Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

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> The point was to promote the creation of new creative works.

What are you referring to exactly, US copyright law or earlier laws from other countries? US Copyright law from the beginning (1790) was written in part to preserve the economic property rights of authors and publishers. Part of the point always has been protection of profit. [1] [2]. Initially it only applied to books, not to art. You can’t really separate the granting of a limited-time monopoly over a work from the promotion of new creative works, they go hand in hand, to say economic protection was never the point is not accurate.

‘In 1783 several authors' petitions persuaded the Continental Congress "that nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."’ [2]

The earlier British Statue of Anne says similarly: “Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted” [3]

Note that both quotes reference economic protection as the first reason, and promotion of creativity second.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/timeline_18th_century.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne#Text

From that history of copyright page:

> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers

I think it's far more likely that they're about making sure that the wrong sort of bible, or the wrong sort of pamphlet, doesn't get printed. Whatever "for the economy" or "for the creators" verbiage is in there was added after the fact by marketing.

Actually, it’s almost exactly the other way around. The Gutenberg Bible may be famous as the first thing printed but publishing exploded in the second half of the fifteenth century across all genres.

The competition was intense and with no copyright law, it was a race to find and publish as many works as possible before they were picked up by competitors and copies flooded the market. In order to keep the presses profitable the printers published tons of material that went against Church doctrine. Anti-Church material was often the most profitable because the printers didn’t have to pay the authors for the content. The printers were driven by economics and the Church couldn’t reign them in.

The first copyright laws established regional monopolies so that printers could be controlled for the benefit of God and country but governments did it by freeing them from the laissez fare competition that dominated the early printing industry. By giving printers exclusive rights and banning foreign copies, governments created stable revenue streams for the printers so that they had the option of saying “no” to new authors. The Church exploited “for the economy” rhetoric from the beginning.

The Wiki article is something I wish I had time to edit. Yes, there was an attempt to ensure that the right sort of thing be printed, but it was also about making sure that no one else could print certain documents. You'd license a bible text to be able to regulate that it's the correct type of bible being printed, yes. You'd then see who else was printing bibles and shut them down. Okay, that's all correct, but there's more to its foundation than that. For example, in the UK, one individual had the sole right to profit off the last testaments of people to be hanged in Newgate Prison. In the 17th C, Parliament gave this power was to a preacher who in turn designated a specific printer. That power is what allowed the preacher (and the printer) to profit: no one could (legally) copy it. Regulating printers was the only way to ensure profit for an author and it was an attempt to guarantee conformity.

I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.

I'll have to brush up on my history of the protestant reformation, but I'm under the impression that for a very long time the church had a monopoly on people with enough dedication and support to sit around copying books by hand. There was no need for copyright law because it was totally legal to kick the rabble rousers out of the monastery for any old reason.

In this way, the church had been asserting copyright on the Bible for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the invention of the printing press that they needed a law for it.

It's easy to find legal text today that says it's for one thing but if you're in the know it's clear that its purpose--the side effect without which it wouldn't exist--is unstated or hidden. I'm skeptical that our picture of the 1700's is good enough to solve the same puzzle that far in retrospect, but my hypothesis is that if it was, we'd find things were a bit less about protecting authors economically than a surface-level read would lead us to believe.

There are some interesting vestiges of the origin of copyright, still floating around in contemporary legal systems.

In the UK, and in other countries patterned after the UK constitution, works of the government are technically under royal prerogative. It's usually called "Crown copyright" but it isn't regulated by normal copyright law. Traditionally, the monarch reserved the right to ensure that laws were duplicated exactly, etc. It's the inherent right of the monarch, and that right has never actually been explicitly curtailed by law. For example, Canada's Copyright Act has a clause, asserting the Act does not curtail any rights or privileges of the Crown.

It's probably the purest form of "intellectual property" that exists. Anything the Crown creates is under Crown copyright. The copyright term is forever. There is no fair use or fair dealing with Crown copyrighted works. [1] The justification for the copyright is not derived from statute but, within the legal conceit we're working with here anyway, rather literally from God and traditional since time immemorial.

Speaking of which, The King James Bible is still under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. James I paid for it and his heirs insist on their due. The Crown issued letters patent to several printers, those letters were acquired and now Cambridge University Press has the right to print the KJV Bible in England. It's one of the very few letters patent to somehow slip through the 19th and 20th century overhauls; nearly all have been abolished by acts of legislation.

Letters patent are the granting of an office or title or right or property by the state to an individual. The granting of such rights was historically, also another royal prerogative. Scope-limited monopolies were very common. A monopoly on farming salt on a particular beach. A monopoly on collecting taxes in a particular county. A monopoly on dying wool a certain colour in a particular town. Such letters were considered a form of property by the courts, and they could in some cases be traded.

This is, as I understand it, largely the intellectual/legal origin of modern copyright in the Anglo-American tradition. It was, at first, not focused on the work, the text, so much as the economic right of a printer, to have a monopoly on a specific work, and to not have that right infringed with unseemly competition. As more and more letters patent regarding printing were issued, it eventually became formalized and then regulated by statute, taking it out of the Crown's arbitrary hands. At the same time (I think we're at about 1750 AD now?) the proliferation of printing started reducing the economic significance of the book itself vs. the contents of the book, and we started to think more about the author than the printer.

[1] Of course, practically speaking, in modern times, the Crown has issued various directives over the years, culminating in a whole department to manage Crown copyrighted works, and it's policy that verbatim duplication and etc. of laws are just fine. But very technically, that privilege could be rescinded at any time by royal decree, though of course that won't actually happen.

I was talking about US law, where the purpose was to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." but even that very first copyright law written saw the need for the "Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books"

The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft. You’re right that the rationale did include the notion that granting protection would be good for society and encourage creation of new work (because the alternative they witnessed in practice was to make money copying someone else). You’re right that this was part of the purpose, but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money. Not only was that always the primary point, but it is also the very mechanism by which they promoted new work: the only incentive to create new work is that you have legal protection from copiers for some time so you can make money. This is why these two reasons are inseparable, right?

> The US law, and the British law it was modeled after, were both trying to solve an existing problem of theft.

No, it wasn’t. Creation of novel property rights is never to solve a problem of theft, because theft only exists in the context of existing property rights.

> but the stated purpose from the very beginning was in fact to protect authors’ and publishers’ rights to make money

The original British copyright law did not apply to authors at all, but to printers only. As D f goodzw

> theft only exists in the context of existing property rights

Of course the law didn’t exist before it was written, but copying others’ content was viewed as stealing, which is why there was a push to turn it into real, legal theft. Apologies for using shorthand. What words would you have chosen? Maybe you can make my point better than I can, because the law was in fact written in response to an actual problem people had of being able to recoup their investments.

I don’t agree that ‘theft’ requires existing legal property rights to exist, that is not the definition of the word, so your claim is inaccurate. Theft is the act of stealing, which is taking something without permission. It can be one-sided from the perspective of the person who was taken from, and still be theft.

> Of course the law didn’t exist before it was written, but copying others’ content was viewed as stealing,

But the first copyright laws in Britain gave no rights at all to creators.

They weren’t about moral rights founded in creation of works, the basis of rights was the capital investment of setting up to print the work.

Right yes, to my broad point here that the law’s whole point was to protect profits, and I agree originally it was publisher’s profits not author’s.

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