‘Who owns this sentence?’ Increasingly, who knows?

ALEXANDRA JACOBS

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu’s surprisingly sprightly history “Who Owns This Sentence?” arrives with uncanny timing. New Year’s Eve hangovers had barely cleared before Harvard’s president was ousted over charges of plagiarism and inadequate attribution, followed by quick retorts that her biggest detractor’s wife, a former tenured professor at M.I.T., had filched passages from Wikipedia.

Somebody please alert Smokey Bear: The groves of academe are on fire. How quaint Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” theory of the Romantic poets now seems, amid the current cut-and-paste panic. Like a corrupt police officer, artificial intelligence is scanning for more plagiarism perps, while itself stealing writers’ words. Even the most innocent and well-meaning among us natural intelligences could be forgiven for sitting bolt upright at 3 a.m., worrying that some choice phrase we’d committed to print or pixels had already been committed by someone else.

“Committed” — forgive the scare quotes, but … I’m scared! With pre-existing intellectual property (I.P.) ascendant and piracy run amok, the act of creation can seem like a crime scene where the DNA evidence is all mixed up. Bellos, a translator and biographer, and Montagu, a lawyer, step confidently behind the yellow tape to guide us around.

They sort out the difference between plagiarism, a matter of honor debated since ancient times (and a theme, tellingly, of many recent novels); copyright, a concern of modern law and, crucially, lucre (“the biggest money machine the world has ever seen”); and trademark. If I wanted a picture of Smokey Bear to run with this article, for instance — and I very much do — The New York Times would have to fork up.

The authors’ chapters are short but their reach, like the arm of the law itself, is long. We travel from Plato’s outrage at Hermodorus, who had his teacher’s notes copied and published; to woodblock printing in China; the Stationers’ Company, an early regulatory body in London; and the 1886 Berne Convention in Switzerland, which both codified and complicated international copyright as we know it.

And of course to the nationless ’net, where the tentacles of modern fan fiction spread exponentially if not legally, and social media poses massive unanticipated problems to a civil society. “How to sort good books from bad posts without mistake is a problem no law has truly solved,” the authors write, reminding us that Facebook profits from our posts without being accountable for them. “It is a joke — but it should not make us laugh.”

They themselves have a wry way with technical material; this is less Copyright for Dummies, like that endlessly extended, imitated and spoofed series, than for wits. Discouraged by their publisher from naming a chapter title after the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the authors deftly illustrate this “absurd” circumstance by only describing in close identifiable detail the band and the song.

Though often compared to theft, incorporating chunks of protected written works into your own — as critics must — will not land you in jail, Bellos and Montagu reassure. Copyright is a far more debated and nebulous entity than murder — and, the authors argue, the statutes governing it are ripe for revision.

Jacobs is a Times book critic