INTRODUCTION 102
I. AUTHORSHIP IN THE STATUTE 106
A. Joint Works 107
B. Works Made for Hire 108
C. Summary: Collaboration under the copyright statute 111

II. AUTHORSHIP IN THE WORLD 112
A. Scholarship 112
B. Sculpture and Painting 117
C. Theatre 121
D. Screenplays 125
E. Songs 128
F. Comic Book Characters 132
G. Summary: One Size Doesn’t Fit All 143

III. Authorship in the Courts 144
A. Joint Works and Dominant Authors 146
1. The “dominant author” test 146
2. The “control” test 156
B. Authorship claims and time bars 164
1. When authorship claims accrue 165
2. Works made for hire and time bars 171
3. Time bars and copyright policy 172

IV. AUTHORSHIP SENSE 175

CONCLUSION 182

Copyright law’s primary device for promoting progress is to bestow rights on the authors of works. Rights vest automatically and last for a very long time. Authors’ choices to retain, license, or transfer those rights fuel opportunities to communicate the works to their audiences. The copyright system’s mechanisms for determining who authored works (and therefore automatically obtained copyright rights) should be both accurate and reliable, since misidentifications will undermine the law’s working as intended.

This article examines authors’ creation of works and copyright law’s handling of authorship disputes. Many works result from creative collaboration. Although the copyright statute incorporates mechanisms for allocating rights among multiple contributors, judges appear to be uncomfortable with severally-authored works. Accordingly, courts have adopted rules that minimize, reallocate, or erase the creative contributions of inconvenient collaborators. These well-settled rules are nonsense, neither well-reasoned nor probative. They complicate and confuse our efforts to identify the author and owner of copyright in a work, and exacerbate power disparities in unbalanced creative ecosystems