesis than on sustained observation. Conceptually, while copyright consciousness is elegant and productive, it could have been placed in closer conversation with scholarship on moral economy, especially regarding how fairness and obligation are negotiated in everyday economic life, and with work on cultural intimacy in Turkey, which has long examined how citizens internalize the state's contradictions as part of national self-understanding. The analysis might also have benefited from a reflection on the vernacular inflation of the word “consciousness” (bilinç), often used interchangeably with “awareness” in Turkish public discourse and proliferating across civic and moral registers in relation to nearly every social problem. In this context, Fossum's analytical frame mirrors but does not fully interrogate a national idiom of self-governance. Still, these are minor limitations in a work that so ambitiously and successfully bridges law, culture, and sound. Copyright Consciousness will engage readers in legal anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Middle East studies while contributing to cultural anthropology more broadly. For legal anthropologists, it reanimates the study of how people inhabit the law by showing that the relevant actors are not only ordinary citizens but also creative professionals whose livelihoods depend on law's indeterminacy. For ethnomusicologists, it provides a rare model of how musical circulation can be analyzed as a site of legal and affective labor. And for cultural anthropologists, it offers a framework for examining how global legal infrastructures articulate with local moral economies of creativity and value. Linking the anthropology of the state, media studies, and sound studies, its interdisciplinary reach positions it as a resource for teaching as well as for research. Ultimately, Fossum invites us to hear law differently. Copyright Consciousness demonstrates how legality seeps into the textures of everyday artistry; how composing, collecting, and broadcasting music become acts of interpreting the state. It reminds us that intellectual property is not only a regime of regulation but also a vernacular moral terrain where citizens voice belonging, fairness, and aspiration. By tracing these negotiations across archives, institutions, and airwaves, Fossum offers an anthropology attuned to law's resonance in both sound and sentiment.