Drassinower, A. (2015). What’s Wrong with Copying? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the publisher’s description (as reprinted for the Bournemouth roundtable of 22 May 2015), Jessica Silbey’s review (IP Law Book Review 7, 2017, abstract), James A. Hayes’s book note (Osgoode Hall Law Journal 53.3, 2016, abstract) and Rebecca Tushnet’s notes of the Notre Dame roundtable (2 October 2015). A reading should check it first.
What the sources say it argues
- Against the economic frame. The publisher’s description says the book “disentangles copyright theory from its focus on the economic value of an authored work as a commodity or piece of property”. Silbey says it “shoves to the side the question of copyright incentives” and reads copyright on its own terms, from its cases since the Statute of Anne.
- A work is speech. The work is framed “as a communicative act”, and infringement as “an unauthorized appropriation of another person’s speech” (publisher). Hayes lists the parts: authors as speakers, works as communication, audiences as interlocutors, and the public domain as conditions of equality between authors and users.
- Rights end where response begins. The rights reach only communicative uses, and only uses consistent with others’ communicative rights: “unauthorized reproduction of a work is lawful when responding to the work requires its reproduction” (publisher). At the roundtable, Wendy Gordon put the test as whether the defendant duplicated the plaintiff’s speech for the same purposes, not whether a physical copy was made. A purely mechanical use, such as search indexing, is on this account not a use of the work as speech.
- Objections raised. At Notre Dame, Gordon questioned the cost of a standard tied to copyright’s purposes and the value of freezing an author’s speech; Pamela Samuelson said the book does not account for transfers; Shyam Balganesh pressed whether its method is rationalist.
Why this is here
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-10-20 as contemporary work in conversation with Lessig’s Remix (LIT-1298) at the intersection of property and expression. Lessig argues from the copy: every digital use makes one, so copyright reaches every use (NOTE-1023). Drassinower argues that copying as such is not the wrong, which is the opposite starting point to the same complaint.
It would be read for the record’s line on what a work is across its renderings. If a work is a communicative act, then CLAIM-002 (a text’s identity across retellings as identity of artifact, continuity of transmission and similarity of communicative function) has a legal counterpart, and the line between using a work as speech and using it mechanically is a candidate for CLAIM-210’s line between being a rendering and only sharing a kind. Both bear on QUESTION-002 (what survives translation, retelling or rendering). Whether the book says anything usable on those points is not known until it is read.