David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence?

 

- Anybody in the publishing industry who is interested in copyright will find this new book absorbing and extremely enlightening. It not only covers in detail the history of how the notion of protection of creative works developed across the world over the last three hundred years, it doesn't shy away from robustly criticising the misplaced decisions governments have too frequently taken along the way.

- It's lucidly written, comprehensive, and very accessible. It doesn't get bogged down in legal niceties but it's apparent at every turn that the authors are fully across all of them. What is refreshing is that they don’t hesitate to call out bullshit when they see it. And they see it often. ‘…Intellectual Property continues to follow its long trajectory from the sublime to the ridiculous’. 

- The book's main focus is the corporate overreach that has developed over the last 50 years, particularly in the US. And the absurd protection given to all works up to seventy years after the author's death. This post mortem period was also adopted by Australia during the Howard years under pressure from the US. 

- The laws that create the opportunity to sequester and exploit creations of every kind for three or four generations do not have very deep roots and only the last few decades have they acquired such scope, length and power as to allow the accumulation of huge piles of money. That is why copyright now means more than it every did before, and why we need to understand how it suddenly got to play such a large role in modern life.

This book explains where the idea was first sown, how it sprouted, developed and ramified over centuries, and then, in a short space of time, was transformed into the biggest money machine the world has ever seen.

On December 16, 2021, SONY Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of 72-year-old singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen: the New York Times reported that the sale price was around $550,000,000. 

...the tax it aims to extract from the global audience of Springsteen-lovers over the next century must run into billions.