Logos, trademarks, celebrity images and design patents are vibrant signs in a consumer culture governed by a regime of intellectual property laws. This book aims to bring an ethnographic approach to an analysis of authorship and the role law plays in shaping the various meanings that animate these protected properties in the public sphere. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the book examines and dismantles the legal assumption that the meaning and value of a text or image is produced exclusively by an individual author or that authorship has a single point of origin. In the process, the book discusses such issues as the proposed use of the term "Olympico" in reference to the proposed gay Olympic Games. Ultimately the book makes a case for redefining the political in commodified cultural environments.