Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

by David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu

Genres: Non-fiction, History
Pages: 384
Rating:

Synopsis:

Who Owns This Sentence? looks at how throughout history, principled arguments, greed, and opportunism have ensured copyright's ascendency, and unveils those who are behind a phenomenon that has faced little public debate.

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs is surprisingly readable, for a book on a subject that could be incredibly dry. It helps that they split things down into plenty of chapters, and take one or two examples at a time — they’re quite thorough in discussing the development of each successive law and expansion to law, but the chunks are pretty bitesize for the most part, and the tone is fairly casual.

If you are pro copyright without limit including for corporations, then you probably won’t enjoy the general tone they take, pointing out multiple times (and in multiple ways) that the argument that copyright gives people a livelihood and fosters creativity isn’t a universal truth (people will often create without financial incentives) and that the laws anyway aren’t focused on providing that (you wouldn’t need lifetime + 70 years just for that).

Their argument is that far too much stuff is tied up in copyright in a way that hampers creativity and the sharing of knowledge, and they make a fair case for it, especially when it’s clear that a bare handful of companies own almost all of it anyway, and the net result is that the rich keep on getting richer and richer — based on the hard work of others who are often dead.

That said, it is a fairly opinionated account, so if you want a dispassionate rundown of what copyright is, you don’t want this book.

Rating: 4/5