Once upon a time information was hard to get. Now it's astonishingly easy, whether it's a person's phone number, medical records, or research. But as a society we haven't reached a consensus on how to control - or even whether to control - all this accessible information. So a war is going on between private citizens and information-based businesses over who owns such valuable data as a person's name, photographic image, telephone number, shopping records, and medical records.

Similar battles are raging over who owns the airwaves and computer-user interfaces, and one of the most vituperative information wars is going on among academics over who owns the words on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In this engaging, sometimes poignant, often hilarious book, Anne Wells Branscomb elucidates such conflicts. With fascinating case studies ranging from Citizen Mog, who sued J. C. Penney for the use of his time in listening to telephone sales pitches, to "Captain Midnight," a satellite dish retailer who disrupted HBO's transmission as a protest against the cable company's scrambling its signals; from Lotus Development Corporation's going to court to outlaw clones of its spreadsheet software to the Anti-Defamation League's charging Prodigy with permitting hate messages to be transmitted via E-mail - the book shows how the law is lumbering along, trying to apply the old rules to a new game.