"Theft! A History of Music" - A comic book must-read

"Theft! A History of Music" is a monumental, very cool graphic-novel presentation of music history, changing music media, borrowing, and copyright law, created by James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, professors of law at Duke University. In 251 pages, it covers 2000+ years of music history, from Plato to rap.

You don't want to miss this.

Click here to view online, get a free download, or purchase a hard copy.

Here's a clip from the book's web page ("fair-use"!!):

The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to standardize religious music with the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers, swapping tunes (and remarkably profane lyrics), changing both religion and music in the process. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line. You will learn about the lawsuits that, surprisingly, shaped rap. You will read the story of some of music’s iconoclasts—from Handel and Beethoven to Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, the British Invasion and Public Enemy.

 To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still—into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law’s 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were reinvented today? We are not sure. Which as you will read, is profoundly worrying because today, more than ever, we need the arts.

See the video below for a lecture on the subject by co-author Jennifer Jenkins. I'd recommend that you read the comic book first, though.