| book details |

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

By (author) David Bellos, By (author) Alexandre Montagu

| on special |

normal price: R 559.95

Price: R 503.95

| add to trolley |

| book description |

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 propertiesâ€”making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. It wasnâ€™t always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printersâ€™ 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. Copyrightâ€™s metastasis canâ€™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. 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.

| product details |

| other options |

Normally shipped | Publisher Out of Stock. No orders accepted at this time
Readership Age |

| back |

| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

Survive the AI Apocalypse: A guide for solutionists

Bronwen Williams
Paperback / softback
232 pages
was: R 340.95
now: R 306.95
Forthcoming

Let's stare the future down and, instead of fearing AI, become solutionists.

| more |

| add to trolley |

The Memory Collectors: A Novel

Dete Meserve
Paperback / softback
320 pages

Enquiries only

| more |

| enquire |

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order

| more |

| add to trolley |

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

William Kelleher Storey
Paperback / softback
528 pages
was: R 425.95
now: R 382.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodesâ€™s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting, white-dominated colonial society.

| more |

| add to trolley |