Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

OK, I’m not the audience for this, but if you want a layperson-oriented book about how copyright got so bloated, you might enjoy this one. Useful statistics on just how dominant English is in terms of what gets translated from/to, and likewise the US is dominant in receiving royalties. Limiting the right to control translation, as they suggest, might change a bit of that, though copyright can’t create demand itself. The most interesting part for me was the chapter on Soviet copyright, “simultaneously wildly generous and highly dubious.” Authors couldn’t block publication and royalties were often paid to the state, but popular prose writers were entitled to at least 100 per cent of the retail price; advances and royalties were show more subject to fixed scales “based on the political standing and official position of the author.” Belonging to the Writers’ Union conferred access to better housing and luxury goods. “At its peak, the union had more than ten thousand members, who were collectively far better remunerated than any ten thousand full-time writers (if there ever were so many!) in the United States. However, works by emigrants, works not approved for publication, and works by non-Soviet authors were not remunerated at all.” Soviet poets held readings in football stadiums and new printings of classic works came out in runs of 100,000—but of course censorship and privation were also features of the system. show less