M onika D ommann . Authors and Apparatus

In this compact book, Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright, Monika Dommann historicizes the copyright conflict from the 1850s, when the legal doctrine took its modern shape, to the 1980s, when the computer became common, but the internet was not yet part of everyone’s daily life. The developments of our present-day copyright regime as well as its embedded conflicts, she states, need to be examined jointly with the media transformation in the past two centuries. The concept of copyright emerged in the eighteenth century initially to deal with disputes between authors, publishers, and reprinters over the reproduction of printed materials and its accompanied socioeconomic gains. This author-centered formulation, which privileges material forms of intellectual and artistic “works,” she argues, has since been consistently challenged and reshaped by new technologies for mechanical reproduction of words and music. The recent debates over authorship and copyright brought by the digital...

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