Hacker News Reader

Here’s the citation that Wikipedia gives: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...

There definitely were a lot of factors, and lax copyright was one of them.

Interestingly enough, it's a rather bad article that goes for framing things in a certain light...like mentioning Prussia's copyright law from 1837 and then going on to say way later: "The market for scientific literature didn't collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s." No precise date there...which is 1845, as I mentioned in another comment, where the "Deutsche Bund" extended their own copyright law which existed beforehand. Prussia's law is insofar worth mentioning as it was really modern and comprehensive for its time....which isn't acknowledged at all in the article. The way they used Prussia's law from 1837, they could have used another state's one where printing businesses had "copyright" (printing privileges) for two years if they used it (as an example), and that started in the late 15th century, instead. Or they could have used the French-style copyright laws introduced in some states in the early 1800s due to the French invasion. Of course, due to the plethora of states and the lack of an encompassing law which the "Deutsche Bund" had to establish first, one could just hop across a border and copy a work, thus rendering the copyright law of a state effectively useless. That's also the reason why I didn't bother mentioning it at all in my other comment but here it's relevant because the article writes: "Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time", right before mentioning Prussia's 1837 law which is just straight up nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com