Not your ordinary comic book.
It's called "Theft! A History of Music" By James Boyle,
et al. Publication date 2017. It's free from
unglue.it, through a "Creative Commons license." Amazon sells it. Unfortunately, the only format that this one comes in at
unglue.it is PDF.
There are more than a gazillion free ebooks out there--free for various reasons--from being open access to having their copyrights to have expired.
Unglue.it features a different free book all of the time, although not usually a different book from one day to another. There are also a handful of other free ebooks always below the featured book of the day, that are easy to miss.
The book description, from unglue.it
This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing—extensively borrowing—from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race—again and again, race—and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.
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.
This comic book may be a way for peeps who only read comic books to actually . . . *gasp* . . .
learn something. I may even read it myself, even though I gave comic books up when I was about seven years ago, which was about 20 years ago.
