I recently finished SLS Professor Paul Goldstein's 2003 book, Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox over break. After taking a full semester of visiting professor Tim Wu's very liberal and intellectual Copyright class, it was refreshing to see the central issues of copyright approached from an entirely different perspective. Not only does Goldstein make lay sense out of puzzling one-line phrases like "the access-incentive paradox," "the idea-expression distinction" and "fair use," he takes the reader through some of the most central battles in Copyright's contentious, 3-century-long British and American history. He lays out the personalities and the motivations behind the conflicts that has shaped today's American copyright doctrine, from Lord Mansfield and the Statute of Anne to the formation of ASCAP, the 2 Live Crew case and the intense lobbying behind the 1976 and 1998 copyright acts. It's engaging and the level of detail is impressive, probably because Goldstein was there when these things happened.

Goldstein also deftly frames the most contentious issues in copyright today, namely what happens to copyright when new technology enters the picture. New technology creates value; if you can now broadcast songs over the radio, or take it with you on your iPod when you go jogging, that makes existing music copyrights more valuable. Yet technology can also facilitate copyright infringement, a la Napster. The struggle (in the Betamax case, the Napster case, the Grokster case) is over who will get the "surplus" generated by technology – users with their private uses, or copyright holders – and also who can control the development of new copyright technologies. Goldstein neatly describes the two sides of this fight as the copyright optimists (who view copyright's cup as half full) and the copyright pessimists (who see the opposite.)

( cut - the Celestial Jukebox )
Bottom line, great entertaining book for lawyers as well as non-lawyers (though it gets a bit legalistic at parts, and that's unavoidable). But if this is your first foray into copyright, be wary that Goldstein doesn't take you to a place you don't want to go. After all, would you trust a man that looks like Count Dooku?