Who Owns This Sentence? by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu review
Before Claudine Gay, there was Virgil, Helen Keller, George Harrison and Taylor Swift.
Virgil’s “Aeneid” was attacked as plagiarizing Homer’s “Iliad.” Helen Keller stood accused of copying work that had been read to her aloud before she could read Braille. George Harrison was found guilty of “subconsciously” copying the Chiffons’ 1962 chart-topper, “He’s So Fine,” to make his 1970 hit, “My Sweet Lord.” More recently, Taylor Swift settled a copyright lawsuit alleging that she stole the lyrics “players gonna play … haters gonna hate,” the memorable riff in her 2014 megahit “Shake It Off.”
These examples — save for that of the ex-Beatle — plus scores more are explored in “Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs,” a new book by David Bellos, a literature professor and translator at Princeton, and Alexandre Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer. This encyclopedic yet refreshingly breezy book takes readers across time — from ancient honor codes policing plagiarism to the first modern copyright statutes, World Trade Organization rules and developments in copyright in China. The result is a compelling history of human creation, which for better or worse inevitably involves copying.
Today, artificial intelligence could use such an eloquent defender. This book may very well be it. Bellos and Montagu argue that “cryptomnesia,” a term psychologists coined for involuntary copying, is not a “mental disorder” but simply a part of how humans learn and create. The centuries-old stories and lessons in this book have implications for very modern questions, as creators sue companies like OpenAI for feeding their machines others’ content. Machine learning replicates human learning, to an exponential degree, mimicking how we from birth ingest knowledge from all around us.
Of course, a book that argues, essentially, that there are no new ideas under the sun must tread carefully. Indeed, this is not the first work to ring alarm bells about the creep of copyright into every corner of our lives, or to point out the pitfalls of requiring permissions and royalties to create new works. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “Copyrights and Copywrongs” (2001) and James Boyle’s “The Public Domain” (2008) cover similar territory.
Still, “Who Owns This Sentence?” is a welcome and timely addition to our understanding of this complex issue, particularly of the political economy of copyright. Though invisible to most people, copyright, the authors point out, is the legal matrix underlying the wealth of nations today, with copyrights in design, software and popular culture accounting for nearly all the valuation of “six of the largest corporations in the world — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Disney.” The lesser-known and abstract law of copyright, they reveal, is “the world’s greatest money machine” and the engine of contemporary empires, funneling billions in royalties from poor to rich countries.
The authors spend considerable time recounting how copyright proliferated without rigorous public debate. They also debunk the myth that copyright helps artists. To the contrary, they write, “most copyrights of commercial value now belong not to artists, but to corporations.” The authors bemoan that, to play the music of Bruce Springsteen, generations will pay royalties not to the artist but to Sony Corp., which bought the copyrights in the Boss’s work for more than half a billion dollars.
In their efforts to warn about the harms of copyright overprotection, Bellos and Montagu at times miss out on explaining important ways in which copyright is a sophisticated instrument for handling complex disputes. Plagiarism is a case in point. Moralistic honor codes often indiscriminately decry the mere repetition of words. Copyright makes finer distinctions, protecting original expression of an idea (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”) but not underlying ideas and facts. And copyright recognizes that sometimes there are just a few effective ways of expressing an idea — like when explaining the rules of a game — and law does not preclude copying in those situations.
Advertisement
In short, archaic honor codes policing plagiarism moralize without much room for nuance. Copyright’s modern approach of built-in limitations and exceptions is, in the Supreme Court’s words, “the engine of free expression.”
But Bellos and Montagu are absolutely right that, though well-meaning, copyright has become a monstrous Frankenstein that is now out of control. Copyright started in early 18th-century Britain to wrest control of printing from the Crown and monopolistic publishers. It gave a limited property right to authors to spur new works that would promote learning among the public. The first copyrights lasted for a maximum of 28 years and were limited in scope. Today, copyright covers not only literature, film, photography and music, but also video games, software, architecture, choreography, kitsch and ephemera, from stripes on cheerleading uniforms to adult banana costumes. And copyrights endure for the life of the author plus another 70 years.
While the book does a nice job discussing the excesses of copyright, it does not explore emergent claims of cultural appropriation by traditionally disempowered creators, many of whom seek copyrights themselves. A new case brought against Martha Stewart by an employee alleging theft of her cranberry nut torte recipe is one example. Academic plagiarism cases raise the question of how much of a scholar’s published work is the fruit of uncredited research assistants. A recent Supreme Court decision finding that Andy Warhol has no “celebrity-plagiarist privilege” against a lesser-known female photographer whose photograph he appropriated brings claims of fairness and power front and center. Creators suing AI companies echo the language of fairness and livelihood. How do we reconcile these reparative claims with the necessity of copying to promote speech and culture?
Advertisement
The authors weave in and out of various intellectual-property domains. A careful reader will need to pay attention to the distinctions between trademark, patent and copyright. For instance, it’s possible that even if a particular action does not violate one area of intellectual-property law, it may violate another. To take one recent example, even though the earliest images of Mickey Mouse finally entered the public domain at the start of this year, those depictions could still be protected by trademark, so long as the iconic mouse signals Disney.
But these are quibbles in a book that grapples with some of the biggest and most challenging questions of our time. Which approach to copying will resolve the greatest copyright question of the 21st century, over the future of AI? An archaic, moralistic approach that extracts tolls from every person and machine that has learned from another creator? Or a balanced approach that recognizes, in Mark Twain’s prophetic words, that “the kernel, the soul … of virtually all human utterances is plagiarism?”
Madhavi Sunder is the Frank Sherry professor of intellectual-property law at Georgetown University Law Center and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Who Owns This Sentence?
A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
By David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
W.W. Norton. 384 pp. $28.99
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYml8cX6Oamtor5ikerDDzaxkrJ2eqbKvr8RmqrChlql6o7vOpGSrnaaesrh7