| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
384 pages ; 24 cm |
|
Book tlcgt |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-371) and index. |
| Contents |
What copyright means -- Authors in antiquity -- Patents and privileges in Renaissance Italy -- Authorship and answerability -- Books before copyright -- Where does property come from? -- A short history of genius -- The statute of Anne -- The myth of incentive effect -- Authors in eighteenth-century France -- The losing side -- The fog of law -- Copyright creep -- Copyright capture -- Revolutionary change in France and America -- Romanticism and copyright -- Literary estates -- Rights in theatre and film -- Institutional piracy in nineteenth-century America -- The struggle for international copyright -- The Berne Convention of 1886 -- When copyright nearly died -- Keepers of the flame -- America and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century -- Corporate copyright -- Who owns the facts? -- Ideas and expressions -- Do you own your face? -- What moral rights can do -- The story of sound -- The U.S. copyright act of 1976 -- Fair use -- Copyright panics -- Misinformation campaigns -- Orphan works -- On the boundaries of the protected zone -- Copyright in China -- Copyright overreach -- Copyright warp -- The rise and fall of transformative use -- Creative commons -- The world's biggest money machine -- Where we are now -- What if...? |
| Summary |
"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, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties--making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. It wasn't always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright's metastasis can't be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Subject |
Copyright -- United States -- History.
|
| Genre/Form |
Instructional and educational works.
|
| Added Author |
Montagu, Alexandre, author.
|
| ISBN |
9781324073710 (hardcover) |
|
1324073713 (hardcover) |
|
