New from Princeton University Press:
The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, by Peter Baldwin (University of California, Los Angeles/New York University). A description from the Press:
Today’s copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital
revolution that has made copyright—and its violation—a part of everyday
life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators,
Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley,
and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be
forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing
industry and Google is completely new, the copyright wars in fact
stretch back three centuries—and their history is essential to
understanding today’s battles. The Copyright Wars—the first major trans-Atlantic history of copyright from its origins to today—tells this important story.
Peter
Baldwin explains why the copyright wars have always been driven by a
fundamental tension. Should copyright assure authors and rights holders
lasting claims, much like conventional property rights, as in
Continental Europe? Or should copyright be primarily concerned with
giving consumers cheap and easy access to a shared culture, as in
Britain and America? The Copyright Wars describes how the
Continental approach triumphed, dramatically increasing the claims of
rights holders. The book also tells the widely forgotten story of how
America went from being a leading copyright opponent and pirate in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to become the world’s intellectual
property policeman in the late twentieth. As it became a net cultural
exporter and its content industries saw their advantage in the
Continental ideology of strong authors’ rights, the United States
reversed position on copyright, weakening its commitment to the ideal of
universal enlightenment—a history that reveals that today’s open-access
advocates are heirs of a venerable American tradition.
Compelling and wide-ranging, The Copyright Wars is indispensable for understanding a crucial economic, cultural, and political conflict that has reignited in our own time.
A scholarly endorsement:
"From Kant and Fichte to Wikipedia’s protest shutdown and the Swedish
Pirate Party, and from international copyright in the Confederacy to
moral rights in Fascist Italy, Baldwin offers a riveting historical
account of copyright in the Anglo-American and Continental European
spheres that becomes an indispensable guide to understanding today’s
struggles over copyright and international trade treaties."--Yochai Benkler
More information, including the TOC and introduction, is available here.
