Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright, by Will Slauter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright by Will Slauter Priti Joshi (bio) Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright, by Will Slauter; pp. xii + 352. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019, $90.00, $30.00 paper, £74.00, £23.99 paper. There is today a virtual cottage industry of books on copyright (or piracy, its colorful sibling). It is not hard to see why copyright occupies scholars: Google Books's ambition to digitize the world's libraries and the legal challenges it faced made copyright courtroom drama. Elsewhere, the prospect of the digitization of historical newspapers has been tantalizing, only to be tempered by the realization that rigid interpretations of copyright mean that most digitized archives of nineteenth-century British newspapers lie behind prohibitive paywalls. And book history's directive that we examine the networks that lead to the production of printed material has moved copyright from the purview of authors, publishers, bibliographers, archivists, or literary executors to scholars probing how the books in our hands end up here. Given the plethora of books on the subject, why another on copyright? Quite simply: because the bulk of attention to copyright has focused on books in general and literary or creative works in particular. Readers are familiar with Charles Dickens's agitation to secure international copyright protections for his writings, and Meredith McGill's [End Page 326] well-regarded work takes up the story of transatlantic copyright from a book history perspective. By contrast, less attention has been paid to copyright in news. Indeed, the very concept of copyrighting news seems risible. How can a person or organization copyright what is clearly free for the taking: facts or events in the public sphere that belong to nobody and everybody? This is the question Will Slauter's Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright takes up in this riveting history of copyright for news and newspapers from the eighteenth century to the present in Britain and the United States. The story of copyright that Slauter relates—with a density of detail that admirably never bogs him down—is the journey of an industry that not only tolerated but in fact relied on copying to one that increasingly sought to protect the contents of its newspapers. As any reader of nineteenth-century Anglo-American newspapers knows, so-called scissors-and-paste journalism was practiced by virtually all newspapers, metropolitan or regional. Slauter illustrates that for roughly two hundred years, most printers and publishers did not seek copyright for their products; only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did a number of editors and publishers agitate for copyright. Copying between newspapers, Slauter writes, went from "welcome publicity … to unwelcome appropriation" (122). Yet even as some news organizations sought copyright protections, their adversaries were other news organizations who challenged the desire for protection and exclusivity as contrary to an enterprise premised on the flow of information. Slauter deftly draws out the fundamental questions that lie at the center of the debates (which involved lawmakers and courts, as well as news organizations): what is news? Events or accounts of those events? Facts or a particular arrangement or expression of those facts? And behind these, a broader, philosophical question: can events or facts be owned? Are they not common property? Is news not a public good? Does the public not have rights of access to information, rights that supersede the interests of news organizations? Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, news organizations sought not rights over facts themselves but protections for their investments in gathering news. Because being first provided a market edge and more advertising dollars, the cost of gathering news—particularly with the telegraph—rose. As Slauter patiently details, publishers' desire for copyright grew as their business model altered from collaborative to competitive. Yet the story of changes to copyright in news, in Slauter's hands, cannot be told in a straight line, but rather as the accretion of arguments that, almost as soon as they were enshrined in a ruling, seemed to become obsolete. Thus, in 1918, in International News Service v. Associated Press, the United States Supreme Court ruled that newspapers could protect their reports from...