"Honorable Mention for the 2015 PROSE Award in Law & Legal Studies, Association of American Publishers" Peter Baldwin is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.
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. "[F]ascinating and learned."---Louis Menand, New Yorker "Baldwin quite ably and thoroughly illuminates the history of copyright developments in Europe and the US."---Mark A. Fischer, Los Angeles Review of Books "Baldwin expertly and economically records the major beats of copyright history in the last 300 years in a surprisingly focused, readable narrative. . . . In discussions ranging from the origins of copyright in 18th-century England, through the rise of 'moral rights' in Europe and the transition of the U.S. from global pirate to a net exporter of cultural works in the 19th century, to present day battles over Google Book Search and thorny legislation, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Baldwin both illuminates the past and neatly sketches the contours of the battles to come." "Scholarly but accessible and lucid; essential for students or modern intellectual property law and of much interest to a wide audience of writers, journalists, publishers and 'content creators'." "Baldwin has provided an often fascinating account of debates over intellectual property, including the defense of the moral rights of authors in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Most important, Baldwin makes a compelling case that although claims to intellectual property have strengthened over the last three hundred years, they do not rest in nature. Intellectual property is, in fact, 'a contingent, socially created right, in thrall to what the lawmakers of the day' decide it is." "The overriding value of The Copyright Wars is . . . its rich history of copyright and its underlying philosophy. In particular, [Baldwin] provides a fascinating analysis of the rivalry between the US and UK conception of property rights and the continental European belief in the author's
