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Podcast: New Books in Human Rights
Episode: Rajshree Chandra, “Knowledge as Property, Issues in the Moral Grounding of Intellectual Property Rights” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Description: Copyright is one of those topics over which even two saints disagreed. The legend has it that Saint Columba and Saint Finnian engaged in an argument as Columba had secretly, and without the latter’s permission, copied a Latin Psalter owned by Finnian. When Finnian found out about it, he requested the copy, but Columbia refused to give it back. Dermott, the King of Ireland, decreed “to every cow belong its calf, so to every book belong its copy.”In 1925 the former Assistant Register of Copyrights in the United States, Richard De Wolf, pointed out that “the progress...