de David Bellos
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 So Far
A fascinating and original history of an idea that now controls and monetizes almost everything we do.
Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity.
It wasn't always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright's metastasis can't be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger.
Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 So Far
A fascinating and original history of an idea that now controls and monetizes almost everything we do.
Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity.
It wasn't always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright's metastasis can't be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger.
Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.
Critiques-
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December 15, 2023
A sprawling popular history of copyright law. "Most copyrights of commercial value now belong not to artists, but to corporations," write Princeton literature professor Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, and lawyer Montagu. A case in point is the catalog of Bruce Springsteen, which he sold for $550 million to the Sony Music Group at the end of 2021. Sony will monetize that catalog in numerous ways, licensing it for advertisements, soundtracks, etc.--and that corporate ownership, unless sold or subdivided, will extend so many years in the future that it will still be in force in the next century. This is a far cry from the original intent of copyright, which, in the U.S. at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, held for a two-year period when the creator could enjoy exclusive rights, after which it entered the public domain. The problem with copyright law, as it unfolds in this book, is not just that it is corporate controlled, but also that individual artists make pennies to the corporations' dollars--a matter that's likely to become ever more complicated in the age of AI. Who owns the creations of the machines? That's a matter of massive debate. In the current environment, those corporations--whose lobbyists have been strongly involved in every recent revision of copyright law--treat each other with the courtesies of gentlemen thieves while crushing any individual who would dare repurpose or reproduce even a few seconds' worth of protected material, which flies in the face of creation via imitation and reinterpretation, a fundamental mechanism of art. What seems certain, by the authors' account, is that corporate control is not likely to lessen in the coming years. A gimlet-eyed analysis of a system that protects a corporate status quo at the expense of independent invention.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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April 26, 2024
Translator/biographer Bellos (French and comparative literature, Princeton Univ.; The Novel of the Century) and intellectual property lawyer Montagu (comparative literature, Princeton Univ.; The Riddle of the Sphinx) team up for an expansive intellectual discussion of copyright law and its origins. Covering centuries of history in 44 chapters, the book reads like an extended lecture by favorite history professors. It is not a primer on copyright law or even a chronological description of its development. Instead, the authors describe how publishers dominated the spread of information, which caused England, in the 1700s, to give more power to authors. The book moves back and forth in time while devoting chapters to major laws such as the Berne Copyright Convention, the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, and major court cases that protect and give rights to authors. There are many fascinating stories in the book involving Mark Twain, Disney's Steamboat Willie, and Plato's outrage that notes of his lectures were being copied and sold. The authors conclude that rights issues have spread from printed works to the development of image rights, music and other recordings, architecture, and software. VERDICT Readers interested in the protection of information will find much to savor.--Harry Charles
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
