San Antonio College Library

"Copyright reflects far more than economic interests. Embedded within conflicts over royalties and infringement are cultural values - about access, ownership, free speech, race, class, and democracy - which influence how rights are determined and enforced. Questions of legitimacy - of what constitutes "intellectual property" or "fair use," and of how to locate a precise moment of cultural creation - have become enormously complicated in recent years,...

"In this book Michael Ryan explains the issues, politics, and diplomacy of balancing intellectual property rights with the public's right of access. He discusses the major negotiations to forge international policy in the 1980s and 1990s, including the bilateral U.S. intellectual property negotiations with China and other developing countries, the multilateral negotiations conducted at GATT, and the 1996 copyright treaties negotiated at the World...