"Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Coprights and Wrongs" by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu: Review by Jesse Goodwin

Abstract

At the very start of Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu lay out their goal: not to present a guide to copyright law but to track how the landmark idea that authors should hold ownership over their work for a brief time morphed into the multibillion-dollar intellectual property (IP) industry. The book takes its time spelling out this intricate (and sometimes circular) history and connecting it to what we see in the modern day—from Plato to artificial intelligence (AI)—in almost 400 pages. Frankly, with the amount of history, concepts, and terminology to cover, the two do a pretty good job vis-à-vis their goal.