Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

By David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

WW Norton 2024

David Bellos is a professor of French literature, and Alexandre Montagu is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property, and their collaboration, Who Owns This Sentence takes an informed, readable look at the torturous history of copyright – its deep antecedents, its omissions, its false promises, and, in some cases, its “long trajectory from the sublime to the ridiculous.” Bellos and Montagu are entirely right in assessing the ubiquity of their subject; the proliferation of media in the 21st century has vastly increased the likelihood that even the most unsuspecting civilians will bark their shins on some kind of copyright claim at least once a week. Your favorite TikTok meth addict lunges to turn the car radio off a second after a certain song comes on? He’s afraid of a copyright claim from the record label if too much of the song plays unauthorized in his video. A guileless nobody writes a what-happened-next continuation of The Lord of the Rings and self-publishes it? Copyright will land that nobody in court. Your Instagram feed is full of Mickey Mouse memes? It’s because copyright expired on the “Steamboat Willie” version of the character. 

Copyright is what stops a review of this review of Who Owns This Sentence from consisting of an annotated (in this particular case, extensively annotated) copy of the full text of the book. Since, as Bellos and Montagu characterize the issue, copyright strengthens with the clout of the holder, copyright itself might not be what stops this review of Who Owns This Sentence from appearing pasted verbatim under some random user’s name on Goodreads (book critics typically having little or no clout), but the concept nevertheless works its way even into a reviewer’s life via the “gate ajar in the high wall … around intellectual property” that is the “fair use” exemption to the beefed-up copyright protections that came into US law in 1976. This exemption allows the very limited use of copyrighted material “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research,” although even here, Bellos and Montagu, forever unsatisfied with legal wordings, are unsatisfied: “To say, as this paragraph does, that ‘the fair use of copyright work … is not an infringement of copyright’ is a tautology,” they contend, even though it isn’t. Possibly they meant that it’s a contradiction, although even that isn’t true, since the exemption makes it clear that the “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole” is what governs fair use, which is permissible unless its extent is egregious – transcribing the entire chapter on “fair use” from Who Owns This Sentence, for example, would violate copyright in a way that this discussion’s brief quotations don’t. 

Even so, the authors are correct about clout; the thing that would stop a critic from wholesale reproducing that “fair use” chapter wouldn’t be a bailiff – it would be an editor, adding a comment along the lines of “what the hell is this?” – or it would be the specter of public mockery when the laziness was uncovered (provided it didn’t happen in the Ivy League, that is). Who Owns This Sentence is an invigoratingly pugnacious working-over of the whole concept of copyright, but the angry assertion gaining strength through its chapters is that most forms of copyright have evolved into the concern of “a handful of celebrities,” acting more as a fencing of the intellectual commons than the freeing of intellectual energy. “Fame and glory are not the children of copyright,” our authors claim – if anything, just the opposite. 

This book challenges several settled pieties surrounding the whole subject. Those pieties, our authors point out, can be found in the “seductive prose” that typically begins any new book you pick up. Take Viking Penguin, for instance: “Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.” As Bellos and Montagu fairly well demonstrate, these claims are not only historically illiterate but also decidedly double-edged, vague enough to sound idealistic, but elastic enough to act as a threat. “You and I therefore,” they write, “have no recourse against book publishers who mislead their readers with overstated copyright notices, but publishers have recourse against you and me if we stumble outside the hazy lines of fair use or fair dealing in quotations and excerpts we use in our own books.” 

In 1909, an American Act of Congress elaborated on the copyright guarantees enshrined in the Constitution in a fateful way: it wrote that “the word author shall include an employer in the case of works made for hire.” Bellos and Montagu point out that although authors and inventors are people, the “employer” mentioned here might be corporations or partnerships of all kinds. “Today, the vast majority of commercially available copyrights belong not to people, but to large, impersonal empires in the book, film, music and software fields,” they write, “and in the mangled language of copyright law, these entities are now the authors of the works they distribute …” 

The results? Unless something drastic were to happen, the results will almost certainly be a further restricting of copyright’s utility into a smaller and smaller number of hands, a further enclosing of the cultural commons by corporations that can afford to manipulate the many vague or slippery parts of existing copyright laws. Considering the millions of people who now self-publish every year in the US and UK alone, Bellos and Montagu are only being a little alarmist when they mention, in a sobering aside about how few authors ever make a profit on their work, that “never in the course of human history has so little been paid to so many for so much.” Given that, and looking even briefly at the copyright nightmare that is generative AI, the importance of a book like Who Owns This Sentence, when it’s done this well, becomes obvious.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News