News and Reviews
Bookforum
The American Scholar (Siva Vaidhayanathan)
Publisher's Weekly
Wired.com
Chicago Sun-Times
Valley Advocate (western Massachusetts)
The Australian
Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge
Philadelphia Inquirer
Selected Blog Reviews
Electronic Frontier Foundation Blog
New Media Musings Blog, JD Lasica
Stay Free! Daily
The Vision Thing (Podcast)
Webcast of presentation at USC Annenberg School for Communication, Feburary 15, 2005
Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture
Bollier, David (Author)
ISBN: 0471679275
John Wiley & Sons
Published 2005-01
Hardcover, $24.95 (320p)
Intellectual Property; Advertising & Promotion; Marketing - General
Reviewed 2004-12-06
PW Annex
Society's growing mania to "propertize" every idea, image, sound and
scent that impinges on our consciousness is ably dissected in this
hilarious and appalling expose of intellectual property law. Bollier,
author of Silent Theft, compiles a long litany of copyright and
trademark excesses, many of them familiar from brief flurries of media
coverage but, in his view, no less outrageous for it. Music royalty
consortium ASCAP sought fees from the Girl Scouts for singing
copyrighted songs around the campfire; McDonalds threatened businesses
with the Mc prefix in their names; Disney threatened a day-care center
that painted Mickey and Goofy on its walls; and Mattel sued a rock band
that dared satirize Barbie in song. Nor is it only corporate megaliths
that resort to this petty legal thuggery. Martin Luther King's estate
forbids unauthorized use of his "I Have a Dream" speech (but rents it to
Telecom ad campaigns), and the author of a completely silent composition
was asked for royalties because it allegedly infringed on avant-garde
composer John Cage's own completely silent composition. Bollier is a
sure guide through the thickets of intellectual property law, writing in
an engaging style that spotlights capitalism and its supporting cast of
lawyers at their most absurd. But he probes a deeper problem: as the
public domain becomes a private monopoly, he warns, our open society,
which depends on the free, collective elaboration of a shared "cultural
commons," will wither away.
|
