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Comment by bdowling | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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

> 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.

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