Thirty years ago, give or take, I sauntered into class as a lowly “2L” law student, sat down, and opened the textbook for my first day of studying copyrights and trademarks. One hour later, I walked out of that classroom—utterly confused—and proceeded to drop the course and sign up for something a bit less arcane. (Immigration law, if I recall correctly.)

I never did go back to re-take that course in copyright law. So how very fortunate for me—and for you, dear reader!—that 30 years later, Princeton professor David Bellos and London lawyer Alexandre Montagu decided to sit down and explain the concept to lay readers in their recent collaboration: Who Owns This Sentence?

Now, you might think that’s a silly question. How much could a single sentence be worth, anyway, and who cares who owns it? But the question’s importance swells in significance as the sentences start getting stacked one upon the other and getting copyrighted, as things entirely unlike sentences (sheet music, paintings, song recordings, and software) become copyrightable as well—and as related concepts such as patents, trademarks, and moral rights are added to the list of “intellectual property rights” granted legal protection … and demanding monetary compensation.

As the authors put it, copyright may have begun with authors merely seeking to control who can publish their sentences. It has expanded, however, “into a tool for the control of almost everything else.” And that everything else is worth quite a lot of money.

By 2021, write Bellos and Montagu, the total value of intellectual property (IP) licensing fees paid from country to country and around the globe topped $508 billion—and that may be an understatement. Calculating the total amount that IP payments add to the cost of products, be they IP themselves or simply products incorporating IP into them (anything from the licensing fees paid to use music in a movie, to the design on a box of cereal), the authors conclude that our current system of IP regulation costs consumers approximately $6,000 per person per year.

Times a global population of 8.1 billion souls, that’s $48.6 trillion—a figure roughly 100 times the size of the first estimate! So you can see that there’s some debate about exactly how big the size of the global IP market has become.

What is clear, though, is that the number is quite large. But how did this happen, and what (if anything) can be done to control it?

A Brief History

Across 44 chapters, Bellos and Montagu attempt to untangle this story of how owners of “copies” of books first came to have rights to control their publication, how “copyright creep” expanded the list of copyrightable items (and how related rights arose), and how—in the present day—a right originally designed to protect the interests of individual creators came to be captured largely by corporations.

Because it doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to discern that this is ultimately the point the authors are getting at. As Bellos and Montagu argue, if the market capitalizations of six of the largest corporations in the world—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Disney—”are almost entirely constituted by their ownership and control of copyright material,” while the employees who created the IP that built these businesses must forfeit rights to their created work, then today’s copyright system has drifted very far indeed from where it began.

Key to this current situation—both as the source of copyright wealth and also the thing that most attracts corporations to want to control it—is the length of protection awarded to a copyright holder. For example, when Britain passed its first copyright law, the 1710 Statute of Anne, authors were granted exclusive rights to their work for just 14 years after the creation of the work. But over time and through many twists and turns, we’ve reached a point where—in the United States at least—a bit of software code, a drawing, or a sentence composed by an author in his 20s could easily retain copyright protection for 100 years or more.

What is to be Done?

Admittedly, governments have reasons for guaranteeing long terms of copyright protection. It’s easy to argue, for example, that an author should control the product of his labor during his lifetime. And if an author pens the Great American Novel in his 20s, and lives to 100, then—good for him!

US copyright law, however, adds a further 70 years of copyright protection beyond the life of the author. Again, the reasons are laudable—post-life extensions of this sort originated in France, and with the aim of providing for the livelihood of an author’s widow and children.

But what if an author sells his copyright to a corporation? Who Owns This Sentence‘s authors cite the example of Mr. Bruce Springsteen and the recent sale of his life’s work to Sony for the princely sum of $550 million. And there’s a real question of how a transaction like this one, which could lock up the Boss’s catalog in Sony’s ownership well into the 2100s, encourages any creativity by anybody. On the contrary, by shackling Born in the U.S.A. to a corporate master, copyright law is much more likely to prevent anyone else from riffing on the album for almost the next 100 years!

Speaking of creativity, governments also have an interest in using IP laws to encourage creative work—whether by authors circulating new ideas in written form, or by way of inventors creating new objects of industry. Bellos and Montagu cite the example of Venice, Italy’s 1474 patent law designed to attract “acute and ingenious [inventors] capable of thinking up … various ingenious contraptions.” But as the authors point out, very few inventors—or writers—actually succeed in earning a living from their art.

On the contrary. Successful book authors, able to earn a living income from writing, number in the mere hundreds across the globe—”a bare handful.” And the vast majority of self-proclaimed writers earn less than minimum wage from their work, even with the full weight of copyright laws supporting them.

“Yet people keep on writing!” exclaim Bellos and Montagu, and the reasons they keep on writing (and acting, and singing, and otherwise creating) often derive from goals beyond the monetary—a desire for fame, for example, an internal need to express themselves, or even simple “sheer pleasure.”

The logical conclusion: Authors would continue to write, actors act, singers sing, and even software programmers program, with or without copyright and other IP laws to protect their work and generate nominal incomes (to them) in return. IP rights, in other words, are often superfluous—even as they impose upon society “almost everlasting rent-generating monopolies” benefiting the corporations that collect them, and discouraging future creativity by individuals.

Summing up how we got to where we are today, Bellos and Montagu argue that over the centuries “a long sequence of dubious analogies and plays on the meaning of words” has vastly expanded copyright protections, that were originally awarded to protect the livelihood of individual creators, and transferred these rights instead to giant corporations, which use them to extract a form of rent from global consumers. For example, engravings were deemed similar to the movable type originally used to print books, both used to transfer ink to paper; phonograph recordings were then brought into the copyright fold on similar principles; thence to cassette tapes, CDs, and ultimately digital recordings—all swept under the umbrella of copyright law. “In an increasingly commercial and industrial society, [this] privatization proceeded without anyone really noticing what was going on.” Like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, it’s ultimately created a situation in which corporations that don’t themselves create anything appropriate for themselves the work product of employees and individual creators.

Naturally, these corporations are pleased with how things have worked out—and will lobby hard against any changes that might be proposed to the current system. But if change could be made, what changes might one propose?

Limiting the length of copyright protection, for one. If both patents and copyrights constitute similar “intellectual property,” after all, and even assuming that protecting intellectual property is required to encourage creative work, it’s strange that one form of such IP (copyright) should require a century or more of protection as encouragement, while the other (patents) can be encouraged with a mere 20 years of protection (the standard length of a US patent).

A more dramatic change to IP laws, however, might have an even more beneficial effect—rewarding creative efforts by individuals, while preventing corporations from hoovering up IP rights and charging for their use in perpetuity. Bellos and Montagu cite the example of France’s decision to deny Louis Daguerre a patent on his design for an early camera prototype, awarding the inventor a pension instead. Another example might be found in Soviet Russia’s practice of rewarding inventors with social status, medals, and prizes.

Such one-off payments by the state would directly reward inventors, authors, and other creators, without establishing long-term restraints on trade that harm consumers for decades and concentrate power in the hands of corporations. It’s an idea worth considering.

Let’s just hope they don’t copyright it.