Who owns this sentence?

Bellos, David

£14.99

An 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.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 18/01/2024
ISBN: 9781800699144 Category: Tags: , ,

Description

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.

Additional information

Weight 460 g
Dimensions 232 × 152 × 34 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

384

Language

English

Edition

Export ed

Dewey

346.0482 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K