Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
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.
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Bellos and Montagu's astonishingly capacious narrative is a gripping detective story, a flamboyant intellectual history, and a passionate manifesto for creative freedom, all rolled into one. You'll never think about copyright in the same way again.--Fara Dabhoiwala, historian and senior research scholar, Princeton University
By turns painstaking and playful, Bellos and Montagu reveal the patchwork of laws, norms, and assumptions that have transformed ideas into property. Copyright is no longer just about authors and the right to benefit from their work, but about big business and even bigger profits. Theirs is a compelling call to address the privatization of the global imagination.--Emily Drabinski, President, American Library Association
We often think of copyright as a form of justice, a means of ensuring that creators rather than pirates of works receive whatever compensation is on offer. This witty, informed and timely book urgently invites us to think otherwise. Copyright, the authors tell us, 'means more than it ever did before.' It takes in books, films, sheet music, computer programs and many other inventions, and yet it in the end 'it is an edifice of words.' This detailed history makes very lively reading, and also encourages action, since we could, if we wished, use different words.--Michael Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Princeton University
In this madcap history from Plato to Donald Duck, from feudal Europe to Facebook, David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu have written the definitive account of where copyright came from and why it looks the way it does. Who Owns This Sentence? belongs on the bookshelf of every creator, producer, policymaker, and consumer.--Jason Mazzone, Albert E. Jenner, Jr. Professor of Law, University of Illinois
A gimlet-eyed analysis of a system that protects a corporate status quo at the expense of independent invention.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Fascinating.... Bellos and Montagu have extracted an enormous amount of fun out of their subject, and have sauced sardonic and playful prose with buckets full of meticulously argued bile.--Simon Ings, The Telegraph (UK), 5-star review
Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely.--Louis Menand "The New Yorker"
[Bellos and Montagu are] witty and learned.... [A] robust and readable polemic-history.--Boyd Tonkin "Financial Times"
The field of copyright has been full of dramatic turns, as a new book, Who Owns This Sentence?, recounts.-- "The Economist"
As this thoughtful book shows, copyright law has been revised and rewritten according to changing needs. The authors are right that we need a 'broad debate.'--Dominic Green "Wall Street Journal"
A surprisingly accessible recounting of the major twists and turns--and there are many!--surrounding this topic [copyright].... Well worth a read for anyone interested in history, publishing, or philosophy.--Mariko Hewer "Washington Independent Review of Books"
A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright.--Anne Margaret Daniel, Spectator (UK)
David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu's surprisingly sprightly history Who Owns This Sentence? arrives with uncanny timing.... [B]y encouraging contemplation beyond specific pieces of what is now bleakly known as 'content, ' the book succeeds. Let's hope excerpts are hot out of the XeroxTM machine and being collated for college classrooms across the country.--Alexandra Jacobs "New York Times"
Thorough and engaging.... [A] welcome and timely addition to our understanding of this complex issue.--Mahvani Sunder "Washington Post"
In short, punchy chapters and witty prose, a lawyer and a literature professor untangle the history of how intellectual property has come to be protected--and who wins and loses in the bargain.--New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
