"Vastly More Monsterous": The Insidiousness Of Copyright Law

Live-streamed on March 18, 2024

David Bellos, professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, discusses his recent book Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu.

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Professor David Bellos joins, diving right into the contemporary distinctions between patents, trademarks, and the monstrous world of copyright, with the former two requiring applications and reapplications, while copyright allows for extensive, long-term monopoly over intellectual property for both individuals and corporations. After briefly touching on the concept of intellectual property writ large, Professor Bellos steps back to look at the initially parallel histories of patents and copyright, both birthed alongside the creation and dissemination of the printing press in 15th Century Venice to provide a distinction between the limited ownership of newly-authored works and the public domain of older and classical art, also touching on the much longer (and more severe) history of trademarks stretching back through the medieval times. Moving forward, Bellos then walks Sam and Emma through how the evolution of the world of intellectual property over the 18th and 19th Centuries largely took place in Western Europe, with Paris and London leading the way to the 1886 Berne Convention while other Western states like the US seriously lagged, also touching on the lack of ideology or even rationality behind the slow but steady expansion of these rights, before parsing through the US’ 180º turn on intellectual property over the 20th Century as they came into their hegemonic station, not only signing onto Berne but forcing anyone who wanted help from the Neoliberal order to do so as well.

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