7: Copyright wars

Peter Baldwin interviewed by Romesh Vaitilingam, 16 April 2016 Should copyright assure authors and rights holders lasting claims, much like conventional property rights, or should copyright be primarily concerned with giving consumers cheap and easy access to a shared culture? In this Vox Talk, Peter Baldwin – author of the book ‘The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Transatlantic Battle’ – outlines how America went from being a leading copyright opponent and pirate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to become the world’s intellectual property policeman today. He describes a ‘Californian civil war’ over open access: between the content owners in Hollywood and the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.