![Hello, Future! [Please be kind.] Hardcover Journal](https://hachette.imgix.net/books/9781546015079.jpg?w=210&h=280&fit=crop)
Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu
Formats & Editions
'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' Spectator
This 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.
On December 16, 2021, Sony Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of singer songwriter Bruce Springsteen. The sale price was over half a billion dollars. The reason why a catalogue of songs and recordings can now be sold for the price of a fleet of small aircraft is the whole subject of this book: copyright.
Who Owns this Sentence? is a fascinating and comprehensive cultural, legal and global history of how intangible things can be owned, and reveals how copyright is no longer for the benefit of creators but has been transformed into an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.
Read MorePraise for Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
-
A gimlet-eyed analysis of a system that protects a corporate status quo at the expense of independent invention - Kirkus ReviewsA gripping detective story, a flamboyant intellectual history, and a passionate manifesto for creative freedom ... You'll never think about copyright in the same way againOne good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written - GuardianBellos 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 imaginationIn 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 consumerWe 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 wordsThe 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
Find a book you'll love, get our newsletter
© Hachette Aotearoa | New Zealand, All Rights Reserved · Site by Chook