In my recent post, The value chain strikes back: Google and the history of copyright,  I touched on the threat of internet piracy, which is a highly contentious issue at the moment throughout the digital industries. In researching that piece I came across some interesting historical sidelights on book piracy, which deserve more attention than I could give them in the previous piece.
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In an article in the London Review of Books in 1995 John Sutherland wrote: ‘Momentous changes in copyright law, such as those of 1710, 1842, 1890 and 1911, are preceded by periods of turmoil and radical uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of intellectual property. We are in such a period now.’

Sutherland could hardly have foreseen how much more uncertain things were about to become. The particular issue exercising him at the time, harmonisation of UK law with the latest EU regulations on copyright, surely pales into insignificance compared to subsequent events. The threat from internet piracy, the emergence of Amazon as a dominant player in book supply and the Google Books settlement: all of these were seismic developments, the cumulative effects of which has been to transform the landscape of publishing utterly. view this post »