Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
"Illuminating"
—Bookforum April-June 2002 "It has taken lawyers 200-plus years to morph copyright law from the balanced compromise that our framers struck to the extraordinary system of control that it has become. In this beautifully written book, a nonlawyer has uncovered much of the damage done. Copyrights and Copywrongs is a rich and compelling account of the bending of American copyright law, and a promise of the balance that we could once again make the law become."
—Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School and author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace "Siva Vaidhyanathan has done a big favor for the academic and library communities. In this book, he has spelled out in clear, understandable language what's at stake in the battles over the nation's intellectual property. The issues brought forward are critical to the future of scholarship and creativity. Librarians and academics are wise to purchase this book and add it to their ‘must read' lists."
—Nancy Kranich, President, American Library Association, 2000–2001 "Copyrights and Copywrongs is an urgent information-age wake-up call to a public cocooned in belief that ‘copyright' is a seal and safeguard for consumers and producers of culture-ware. This book guides us into the legal labyrinth of a new world of so-called intellectual property, in which ‘fair use' isn't fair, where rights are waived and free speech—when we can get it—costs a great deal of money. From print books to video games, Copyrights and Copywrongs shows free expression in a legalistic chokehold. Clearly written, meticulously argued, this book is a must."
—Cecelia Tichi, author ofEmbodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Spaces Copyright reflects far more than economic interests. Embedded within conflicts over royalties and infringement are cultural values—about race, class, access, ownership, free speech, and democracy—which influence how rights are determined and enforced. Questions of legitimacy—of what constitutes "intellectual property" or "fair use," and of how to locate a precise moment of cultural creation—have become enormously complicated in recent years, as advances in technology have exponentially increased the speed of cultural reproduction and dissemination. In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidhyanathan tracks the history of American copyright law through the 20th century, from Mark Twain's vehement exhortations for "thick" copyright protection, to recent lawsuits regarding sampling in rap music and the "digital moment," exemplified by the rise of Napster and MP3 technology. He argues persuasively that in its current punitive, highly restrictive form, American copyright law hinders cultural production, thereby contributing to the poverty of civic culture. In addition to choking cultural expression, recent copyright law, Vaidhyanathan argues, effectively sanctions biases against cultural traditions which differ from the Anglo-European model. In African-based cultures, borrowing from and building upon earlier cultural expressions is not considered a legal trespass, but a tribute. Rap and hip hop artists who practice such "borrowing" by sampling and mixing, however, have been sued for copyright violation and forced to pay substantial monetary damages. Similarly, the oral transmission of culture, which has a centuries-old tradition within African American culture, is complicated by current copyright laws. How, for example, can ownership of music, lyrics, or stories which have been passed down through generations be determined? Upon close examination, strict legal guidelines prove insensitive to the diverse forms of cultural expression prevalent in the United States, and reveal much about the racialized cultural values which permeate our system of laws. Ultimately, copyright is a necessary policy that should balance public and private interests but the recent rise of "intellectual property" as a concept have overthrown that balance. Copyright, Vaidhyanathan asserts, is policy, not property. Bringing to light the republican principles behind original copyright laws as well as present-day imbalances and future possibilities for freer expression and artistic equity, this volume takes important strides towards unraveling the complex web of culture, law, race, and technology in today's global marketplace.
Customer Reviews:
Review #1: Boring
2007-06-28 
The problem with this book, is that you cannot argue for copyrights on one hand, and against them on the other. Either there is intellectual property or there is not. If there is not, then it is a government granted monopoly, and government granted monopolies can be shown to be less efficient then the market. As such, this means that copyrights would not do a better job at encouraging ingenuity. The thing is the book seems to talk about the philosophy of it a lot more then the reality of it.
Review #2: Great
2007-01-28 
A great presentation on why we should go to copyleft or the creative commons.
Review #3: Copyright Is More Than Just About Profit
2006-04-05 
This book does not really explore aspects of copy protection beyond profit. Copy protection's original purpose was to protect others from taking your intellectual work and pretending to be theirs without giving the original authors any credit. So yes, copyright protection is indeed important, as it encourages creativity when implemented properly.
Review #4: In Defense of the Writing Style
2006-03-18
I am writing this primarily to defend the style used by Dr. Vaidhyanathan in this book. The person who commented anonymously (as "a reader") suggested it was written at a second grade reading level. That was not a mistake.
I recently found an interview Dr. Vaidhyanathan gave to a magazine concerning this book, and he said that, "I went looking for a clearly written book for laypeople to read [about copyright], and I found that there wasn't one. I thought I should probably write one."
Copyright law is at best difficult to "translate", and and this book is an excellent beginner resource. "A Reader" complains that Dr. Vaidhyanathan is biased toward less restrictive copyright laws, but I can only imagine that "A Reader" is in fact a representative of a large corporation which holds very many copyrights it wishes to protect. I don't think that the average American who wishes to copy his/her CDs onto his/her iPod without being subject to prosecution would wish for more restrictive copyright laws.
Dr. Vaidhyanathan holds copyrights, but does not fight for very restrictive measures regarding his works. Think about what that means about his "bias."
As far as finding works which quote court decisions about copyright issues, and are written at a very highbrow level, just look for James Boyle's works. However, it is important to mention that he, also, believes that copyright laws have become very restrictive, especially since the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998.
Review #5: The Mess of Creativity and Ownership
2004-11-06 
This is an insightful though often quick and unfocused examination of the history of copyright law. Vaidhyanathan outlines the deceptively complicated realm of copyright law from its origins in medieval Europe to current issues with peer-to-peer networks and intellectual property. Through his sometimes creative use of legal precedents and historical trends, Vaidhyanathan reaches a few outstanding insights here, such as debunking the incorrect impression that the term "copyright" implies a right when it is actually a privilege; while modern crazes like hip-hop sampling and MP3 file sharing are not direct violations of copyright law but instead offer harsh illuminations of the gaps and inconsistencies in that law. Most importantly, the highly varied nuances and applications of copyright law in the past have been ruinously combined in recent years into the poorly defined, but disastrously applied, concept of intellectual property. Thus we have the modern corporatist view of everything as "property" that can be owned, bought, and sold, including ideas and expression.
Vaidhyanathan provides plenty of believable evidence that this troublesome doctrine, while often disingenuously trotted out to supposedly protect original creators, does little more than enrich corporations while also chilling free speech and restricting creativity. The problem with this book is Vaidhyanathan's poorly constructed writing style, with distracting jumps in subject matter and unnecessary academic theoretical investigations into phenomena of doubtful value to the reader. An example is the chapter-long dissertation on Mark Twain's certainly voluminous but questionably influential (or relevant) thoughts on copyright law. Meanwhile, Vaidhyanathan's goal of finding the best answers to these problems is trickled out in passing throughout the book, rather than appearing authoritatively in the book's very rushed conclusion. But otherwise, if you can handle some reader-unfriendly passages, this is an acceptable look at the complex world of copyright law and how it is currently moving in all the wrong directions. [~doomsdayer520~] |
