Who Owns This Sentence : A History of Copyrights and Wrongs – David Bellos, Alexandre Montagu

Description

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. 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. ‘Who Owns This Sentence?’ is an often-humourous 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.