"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."

"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."

"A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright."

"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."

"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 Xerox^TM machine and being collated for college classrooms across the country."

"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."

"The field of copyright has been full of dramatic turns, as a new book, Who Owns This Sentence?, recounts."

"Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely."

"[Bellos and Montagu are] witty and learned.... [A] robust and readable polemic-history."

"The story of copyright has many moving parts: history, literature, economics, politics, policy, and technology. Each element gets a closeup in this expertly told story of the evolution of copyright. In a time when billions of words are used to train AI models, this engaging and instructive book tells how different eras and countries have struggled with the challenge of defining ownership of texts."

"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."

"Thorough and engaging.... [A] welcome and timely addition to our understanding of this complex issue."

"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.’"

"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."

"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."

04/26/2024

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

2023-11-17
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.