The history of copyright has been as much the story of technology as anything else. From Gutenberg to the 78 r.p.m. record to the internet, the scope and provisions of copyright law have been chasing after technological developments. In Peter Baldwin's new book, The Copyright Wars, copyright is seen as a series of contentious battles within each European country and between the US and Europe. The battles (or perhaps wars) that Mr. Baldwin cites have been over issues including protection (or the lack thereof) of moral rights in the integrity of authorship and attribution, fair use, the term of copyright protection, and, increasingly, the effect of digitization and our fascinating recent companion: the internet.
Baldwin quite ably and thoroughly illuminates the history of copyright developments in Europe and the US. One longstanding distinction between the US and Continental Europe is their treatment of moral rights. Moral rights, or droit moral, are the rights of an author and his or her heirs to protect the integrity of an author's works and authorship from distortion (by, for example, significant changes to the text or appearance of a work or its false attribution). The book illuminates the differences well, showing how Europe protects such rights and the US does so only to a very limited degree. He offers waves of anecdotes about European developments largely unknown to US readers, such as copyright in the Third Reich. For example, the Fascist Nazis were quite interested in copyright law, including copyright term extension (they favored it) and moral rights (it was a complicated question).
However, the book might have more profitably focused on the role of profit as a motive for copyright law's development.
Originally published on the Los Angeles Review of Books website
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