Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying

For those of you who are interested in copyright issues, Marcus Boon from the University of Toronto has a new book, In Praise of Copying, that provides a fresh look at what it means to copy something, and how central copying has been to our shared culture.  He suggests that tension about copying arises from unease with the impermanence of everything.  If everything is in the process of changing all the time, then how can we be assured that what we hold is an “original”?  Boon argues that the law identifies some things as originals and others as copies, so that we can believe that the originals are stable and unchanging.  Find the book in the Law Library collection at http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/8164329. For more information (warning: shameless self-promotion), see my review in the current issue of Law Library Journal at http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/Vol-103/Spring-2011 under Keeping Up With New Legal Titles, at p. 289.