The content of a copyright

WHO OWNS THIS SENTENCE?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

Author: David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

Publisher: W W Norton

Pages: 384

Price: $28.99

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s surprisingly sprightly history Who Owns This Sentence?  arrives with uncanny timing.

New Year’s Eve hangovers had barely cleared before Harvard’s president was ousted over charges of plagiarism and inadequate attribution, followed by quick retorts that her biggest detractor’s wife, a former tenured professor at MIT, had filched passages from Wikipedia.

Somebody please alert Smokey Bear: The groves of academe are on fire.

How quaint Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” theory of the Romantic poets now seems, amid the current cut-and-paste panic. Like a corrupt police officer, artificial intelligence is scanning for more plagiarism perps, while itself stealing writers’ words. Even the most innocent and well-meaning among us natural intelligences could be forgiven for sitting bolt upright at 3 am, worrying that some choice phrase we’d committed to print or pixels had already been committed by someone else.

With pre-existing intellectual property (IP) ascendant and piracy run amok, the act of creation can seem like a crime scene where the DNA evidence is all mixed up. Bellos, a translator and biographer, and Montagu, a lawyer, step confidently behind the yellow tape to guide us around.

They sort out the difference between plagiarism, a matter of honour debated since ancient times (and a theme, tellingly, of many recent novels); copyright, a concern of modern law and, crucially, lucre (“the biggest money machine the world has ever seen”); and trademark. If I wanted a picture of Smokey Bear to run with this article — and I very much do — The New York Times would have to fork up.

The authors’ chapters are short but their reach, like the arm of the law itself, is long. 

We travel from Plato’s outrage at Hermodorus, who had his teacher’s notes copied and published; to woodblock printing in China; the Stationers’ Company, an early regulatory body in London; and the 1886 Berne Convention in Switzerland, which both codified and complicated international copyright as we know it.

And of course to the nationless ’net, where the tentacles of modern fan fiction spread exponentially if not legally, and social media poses massive unanticipated problems to a civil society. “How to sort good books from bad posts without mistake is a problem no law has truly solved,” the authors write, reminding us that Facebook profits from our posts without being accountable for them. “It is a joke — but it should not make us laugh.”

They themselves have a wry way with technical material. Discouraged by their publisher from naming a chapter title after the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the authors deftly illustrate this “absurd” circumstance by only describing in close identifiable detail the band and the song.

Though often compared to theft, incorporating chunks of protected written works into your own — as critics must — will not land you in jail, Bellos and Montagu reassure. Copyright is a far more debated and nebulous entity than murder — and, the authors argue, the statutes governing it are ripe for revision.

While Bellos is a comparative literature professor at Princeton, Who Owns This Sentence? could not have possibly anticipated the current Poison Ivy League. But it does discuss the early version of Mickey Mouse in “Steamboat Willie,” unloosed into public domain days ago by the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, aka the Sonny Bono Act, which protected that pointy-nosed Mickey so much people may have forgotten him. Not so F Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, whose own liberation has engendered a vampire version and other horrors.

Bellos and Montagu champion the little guy, the writer — who seems to be getting smaller and smaller — against the massive entertainment Goliaths. There are carefully footnoted stories like that of the documentarian who sticks one of his own movies on a TV screen in the background of  Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle  so that he wouldn’t have to pay a studio $10,000 to show the four-second segment of The Simpsons that they were actually watching.

How was this good for anyone? Not the audience of the documentary, which missed the chance to see how the stagehands really relaxed; not its maker, who had to enhance reality just to keep his lights on; not the studio, whose absurd price wasn’t met.

Reading this anecdote I found myself thinking of a favourite sequence in Maestro, the biopic of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein that had the cooperation of his estate. Played by Bradley Cooper with a prosthetic nose that maybe deserves its own patent at this point, Bernstein comes home on Thanksgiving to find a Snoopy stuffed animal abandoned in the vestibule of his sumptuous apartment. And then minutes later, as Bernstein and his wife (Carey Mulligan) bicker in their bedroom at the Dakota, a giant Snoopy float from the Macy’s parade looms comically into view outside the window.

How much, if anything, I now wonder, did securing rights to this character from Peanuts Worldwide cost? Would someone without Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment looming behind him have been able to include it?

The wide range of examples in Who Owns This Sentence?  had me wondering also about what’s left out. Readers will learn about J M Barrie donating Peter Pan to a children’s hospital, Milan Kundera’s fussiness about translation and how Alexander Pushkin’s wife killed him twice (by setting him up for a duel and restricting his readership with copyright protection).

But by encouraging contemplation beyond specific pieces of what is now bleakly known as “content,” the book succeeds. Let’s hope excerpts are hot out of the Xerox™ machine and being collated for college classrooms across the country.

The reviewer is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. ©2024 The New York Times News Service