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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

What rights did you used to have?

We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and be accountable to no one.

That all went away in 1790 when the U.S. government passed the first Copyright Act. https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/timeline_18th_century.htm...

> We used to have the right

> That all went away in 1790

Interesting use of the word “we” here.

Also there’s a few other “rights” that have changed since then, not sure this argument has the power you think it does.

> We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and be accountable to no one.

Unless you copied something of value to a rich and powerful person, in which case your accountability would likely be quite high.

Also, "copying" before 1790 meant something rather different than cp(1).

And what exactly would you have copied with your rights in, say, the year 1789? And how would you have done that?

You could copy a book, and sell it. This was a big part of the Protestant revolution; the Catholic church didn't want the common people reading the Bible, but back then they had no legal way to control how people used the printing press.

The Bible is not copyrighted. So you could still do that today.

Also I‘m pretty sure the catholic church wanted no one to read the Luther Bible. Neither common people nor others ;)

The copyright to the King James Version is owned by the crown.

Apparently that’s true (in the UK).

Specific translations, such as the NIV, are copyrighted.

Reviewing this a bit more, it was actually the 1710 Statute of Anne in Great Britain that took away our rights to copy whatever we wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

The big one is: when you bought a thing you owned it. The anti-circumvention clause is ultimately the root cause of the right to repair movement.

The anti-circumvention clause also means it might be illegal to make a back up copy of media you bought, a thing that always used to be ok.

More coherent private ownership, a healthy public domain, more robust fair use, and greater non-commercial protection, for a start.

I consider all of those to be erosions of public rights and benefits.

You had the right to time shift, move between formats, excerpt and edit for academic and research purposes, etc.

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