I'm currently reading "Promises to Keep" by a Harvard professor Terry Fisher. The book reviews the recent conflicts in the field of copyright law and makes a series of proposals for an alternative system. Fisher is not exactly an innovator in this field, but his text is useful for its clarity in describing the natire of the film and music industries, as well as summarising the different levels upon which the battle has unfolded. I recommend the book even if I disagree with his conclusions.

There are two canonical histories of copyright law:

"An Unhurried View of Copyright", Benjamin Kaplan, Columbia University Press, 1967 Copyright in historical perspective by L. Ray Patterson 1968

I've read sections of both but neither in its entirety as they are rather expensive and, obviously, dated.

Jessica Litman wrote a long and extremely (tediously?) detailed account of intra-industry negotiations/legislative history of the 1976 Copyright Act in the USA, which she wrote for a journal. Otherwise she also penned a fairly light text called "Digital Copyright" which is notable mainly for it's "this is all becoming surreally complex and a transaction cost apocalypse thesis" that Larry Lessig would subsequently re-cycyle in Free Culture (sic).

Two other titles are of note. The first is Information Feudalism by Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite. This is the best book so far on the subject, IMHO, as it provides thye badly needed politico-economic context which is surpressed in many versions of this story. Further more the authors have a very sharp take on the TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) negotiations which brought this field into the GATT, redefining it in the process as a trade issue. The authors interviewed nearly 500 participants in the GATT process, so as to construct a clear picture of the breaking-points and a panoramic view of the strategic objectives. The results of this work were published in their hefty tome "Global Business Regulation", and then the parts germane to IP hashed out in a more articulated form in Information Feudalism. Some time ago I published an early essay of their here on slash.aut.

The last recommendation is "Copyrights or Copyworngs" by Siva Vaidhynathan, which is the first cultural history of copyright in the United States. The book is rich in examples as to the accretice/cumulative nature of creativity, with a particularly perceptive slant on music culture (Siva would rather be playing with a band than teaching!)

Thsi reading of cultural productiuon as an inherently collective process forms the platform for his criticism of IP expansionism in the last decades. Whilst totally in sympathy with SV's aims, I'm sceptical with regards to his claim that all this amounts to a "perversion" of the american tradition in the field; there are obvious pragm atic reasons politically for presenting the aggressive behaviour of rights-owners as unamerican, but I reckon it's unrealistic. Lessig tried the same strategy in the attempt to overturn the Sonny Bono act and he ended up licking his wounds.

There have been a couple of other books that try to treat the subject as a whole but overall I found them unconvincing. Michael Perelman's "Steal this Idea" is of noble inspiration but ends up reading like a collection of anecdotes rather than a coherent argument. David Bollier's "Silent Theft" endeavours to give breadth to the commons argument and to this end mixes fisheries, NYC gardens and copyright and patent issues; to me the result was just confusing. If you want to build a space of commons studies, choose either the discrete and plausible field of "common property regimes" or else go along with Midnight Notes and Winstanley, attack primitive accumulation and the initial expropriation of the commons by capital. What's the confusion?