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A fascinating and original history of an idea that now controls and monetizes almost everything we do.Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties -- making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity.It wasn't always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers' control of books.