Media Review: Sita Sings the Blues

Witkowski, Terrence H.

doi:10.1177/0276146712446776

Journal of Macromarketing

2012

DOI: 10.1177/0276146712446776

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Media Review: Sita Sings the Blues

Terrence H. Witkowski

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2024

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“…Since 2002, Duke University Law School has hosted a Center for the Study of the Public Domain, while other universities and the American Library Association maintain websites that help users navigate fair use. Cartoonist Nina Paley became embroiled in copyright litigation after releasing her brilliant 2008 reimagining of the Ramayana titled Sita Sings the Blues (see Witkowski 2012). She has lent her voice and considerable artistic talents to the resistance movement.…”

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Book Review: Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

Witkowski

2024

Journal of Macromarketing

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Copyright laws turn the expression of ideas into property. They create rights of ownership that have gradually expanded in scope, enforcement, and monetary value for several hundred years, and especially over the past half century. With some exceptions, such incessant privatization and enclosure of creative thought has progressed unnoticed and unopposed. Today's copyright laws have established a massive entitlement, largely in the hands of global corporations, for collecting monopoly rents. Yet, these laws also suppress free speech, stifle innovation, and cost consumers dearly. Ultimately, they amplify inequality within countries, and between poorer and smaller nations and the rich big ones who possess most of the world's intellectual property.These are central arguments in the fine new book, Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, by David Bellos, a Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, and Alexandre Montagu, a practicing attorney. The authors' pithy and lively writing is very rich conceptually and sprinkled with a good sense of ironic humor. Divided into 44 brief chapters organized both chronologically and topically, their study looks at the past and present across much of the world, though with emphasis on developments in Britain, France, and the United States. Who Owns This Sentence can teach the reader a lot, not so much about legal details (see, e.g., Fishman 2020), but about foundational theories of ownership, how these concepts have influenced marketing systems, and how ultimately they have produced unresolved societal consequences. These topics should be of great interest to macromarketers, especially to those who work with and publish visual data obtained from different sources.The normative belief that products of the mind should receive legal protection has gained traction relatively recently in human history. Writers in the Greek and Roman worlds, for example, ascribed man's thoughts to the gods or to thinkers from older civilizations. Similarly, early Christian doctrine maintained that ideas are gifts from God revealed to others through the written word. The ancients did believe that authors should have the right to decide when and to whom to Book Review

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Book Review: Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

Witkowski

2024

Journal of Macromarketing

Self Cite

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Media Review: Sita Sings the Blues

Cited by 1 publication

References 6 publications

Book Review: Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

Book Review: Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu

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