Today, we are featuring a discussion with David Bellos and Alex Montagu about the history of copyright protection.
Bellos is a professor at Princeton University with a distinguished background as a translator and biographer. Montagu is a founding Partner of MontaguLaw, P.C., a law firm that focuses primarily on intellectual property law, international commercial transactions and new media commercial and corporate law. The pair recently released a book, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyright and Wrongs, which goes into great detail on the history of copyright and how it impacts our everyday lives.
“From the beginning, copyright had this tendency to spread, creep, and crawl, and it extended in dribs and drabs from books to engravings to sheet music—sculptures, the visual arts and even textile designs like tea towels in the Calico Printers’ Act. It had a tendency from the start to get bigger and bigger. This started happening long before there was any new media or the internationalization of copyright and the extension of the rights that it conferred, like translation and adaptation. All this precedes the invention of anything that you might call ‘new media,’” Bellos says.
Montagu adds, “In the 17th and 18th century, these issues were debated publicly. It was not an issue that was limited to a niche circle of lawyers and lobbyists behind the scenes, because issues that affected people were debated by philosophers–John Locke, Condorcet in France, people like that. Today, that's not what we're doing. This is very much a niche issue that, if debated at all, is debated in the context of the United States Copyright Office or the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. There are very few people involved. And we argue that this is actually touching everybody, so we want to open up the discussion.”
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