Who Owns This Sentence?: How Copyright Became the World's Greatest Money Machine

Description

An important 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. Copyright is everywhere. It controls much of what we do in the modern world, including the films we watch, the books we read, the music we listen to, the video games we play and the apps we use on our mobile telephones. Copyright goes beyond content created by the living. Today, legal battles are being fought over who owns the permissions (and thereby earns the profit) in the output of artificial intelligence programs. What began as a means of regulating the trade in books, has developed into a legal and linguistic labyrinth that has given financial and cultural ownership to an increasingly smaller group of larger corporations. Who Owns This Sentence? looks at how throughout history, principled arguments, greed, and opportunism have ensured copyright's ascendency, and unveils those who are behind a phenomenon that has faced little public debate.

David Bellos is a writer, translator and the Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His book,Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything has been translated into many languages, including Japanese and Farsi. He has won the IBM-France Translation Prize and the Goncourt Prize for Biography.Alexander Montagu is a practising lawyer and the founding partner of Montagu Law, which focuses on intellectual property law, international commercial transactions and new media commercial and corporate law. He has written many articles as well as two books,Intellectual Property: Money and Power in a New Era andThe Riddle of the Sphinx.

'One good life option is to just read everything David Bellos has ever written' -- Peter Salmon, Guardian