Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity

Although there is a growing body of literature on copyright and culture, no book takes quite the same tack as Steal This Music. This is the first book to gather a broad range of research about copyright and music. Demers has written a valuable and necessary book in a clear, coherent, and highly readable style that a general audience interested in music will appreciate.

In an age where we take so much for granted--our rights to know about spyware, our right to know about how we can or cannot share memories and exchange files--this book is a primer for those who are more than curious about the rapidly changing landscape of American copyright law. In the same vein as Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Siva Vaidhyanathan's Anarchist in the Library, Joana Demers's Steal this Music gives us more tools to take apart the all too confusing landscape of modern copyright law. It's a clear and concise history of the rights and wrongs of copyright in an age when it's getting harder and harder to tell where the line is between the need to control how materials are distributed in a world of networks, and the natural inclination we all have to SHARE!!! This book is a timely wake up call that these things are all blurring more rapidly than many of us suspect.

A concise, clearly written book that deserves to be read well beyond the academic community . . . Demers cautions that the debate on cultural expression is too important to be left to the self-interest of intellectual property rights holders, whether individual or corporate. It concerns us all. Steal This Music is an excellent introduction as to how and why.

Demers offers a concise, but thorough analysis of how intellectual property law has struggled to define and regulate music. . . . Demers provides a fascinating account of how law shapes music and, in turn, music responds to those regulations.

Steal This Music's strengths [are] its clarity, its vivid anecdotes, its historical grasp, and its fair and balanced assessment of grim facts. . . . Books such as Steal This Music, while not advocating a revolution, prove that articulate observers like Joanna Demers are speaking on behalf of everyone who fears that fair use is slipping away for ever with each new triumph in court for a content provider over a musician, performer, or consumer who has often done much less than what Demers's title seems to exhort all of us to do.

An absorbing new book . . . It is impressive that so trim a book can give the reader so broad a sense of how musical creativity is being affected by the present intellectual property regime.