''Fascinating'' Telegraph
''Thorough and engaging'' Washington Post
''Lively, opinionated, and ultra-timely'' New Yorker
''[A] robust and readable polemic history'' Financial Times
''A fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright ... Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces ... should read this book'' Spectator
This is the story of a relatively simple idea - that authors have rights in the works they create - which through many strange and startling twists and turns has come to frame and to constrain a wide range of things we do, for the benefit not of the many, but of the few.
Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are
