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.
