This book tells the story of how, over centuries, people, society and culture created laws affecting supply of information. In the 21 century, uniform global copyright laws are claimed to be indispensable to the success of entertainment, internet and other information industries. Do copyright laws encourage information flow? Many say that copyright laws limit dissemination, harming society. In the last 300 years, industries armed with copyrights controlled output and distribution. Now the internet’s disruption of economic patterns may radically reshape information regulation. Information freedom, a source of emancipation, may change the world.

A fascinating and original history of an idea that now controls and monetizes almost everything we do. 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 raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. It wasn’t always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers’ control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright’s metastasis can’t be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger. Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

The book attempts to critically analyse the cases on the law of copyright as well as statutory provisions of law of copyright. When the first edition of the book was published in 2015, there was no readable and dependable book for the general reader interested to be acquainted with the changing features of the law of copyright immediate after the enactment of the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012. Since the publication of this book, the Finance Act 2017 has introduced Appellate Board in place of Copyright Board as well as the Supreme Court and High Courts in India have also delivered a large number of judicial decisions on the law of copyright. In this edition the author has surveyed all such Courts decisions and analysed them and inserted them in appropriate places of the book and also examined the impact of the Appellate Board. It presents not only the provisions of the Copyright Act 1957 in the form of a normative, but points out the changes made thereon by formal amendments as well as conflicts of law which have been settled by judicial interpretations. The book is divided into ten chapters. Chapter 1 is introductory, while Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the origin and development of law of copyright at international as well as national level. The most important debatable issue in copyright law is “works in which copyright subsists”, and the Chapter 4 is devoted to this aspect. Chapter 5 explores various issues relating to author of work, owner of copyright and recognised rights of copyright owner. The terms of copyright, licensing of copyright, international copyright and registration of copyright are the subject matter of Chapter 6, while rights of broadcasting organisation and of performers (neighbouring rights) are the subject matter of Chapter 7. Internet is the greatest communication medium of the contemporary era, and there is an inherent link between law of copyright and internet. Therefore, Chapter 8 is devoted to discuss various issues relating to “protection of copyright in internet.” While Chapter 9 demonstrates the law relating to infringement of copyright and defences of copyright liability. Chapter 10, the concluding chapter, discusses the enforcement of copyright in India in detail. Though the book is designed for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Law, it will be equally beneficial for the researchers, academicians, jurists, lawyers, judges as well as members of civil society. TARGET AUDIENCE • Undergraduate and postgraduate students of Law. • Researchers, Academicians, Jurists, Lawyers, Judges as well as members of Civil Society.

Copyright law, policy, and practice underwrites the publication and sale of books. The income that every author and publisher receives derives from copyright law. Independent authors, who are both writers and publishers, and who actively manage their own publishing rights, need to understand the importance of copyright and how to assert their rights in the digital age. As a global nonprofit organization promoting ethics and excellence in self-publishing, ALLi advocates for the fair treatment and empowerment of the individual (“indie”) author in the publishing and self-publishing sectors. It is our responsibility, and our honor, to put forward the issues that independent authors face in the course of doing their work and running their businesses. No issue is more fundamental than copyright. How can we ensure that copyright law remains robust and flexible enough to offer the incentive, protection and reward it promises for those authors who produce and distribute their books on self-publishing platforms, and license only some of their publishing rights to trade publishers and other rights buyers? How can we ensure that authors understand and avail of their economic and moral rights in the rapidly changing, technologized and entrepreneurial environment within which they do their work? We present our answers to these important questions in the form of a Copyright Bill of Rights that builds on the work of previous authors and copyright activists to take into account the experience of self-publishing writers over the past decade.

In the course of the last two decades, collective management organizations (CMOs) have become the nerve centres of copyright licensing in virtually every country. Their expertise and knowledge of copyright law and management have proven essential to make copyright work in the digital age. However, they have also been at the centre of debates about their efficiency, their transparency and their governance. This book, an extensively revised and updated edition of the major work on the legal status of CMOs, offers an in-depth analysis of the various operating CMO models, their rights and obligations vis-à-vis both users and members, acquisition of legal authority to license, and (most important) the rights to license digital uses of protected material and build (or improve current) information systems to deal with ever more complex rights management and licensing tasks. All the chapters have been updated since the 2010 edition. New chapters on Africa, China, Central Europe and New Zealand (together with Australia, which is no longer discussed in the separate chapter on Canada) have been added. Factors considered include the following: • role of 'families' such as the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO); • cases where the unavailability of adequating options makes authorized use difficult or impossible taking transaction costs into account; • growing importance of extended repertoire systems (also known as extended collective licensing); • relationship among collective management, rights to remuneration, and the ways in which CMOs acquire authority to license; • transnational licensing and the possible role of multi-territorial licensing; and • threat of monopolies or regional oligopolies for the management of online music rights. Legal underpinnings covered in the course of the analysis include the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaties, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Napster case, the Santiago Agreement, relevant EU Papers and the 2014 Copyright Directive, and work done by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Part I presents a number of horizontal issues that affect collective management in almost every country. Part II is divided on a geographical basis, focusing on systems representative of the principal models applied in various countries and regions. Each country specific or region-specific chapter provides a historical overview and a presentation of existing CMOs and their activities, gives financial information where available, describes how CMOs are supervised or controlled by legislation, and offers thoughts about the challenges facing CMOs in the country or region concerned. Many of these national and regional commentaries are the only such information sources available in English. Whatever the future of copyright holds, it is clear that users will continue to want access and the ability to reuse material lawfully, and authors and other rights holders will want to ensure that they can put some reasonable limits on those uses, including an ability to monetize commercially relevant uses. CMOs are sure to be critical intermediaries in this process. The second edition of this important resource, with its key insights into the changing nature of collective management, will be of immeasurable value to all concerned with shaping policy towards collective management or working with the ever more complex legal issues arising in digital age copyright matters.

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize “A charming comedy of eros . . . A ride that, despite the bumps and curves in the road, never feels anything less than jaunty.” —Los Angeles Times “Charming, poignantly funny.” —The Washington Post Book World 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget . . .