Who Owns This Sentence?

‘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.

On December 16, 2021, Sony Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen. The sale price was over half a billion dollars. The reason why a catalogue of songs and recordings can now be sold for the price of a fleet of small aircraft is the whole subject of this book: copyright.

Who Owns This Sentence? is a fascinating and comprehensive cultural, legal and global history of how intangible things can be owned, and reveals how copyright is no longer for the benefit of creators but has been transformed into an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.