A fascinating and important exploration into how copyright has become a tool of unprecedented power and wealth for the few, widening the gap between the richest and poorest in society.
A fascinating and important exploration into how copyright has become a tool of unprecedented power and wealth for the few, widening the gap between the richest and poorest in society.
'Fascinating' Telegraph
'Thorough and engaging' Washington Post'Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely' New Yorker'[A] robust and readable polemic history' Financial Times'A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright ... Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces ... should read this book' SpectatorThis is the story of a relatively simple idea - that authors have rights in the works they create - which through many strange and startling twists and turns has come to frame and to constrain a wide range of things we do, for the benefit not of the many, but of the few.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 and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties - making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws covering almost all products of human creativity.Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century concentrated ownership of immaterial goods into very few hands.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.Fascinating ... Bellos and Montagu have extracted an enormous amount of fun out of their subject, and have sauced their sardonic and playful prose with buckets full of meticulously argued bile -- Simon Ings The Telegraph
David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu's surprisingly sprightly history "Who Owns This Sentence?" arrives with uncanny timing ... The authors' chapters are short but their reach, like the arm of the law itself, is long. -- Alexandra Jacobs New York Times
A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright ... Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces .... should read this book -- Anne Margaret Daniel Spectator
A thorough and engaging history of copying and plagiarism, from Virgil to Taylor Swift ... This encyclopaedic yet refreshingly breezy book takes readers across time - from ancient honour codes policing plagiarism to
the first modern copyright statutes, World Trade Organization rules and developments in copyright in China. The result is a compelling history of human creation
Copyright is often defended as an immutable concept handed down through the generations, but this brisk and entertaining history outlines the truth of its complicated history, and illuminates the ways in which it has increasingly been weaponized by contemporary corporations. A gem of narrative nonfiction with wide appeal, bound to be especially savored by anyone with a stake in the future of
intellectual property
David Bellos, the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is an award-winning translator and biographer and the author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? and The Novel of the Century. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Alexandre Montagu is a lawyer and the founding partner of MontaguLaw, which focuses on intellectual property law, international commercial transactions, and new media commercial and corporate law. He lives in London.This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.