Copyright is everywhere.
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..
Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger.
Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century.
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.
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 has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers\' control of books.
It wasn\'t always so.
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.
At This very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs.
Someone Owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table.
Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property.
Copyright is everywhere
