Copyright is a never ending area of fascinating discussion. Just when you think that you have read enough another interesting work sails across the screen. The collection of essays Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright recently came to my attention. The web blurb begins with:

What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and property.

The table of contents looks like this:

Introduction. The History of Copyright History: Notes from an Emerging Discipline by Martin Kretschmer, with Lionel Bently and Ronan Deazley
1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent by Joanna Kostylo
2. ‘A Mongrel of Early Modern Copyright’: Scotland in European Perspective by Alastair J. Mann
3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne by Mark Rose
4. Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America by Oren Bracha
5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones by Laurent Pfister
6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright by Maurizio Borghi
7. Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for their Decline in Nineteenth Century Europe by Stef van Gompel
8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the Reprinting Sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794 by Friedemann Kawohl
9. Nineteenth Century Controversies Relating to the Protection of Artistic Property in France by Frédéric Rideau
10. Maps, Views and Ornament: Visualising Property in Art and Law. The Case of Pre-modern France by Katie Scott
11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Arts Copyright Bill 1862 by Ronan Deazley
12. ‘Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words’: The Birth of the Performing Right in Britain by Isabella Alexander
13. The Return of the Commons – Copyright History as a Common Source by  Karl-Nikolaus Peifer
14. The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians by John Feather
15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property by William St Clair

The book is edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer & Lionel Bently and published by Open Book Publishers and has a Creative Commons NC-ND license the pdf is here. Even after a quick scroll through the file the book seems to be a must read.