Copyright is under siege. From file sharing to vast library scanning projects, new technologies, actors, and attitudes toward intellectual property threaten the value of creative work. However, while digital media and the Internet have made making and sharing perfect copies of original works almost effortless, debates about protecting authors' rights are nothing new. In this sweeping account of the evolution of copyright law since the mid-nineteenth century, Monika Dommann explores how radical media changes—from sheet music and phonographs to photocopiers and networked information systems—have challenged and transformed legal and cultural concept of authors' rights.

Dommann provides a critical transatlantic perspective on developments in copyright law and mechanical reproduction of words and music, charting how artists, media companies, and lawmakers in the United States and western Europe approached the complex tangle of technological innovation, intellectual property, and consumer interests. From the seemingly innocuous music box, invented around 1800, to BASF's magnetic tapes and Xerox machines, she demonstrates how copyright has been continuously destabilized by emerging technologies, requiring new legal norms to regulate commercial and private copying practices. Without minimizing digital media's radical disruption to notions of intellectual property, Dommann uncovers the deep historical roots of the conflict between copyright and media—a story that can inform present-day debates over the legal protection of authorship.

Monika Dommann is Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich.

Sarah Pybus translates fiction and nonfiction from German to English, and was awarded first place in the inaugural Geisteswissenschaften International Nonfiction Translation (GINT) Prize.

Monika Dommann adopts a novel interdisciplinary approach to the history of copyright that attempts to meld the history of communications media with the history of legal norms surrounding such media. [The book's] later parts provide a riveting economic and institutional history of some of the key organizationally influenced organs of the global copyright system, and the extent to which these entities interacted with (and often generated) new norms of use, reproduction, and control. In narrating this history, the book does an excellent job, and its transnational comparisons are particularly insightful.

[A] thoughtful and imaginative book that provides a welcome new perspective on our copyright conundrums.

Recent legal and historical research on intellectual property right has underscored the embedded instability of modern copyright law, and this book enriches the ongoing discussion by identifying the medium-based exclusive authorship as the fundamental source of this instability. Intriguingly, while this book emphasizes the new reproduction technologies as the main drives... scholars and students of media history and legal history will learn a great deal from it.

An elegant entrée into the law of copyright and the history of media.

An intrinsically fascinating and meticulously presented history of copyright in relationship to the ever advancing progress of the technologies affecting the intellectual property rights of authors (and their publishers!), Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright is ably translated from the original German into English for an American readership by Sarah Pybus.