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“All rights reserved,” warns every book’s title page. But whose, and why? In this work the founding partner of a Manhattan law firm and a senior Ivy League professor attack the copyright system that aspires, in their words, to “provide writers and artists with a living wage”. Alexandre Montagu, the lawyer, and David Bellos, the don, challenge artistic claims to originality, seek to dismantle the whole concept of “plagiarism”, and gleefully insist that “a bare handful of writers” makes a living out of books — as opposed, say, to intellectual-property litigation or academic tenure.
When institutional mandarins such as this eminent pair set out to undermine the traditional basis for remunerating the products of the mind, you might expect a lowly scribe (such as your reviewer) to take umbrage. I did begin Who Owns This Sentence? braced for another smug robbers’ charter dressed up as a libertarian manifesto: a habitual manoeuvre of digital-era “radicals” who believe that cultural property is theft. And that its creators can live happily on thin air.
Our witty and learned duo, however, aim to clap the real plunderers in irons. As a group of best-selling authors including John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen sue OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, for “systematic theft” of their work to train its tools, high-stakes turf wars rage again around the advent of new technologies — as they have done for centuries. From the British Statute of Anne in 1710, which granted meagre rights to authors but more to publishers, to those looming AI battles on IP’s “haziest frontier”, the book maps the ever-expanding empire of copyright.
A notion originally meant to give “limited support to living creators” has bloated into “a major engine of inequality”. Now, it warrants perpetual rent-harvesting on so-called “properties” — from a rendition of “Happy Birthday to You” to an image of Humphrey Bogart’s raincoat in Casablanca — by litigious and parasitic corporations.
How to reward the cash-strapped freelance — writer, musician, illustrator, software designer — fairly in an age of mass digital reproduction? That remains a puzzle our authors’ forensic demolition of “copyright creep” mostly sidesteps.
Bellos and Montagu do show that the galloping extension of copyright’s domain (roughly, since the US Copyright Act of 1976) has gathered pace just as the revenues of most authors and artists — aside from a few lucky superstars — have shrunk. Half a century ago the “cross-border licensing of intellectual property” was worth less than $1bn; by 2021, it had ballooned to $508bn. Last month, the (British) Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society reported that members’ median earnings from writing had dropped to about £7,000. Coincidence? Probably not: “Never in the course of human history has so little been paid to so many for so much.”
How did we reach this point? Documentary filmmakers will now strip an apartment of its decorations in case a fee-extracting estate claims rights in a picture on the wall; a Gen Z debut novel of 2024 can’t be quoted freely until perhaps 2160 (“life plus 70 years” holds sway in many jurisdictions), and the first 1928 iteration of Mickey Mouse — a case fully documented here — entered the public domain only this month.
In the Anglosphere and western Europe, argue Bellos and Alexandre, nebulous idealism and a chapter of legislative accidents partnered the self-interest of corporate lobbyists to enforce a “new enclosure of the creations of the human mind”. Yet the “great castle” of copyright law today rests not on firm principles but a cloud of inchoate “hot air”. They trace a long, winding path on which supersized commercial interests have repeatedly snatched the privileges claimed by individual creators: a drift resisted by Victorian mavericks, but confirmed by the 1886 Berne Convention and its many offshoots.
Copyright-hungry creators should note that Who Owns This Sentence? uncovers the same perverse pattern time and again. Measures trumpeted as a boost to writers, artists or “the advancement of learning” — from the 1710 Act to the tentacular US Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 — end up reinforcing the stranglehold of producers’ and distributors’ cartels, whether The Stationers’ Company of London or the Motion Picture Association of America. Since the judgment of Oliver Wendell Holmes in a 1903 US supreme court dispute about circus poster designs, companies have also grabbed rights as “authors” — and made billion-dollar fortunes from that fiction. Copyright protection now “flows disproportionately to large enterprises more likely to use it to stifle innovation than to promote it”.
Only a tiny fraction of today’s creators will conceivably benefit from royalty payments to their great-grandkids in 2120. Almost all suffer under the permissions-obsessed “culture of fear and trembling” that fences off others’ works and even deters writers (an instance the book cites) from proclaiming that “All You Need Is Love” — as those words make up not just the title but a large chunk of The Beatles’ lyrics for their song.
Copyright, this brace of sceptics urge in their robust and readable polemic-history, is decidedly not all that authors and artists need. Indeed, its “ever-tightening vice” may not feed but choke them as the “permissions” regime smothers any engagement with other works. This “roaring international engine of corporate rent” lets bullying giants call the tune.
Bellos and Alexandre offer a few sketchy alternatives, such as shorter post mortem protections or a curb on corporate rights capture, and call for a “broad debate” on copyright’s future. Shut down that rent-engine, though, and — for all but professors and litigators — the question of “Who pays the piper?” will stubbornly endure.
Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu Mountain Leopard Press £22, 384 pages
