Historiography of Interpretations of Television Format Copyright: A Political Economic Perspective

Television formats (e.g., The Masked Singer) have been traded for 20 years without firm legal protection. This paper performs a political economic analysis of this uncertainty in the legal protection of formats by examining television format copyright infringement disputes in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and Brazil in the early 2000s. The cases show two dimensions of format copyright: the formation of the authorship of television formats and the construction of infringement. By examining the two dimensions of the cases, this paper demonstrates that the present state of television format copyright was an outcome of an ideological process that was enacted by the interaction between a territorial logic of law and a transnational logic of capital, expressed through actors such as multinational corporations, domestic corporations, and legal institutions.