Netanel, N. W. (2008). Copyright’s Paradox. New York: Oxford University Press. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Oxford Scholarship Online).
Not read. The summary is drawn from the publisher’s description and table of contents (as given in the Instituto Autor library record), the chapter titles Crossref lists, and the abstract of Shyamkrishna Balganesh’s review (118 Yale L.J. 1126, 2009). A reading should check it first.
What the sources say it argues
- The paradox. Copyright is “at once an engine of free expression and impediment to free expression”. Melville Nimmer called the conflict a “largely ignored paradox” in 1970; the book asks why it has since come to the fore, what it puts at stake and how to resolve it (publisher).
- The digital setting. It sets the expansion of copyright holders’ control against the new ability to “digitally cut, paste, edit, remix, and distribute” recordings, films, graphics and texts (publisher).
- The plan. Nine chapters: an introduction (p. 3); from Mein Kampf to Google (p. 13); what freedom of speech is and how it bears on copyright (p. 30); copyright’s expansion (p. 54); whether copyright is the engine of free expression (p. 81); its free speech burdens (p. 109); the propertarian counter-argument (p. 154); copyright and the First Amendment (p. 169); and remaking copyright in the First Amendment’s image (p. 195).
- The standard. Taking First Amendment values as the guide, copyright “should be delimited by how it can best promote robust debate and expressive diversity” (publisher).
- The democratic paradigm. Balganesh reads the book as continuing Netanel’s view of copyright as a state mechanism for the democratic character of civil society, set against both market-based and minimalist accounts.
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’s argument that copyright now regulates ordinary expression because it regulates copies is a copyright-against-speech argument, and his fifth reform, a levy to decriminalize file sharing, cites Netanel by name (NOTE-1023, ch. 9). Netanel is the constitutional and doctrinal version of that argument. A reading would check whether Lessig’s copy-trigger complaint holds up once speech values, not the copy, set copyright’s scope, and what the levy proposal looks like in its own author’s hands.
It bears on the record’s translation line (CLAIM-002, QUESTION-002) only at a distance: as described, it is about how far law should let one person’s expression be built on, not about what survives the building.