‘Who Owns This Sentence?’ review

Co-authored by a professor of comparative literature and an intellectual property lawyer, this book has two avowed purposes: to trace the history of how copyright law was created and to argue that it shouldn’t have been. The polemic is unlikely to convince anyone who does not already believe that all literary property is theft, breeding inequality between idea landlords and the serfs whose commons they enclose. Even the converted might balk at the authors’ suggestion that copyright has no ‘incentive effect’ because writers of genius would still be willing to work for free, while those ‘who put pen to paper to earn a crust’ tend to be unoriginal hacks. The fact that copyright can apply to ‘any old trash’ rather than works of merit – as decided by whom? – is also assumed as a negative. Despite insisting that copyright reasoning should follow the rules of formal logic (on which we are given a primer), the argument against it frequently seems to contradict itself or beg the question.

As a history, Who Owns This Sentence? casts a wide but scattershot net, ranging from classical Greece to China and Russia, but mainly focusing on Britain, France and the US. The chapters are short (some as brief as three pages) and seem to be almost randomly arranged. There are allusions to previous discussions – on the rights of authors in ancient China, for example – that never actually took place, while important entities such as the Stationers’ Company – the trade organisation that regulated printing rights in England for a century and a half – are first brought in before they are explained to the reader. This bite-sized approach does little justice to chronology or to the connections between events.

Although much of the account is based on documents and commentaries provided by the Primary Sources on Copyright project, the conclusions drawn from them – such as the characterisation of the Statute of Anne, the first Copyright Act in 1709, as the result of a ‘writers’ lobby’ capitalising on ‘widely shared resentment of the Stationers’ wealth and power’ – can be misleading at best. There are also significant omissions: much of the 17th century, for one, as well as moments like William Wordsworth’s role in expanding the term of copyright, or the shift from authors selling their ‘copies’ to publishers outright (as was the case for much of the period) to retaining them and receiving royalties for copies sold. Anyone interested in the prehistory of copyright and book-trade regulation, particularly in Britain, would be better served by the work of Mark Rose or John Feather – or indeed by browsing the Primary Sources on Copyright website for themselves.

Instead, we are given a whistlestop tour of developments, treated with the kind of binary judgement that calls to mind Jane Austen’s History of England. The first patent protections in 16th-century Venice (invariably referred to as ‘the Most Serene Republic’) were generous and broad-minded, but the book trade in early modern England became a ‘deplorable boondoggle for a clutch of plump printers’. The failure of business interests to bring about an end to patents in 19th-century America was bad, but the suppression of Belgian piracies in France during the same period was good. Appeals to nationalism are bad when they lead to patent laws, but good when they call for the nationalisation of deceased authors’ estates. Pushkin’s widow controlling the publication of his unpublished manuscripts: bad. The Soviet Union of Writers (as satirised by Mikhail Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita): good. Any uncertainty and complexity is dismissed with a shrug as ‘obscure’, ‘shrouded in mystery’ or prompted by ‘who knows what’. A 1787 law for the protection of calico designs arrives with a simple ‘Hey presto!’

The book is on firmer ground in its second half, which discusses the current state of play on issues ranging from orphan works to publicity rights and music licensing. The key moment of enclosure becomes the 1976 US Copyright Act, which (among other things) defined computer programs as ‘literary works’ and considerably widened the scope of what counts as ‘derivative’, while leaving the boundaries of ‘fair use’ treacherously hazy. In the following 25 years more copyright laws were passed than at any other point in history, accompanied by a propaganda campaign that sought to instil often-inaccurate ideas about intellectual property: you wouldn’t pirate a car!

Here, the case for corporate overreach is far more persuasive, even if it has already been made by writers from Lawrence Lessig to Cory Doctorow. But if the 1976 Act is ‘only the beginning of the story’, it seems a shame that it comes more than 250 pages in. And if this is the result of a different co-author taking over, one might wonder who owns which sentence.

Perhaps the most instructive part of this book for the student of copyright comes directly after its title page. As is now standard, it states that the copyright belongs to David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, and that their ‘moral right … to be recognised as the authors’ (a concept adopted from late-18th-century French legislation) is ‘asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988’ in the UK. All rights are reserved (a legacy of the 1911 pan-American Buenos Aires Agreement) and, except as allowed by law, no part may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior permission of the copyright owners and the publishers (now separate entities). There follows a notice that a short extract from Jonathan Lethem’s ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’ has been quoted with permission from Harper’s Magazine: a form of publishing over-caution that (as discussed in Chapter 38) has become increasingly common and risks stymieing free expression. Lethem’s 2007 essay makes an effective artistic case against copyright bloat, made up largely of quotations from other sources. In its conclusion he invites his readers to make whatever use of his work they please – within limits. ‘Don’t pirate my editions; do plunder my visions.’ That seems fair enough to me.

• Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
  David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
  Mountain Leopard Press, 384pp, £22
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

Natasha Simonova is a writer and researcher of 18th-century literature based in London.