Abstract
This review essay offers an interpretation of the history of proprietary rights in news as a process of incomplete commodification. Like other species of information, news increasingly came to be treated as a commodity whose exchange value is extracted in markets through the support of property rights. This process of commodification, however, was incomplete because it was hampered and resisted due to three distinctive features of news: its information-intensive character, its close entanglement with public-sphere speech, and its precarious relationship with the modern construct of authorship. The essay identifies three eras in which these distinctive features played out differently with respect to proprietary rights in news: the period of proto-copyright privileges; early, thin copyright; and modern, increasingly commodified copyright. It concludes by suggesting a few lessons from this history relevant for contemporary renewed pressures to further commodify news through proprietary rights.
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