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3.5
Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWho Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs Reviews
3.5
“This book made copyright law and its history engaging enough for me to power through (and by enough I mean it did a pretty good job!! I already knew I wasn’t interested in IP/patent/copyright law going in). This book’s superpower was the way it drew connecting lines through all the major points and showed how copyright protection has been co-opted by companies and the global north to further their capitalistic agendas.
Only wished the authors went a little deeper on the analysis of implications and consequences, but of course that’s for me to do going forward. Glad for the instruction though - lots of homework to do as I’m pretty worried for the future of humanity’s cultural innovation in the face of generative AI.”
“This book was a bit dry in places, so the bottom line is that while copyright was originally intended to protect authors and creators during their lifetimes, it has devolved into a complicated system that more often than not funnels money away from creators and into the hands of large corporations, and that it would be best to return copyright to its original, limited intentions. This would also result in more creativity overall, which I absolutely agree would be great.<br/><br/>Knocked down a star for repeated use of the phrase "him or her," and repeated references to J.K. Rowling.”
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