Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture
An impassioned, darkly amusing look at how corporations misuse copyright law to stifle creativity and free speech
If you want to make fun of Mickey or Barbie on your Website, you may be hearing from some corporate lawyers. You should also think twice about calling something "fair and balanced" or publicly using Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. It may be illegal. Or it may be entirely legal, but the distinction doesn't matter if you can't afford a lawyer. More and more, corporations are grabbing and asserting rights over every idea and creation in our world, regardless of the law's intent or the public interest. But beyond the humorous absurdity of all this, there lies a darker problem, as David Bollier shows in this important new book. Lawsuits and legal bullying clearly prevent the creation of legitimate new software, new art and music, new literature, new businesses, and worst of all, new scientific and medical research.
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Book details
- Author
- David Bollier
- Imprint
- Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Formats
- Hardcover
- Subjects
- History
- Topics
- copyright law · intellectual property · corporate power · free speech · trademark abuse · creativity and culture · public domain
- ISBN-13
- 9780471679271
About the author
DAVID BOLLIER is co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group and has served as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics since 2016. His recent books include Think Like a Commoner, Viral Spiral and Brand Name Bullies.
In 2012, Bollier received the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy. He previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C. advocacy organization, in 2002.
When not writing, Bollier works as an activist, blogger, and independent scholar focused on the commons as a paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. This work shapes his analysis across his books and advocacy projects.
David lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.