Acknowledgments

At the earliest stages of this research project, I struggled terribly with what questions I ought to ask, and what themes I should focus on. Chris Sprigman, a copyright colleague at NYU, helpfully advised me to “Just start talking to people.” After a dozen interviews, he assured me, you’ll have some hunches, and another dozen interviews will refine them. With his encouragement, I took the leap of faith and began to reach out to people. They in turn took their own leap of faith that my project would end up being worth their time. I am grateful for their generosity with their time, their expertise, and the individual insights they shared toward this common whole. A few leaders in the nonprofit publishing and copyright spaces, who are not quoted within the book, contributed particularly important insights. Penelope Bender, T. J. Bliss, Colleen Chien, Cable Green, Gautam John, Micah May, Lily Nyariki, Dana Schmidt, and Paul Stacey all deserve personal mention.

I owe a special intellectual debt to my former professors, Jack Balkin and Yochai Benkler. While I was still a law student, they helped connect my interests in human rights and economic development with intellectual property law through the lens of “access to knowledge.” Jack went on to play an outsized role in my development as a scholar, sponsoring my fellowship at the Yale Information Society Project for three years, before I took my first tenure-track position. As for Yochai, his scholarship on nonmarket production of information goods was foundational to this work. Other particularly important scholarly influences on my approach to the study of copyright law from the perspective of distributive justice include: Keith Aoiki, James Boyle, Margaret Chon, Julie Cohen, Laurence Helfer, Amy Kapsczynski, Ronaldo Lemos, Molly Land, Chidi Oguamanam, Ruth Okediji, Jerome Reichman, Nagla Rizk, Madhavi Sunder, and Peter Yu.

My colleagues at Indiana University McKinney School of Law were unfailingly supportive. Susan DeMaine, Yvonne Dutton, Frank Emmert, Ben Keele, Florence Roisman, Margaret Ryznar, Carlton Waterhouse, and George Wright deserve particular acknowledgment for their feedback and assistance with this work. So does Chinese copyright scholar Xiaohao Zhang, whom we were very lucky to host from the School of Economics and Finance at Xi’an International Studies University. Special thanks are also due to the students in my Copyright, Human Rights, and Intellectual Property courses who shared helpful feedback and contributed valuable ideas as this project evolved. I want to personally thank several students who contributed significantly to this project, most now accomplished lawyers in their own right: Alyssa Devine, Jessica Dickinson, Nicole Dobias, Clark Giles, Kayla Hill, Annalee Patel, and Anne Young.

Colleagues beyond my own school or field also generously shared their time, advice, and thoughts to make this book a reality. Mark McKenna shared valuable comments at the earliest presentation of this research at Yale Law School’s Innovation Without IP conference. Numerous colleagues offered other helpful input at UC Santa Clara, the Kent-DePaul Intellectual Property Colloquium, the IP Scholars Conference, and Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s workshop for junior legal scholars. Erin Delaney was the first to push me to see this book as one that large numbers of “real people” might want to read. Mark Tushnet helped me translate that vague hope into the right language for my book proposal. Joseph Singer is responsible for convincing me to take the metaphor of “book hunger” as the book’s central focus. (I had originally conceived the title as Social Publishing: Ending Book Hunger Through Mission-Driven Innovation.) Fortunately Anupam Chander had introduced me to my editor on this book, Joseph Calamia, who believed in the academic/trade crossover potential of this project even with the original title. I am particularly grateful to Joe and to Yale University Press for ensuring this work could be published on a Creative Commons license.

Because this book was imagined for a mixed audience, I also drew heavily upon the kindness of family and friends as readers. Sarah Green brought an art docent’s perspective to an early draft of the proposal and pushed me to reconceive the framing to make the narrative more readable. Romana Solovan and Oluwatobilola Kappo each read multiple chapters to flag words and phrases that would be problematic for readers who are not native English speakers. A veritable fleet of taxi, Uber, and Lyft drivers served as thought partners over the years, sharing their own personal experiences with access to books in contexts as diverse as Indiana, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia, and helping me to find the right words to describe this project. My parents-in-law, Mike and Jan Shaver, welcomed discussion of these ideas around their dinner table, and my father-in-law read many draft chapters.

I feel a special personal debt to the family members who were most directly responsible for my own passion for books. My mother, Lucia D’Andrea Bishop, was a kindergarten teacher. She made sure that I enjoyed a steady diet of books throughout my childhood, from libraries and garage sales. Among the many humanitarian and community roles her father filled in his life, Joseph D’Andrea served on the board of the local public library in Spangler, Pennsylvania. Although the town was so small its library no longer exists, my grandfather’s position of authority impressed me enormously as a young child, and made our many shared trips to the tiny Spangler library all the more magical. My granny Marjorie McGee D’Andrea, my father Kelley Bishop, his parents, and numerous aunts and uncles were also important models of avid reading as I grew up. Today it is my joy to share books with my own daughters: Josephine (9), Eleanor (6), and Margot (3).

Finally and most importantly, I struggle to find the words that can do justice to the impact that my husband had on this project. I have often noticed acknowledgments in which the authors thank their spouses for their patience. Now I understand why. Such a large undertaking requires sacrifices of time and energy from both the writer and the ones closest to them. Bob Shaver is not only my life partner and co-parent, but also my most important thought partner. We must have spent a hundred hours in conversation about my most recent thoughts and findings. His comments and questions, drawing upon his professional experience in nonprofit strategic consulting, always helped to generate new insights. Thank you, Bob. Your partnership makes me a better person.