Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

Copyright, which arose in eighteenth-century London to limit printers' control of books, has become a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger. 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. Not only poems and novels, but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, ringtones, cartoon characters, databases, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties.

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.