[Air-L] New book out today! 📚😁

[Aram Sinnreich]

Dear AoIRistas,

Greetings from the ICA conference in Washington, DC<canary:map?State=DC&City=Washington>! Apologies for the self-promotion, but I’d like to announce today<canary:event?ts=580752005.00>’s release of my new book, The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property<https://j.mp/sinnIP>, from Yale Press.

Initially, Yale asked me to write a coursebook covering IP — your basic overview of copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. Instead, I wrote kind of an anti-coursebook: all the stuff that typically gets left out of the story. The book talks about stuff like: how copyright has shaped visual culture and musical culture for the past few centuries; how lobbying, campaign finance, and dark money shape our IP laws; how international IP treaties get used as a kind of “soft power” — often to the detriment of “developing nations” in the “global South”; how IP actually gets used in the trenches of industries ranging from entertainment to marketing to pharmaceuticals to tech; and some of the emerging challenges with the law, such as AI authorship and rights to DNA sequences. I also talk about a lot of AoIR-related stuff, including the “copyfight,” the open source movement, digital culture and “piracy,” and more.

I’d appreciate all the support you can offer for the book — please buy a copy, promote it on social media, review it, rate it, critique it, remix it, put it on your syllabi and summer reading lists. Even though it’s an “academic” subject, I aimed for readability, and I’d say it’s probably my most accessible and enjoyable book to date (except for the novel I’m currently trying to sell).

You can pick up a copy here, if you’re interested: https://j.mp/sinnIP.

Many thanks,

Aram

—
Aram Sinnreich<http://www.sinnreich.com>

Associate Professor
Chair, Communication Studies
American University<http://www.american.edu/soc/>
School of Communication<http://www.american.edu/soc/>

Author<http://j.mp/sinnreich> | Musician<http://sinnreich.com/music/>