Home March 2002 Vol 63 No 2 Herrington book review

College and Research Libraries
March 2002, Vol. 63, No. 2

Book Review

Herrington, TyAnna K. Controlling Voices: Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet. Foreword by David Jay Bolter. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Pr., 2001. 171p. $49.95, cloth (ISBN 0809323729); alk. paper, $18.95, paper (ISBN 0809323737). LC 00-56287.

Would you like to know three seemingly harmless words that will make any academic cringe? “Intellectual property law.” This set of laws is often misunderstood and feared by academics, particularly by those in the humanities. The topic is especially relevant because we are living in the Information Age in which the ease of copying and publishing ideas occurs and proliferates in a very accessible public arena, the Internet. A simple misunderstanding of the law can have manifold and unpleasant legal implications.

Herrington, lawyer and assistant professor at Georgia Tech, has a Ph.D. in communication. Her varied educational background has proved to be good preparation for her presentation of highly specialized information in the simplest of terms. One of the best features of this book is the author’s nontechnical language used to explain intellectual property law in layman’s terms.

Herrington implores academics to participate in the discussion about these laws. Too often, it is large companies and politicians who are the major players in copyright legislation, rather than the scholars and artists who tend to be most affected by them. But it is not only academics, Herrington argues, but all citizens who need to be involved in this dialogue: “Intellectual products not only influence society but embody society …intellectual products also make up, in large part, culture itself. Our ability to access them for learning and criticism in order to understand them and their influence and to speak to their meaning in our cultural development is fundamental to our ability to participate in society.”

Herrington correlates the conflicting interests of the academic and legal communities with their conflicting ideologies. The ideology of the academic world is like that of the Internet—one that favors egalitarian access to information. Both academia and the Internet are based on the free interchange of information, regardless of ownership. By contrast, the legal community operates on what Herrington describes as a “romantic” view of property that emphasizes economic aspects and “produces imbalanced access to knowledge, and thus cultural development, in favor of wealthy corporate entities and a class of society with political power.”

Although the book’s intended audience is a general one including academics, the reading level seems to be advanced beyond the mere “general”; Controlling Voices is challenging reading. Despite the author’s lucid writing style, I still found myself re-reading certain passages in order to digest key vocabulary terms and legal information. The inclusion of a glossary would have been helpful. Herrington also is careful to describe the book’s limitations: “Controlling Voices provides information that readers may use to understand issues involving intellectual property, but it will not provide a legal road map for determining what actions they should take to prevent their own violations of the law or violations of their works by others.”

Herrington divides the book into two parts: “The Law” and “Ideology and Power.” The first part examines the pragmatic side of the law; she discusses both general concepts of law and the key court cases that have created the current, controlling law of intellectual property. In addition, she addresses issues associated with the Internet and online publishing. In the second part of the book, the author analyzes the political and social aspects of intellectual property law by “examining the policy issues that drive legal interpretations of the law.”

Herrington has written an understandable and useful explanation of the controlling law of intellectual property. She also has documented the “controlling voices” (corporations, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc.) that influence its evolution. Controlling Voices is well organized and provides readers with helpful notes and works-cited sections where one can refer to applicable Web sites, e-mail lists, court cases, articles, and books. It should be read by anyone seeking a basic understanding of intellectual property law.—Colleen Lougen, Mount Saint Mary College