"That story leaves out significant details, and his description of the reason is wrong. He leaves out significant prior sources and reasons, to the point your s

"That story leaves out significant details, and his description of the reason is wrong. He leaves out significant prior sources and reasons, to the point your statement "It was not created to help artists or whoever" is simply wrong. " If you want to point out details, i'm sure Karl will correct it. "Wikipedia provides a far better history with extensive sources [1]. Note for example the section "Early Developments" where they list precursors to anything in your source as having significant components of individual and author rights. " These citations are, honestly, mostly BS. Read the early documents yourself, and you'll see they pretty much make it up as they go along. "Note also in the US copyright law was started by author guilds wanting author protection, and the first federal copyright act in 1790 was about protection for authors, not for printers." This is kind of irrelevant to why copyright law came to be, since by then it was already a thing, and part of the entire point is that by then, authors and others had started trying to convince others that it was needed for protectionist reasons, claiming that history also felt a need to be protectionist, when this is completely inaccurate.