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Was Germany’s 19th century industrial expansion due to an absence of copyright?

257 points by _Microft 5y ago

COGlory 5y ago
I have two reasons for supporting FOSS: 1) I should control all the software that runs on computers I own 2) Access to information is always preferable in all situations This article really jogged me on the second one. The caveat is that there wasn't much beyond correlation proving it. But regardless, I think it's a really cool example of why access to information is so important. What's tougher is drawing the line to connect access to information and direct benefit to the person giving up copyright. Presumably, most of Germany benefited from industrialization?
- Torwald 5y ago
  What do you mean with "access to information" in regards to FOSS? That you can examine the algorithm to see how it's done or somethng else?
hilbert42 5y ago
Another solid argument for serious copyright reform. It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over and over in recent years. I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just an also-ran. Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets then many are deprived of access to the information they contain. I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that price and I know many others can't either. I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing of the country. Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Regarding textbook pricing. I once ran into a person that said no one should be able to educate themselves/be educated for free. Guy was American. One of the weirdest things I've heard my entire life. Imagine having people with similar mindset running the show
  - anovikov 5y ago
    He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt. Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
    - tester756 5y ago
      >main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
      - anovikov 5y ago
        That's the thing. It has become too common already to give people any actual benefit: it was a way to stand out and it no longer is.
        nosianu 5y ago
        No benefit? They have a much better education. > it was a way to stand out and it no longer is Education is only good if you stand out? What a discussion.
manmal 5y ago
> Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker. This reminds me very much of our modern paywalls. It’s such a shame that people like Alexandra Elbakyan have to risk so much in order to even the playing field just slightly.
- hilbert42 5y ago
  "at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker" Right, paywalls to knowledge are a disaster for any country that's trying to maintain an educated society/workforce and one of the great outcomes of what Elbakyan has done is to alert the world to the problem. We owe her a great gratitude. As I mentioned in my post the situation with with the price of books isn't that much different now to what it was in the UK in the 19th C. except that in rich countries a person can buy about two specialist textbooks for a week's salary. Of course that doesn't apply to those in less well developed countries, if anything at $300 per book they're worse off in this modern world than English citizens were back in the 19th C.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > except that in rich countries a person can buy about two specialist textbooks for a week's salary One has to remember that salary != disposable income. Perhaps especially in developed countries, most people spend more than 3/4th of their monthly salary on necessities such as food, rent, clothing, maintenance and healthcare. "A week's salary" is a couple months of saving up money, and buying a textbook for it means deferring other purchases like new (used) car, or vacation, or home appliance, etc.
    - hilbert42 5y ago
      Right, no disagreement. No matter how one looks at it a $300 textbook isn't small change for most people anywhere and it's going to be worse for those in poor countries. In some ways it's easy to understand why some countries are dragging their feet when it comes to enforcing copyright. Incidentally, the $300 I used may even be conservative, recently I was pricing specialist textbooks and one was over $500. If I'd bought the three books that I wanted it would have come to just under $1200. Instead, I managed to borrow one from a colleague and I'm trying to get the others on interlibrary loan but that's not yet been possible.
roenxi 5y ago
There are arguments in favour of IP law, but it is difficult to escape from the fact - intentional outcome, really - that it puts barriers in front of people making the most sensible decision based on the current state of knowledge. The more time passes, the more advantages accrue to open source software. It has been a true privilege to watch as the concept went from lunatic rantings to such an obvious pillar of the software industry that people in a workplace have to justify and argue for why they can't just run postgres on linux. We've seen it a few times now - if a society wants to actually make progress they loosen IP restrictions. Fast progress happens when people are free to make good decisions.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Loose IP restrictions are a good policy when you are playing "catch-up" and basically need to implement a bunch of things already developed by someone else. For an advanced country that actually has to create new things, the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then the earlier stage. It's still possible to have too much restriction though, I think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.
  - djbebs 5y ago
    Do the benefits actually change though? Or does the country now have established industries and companies with the power to influence the political process in order to cement their position against new entrants via IP laws?
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      All of these factors exist, but their relative importance and value is situational. Loosening IP restrictions would have first-order benefits to a lot of people who could now do things with existing IP that were previously impossible. The downsides would be delayed and second-order: a significant portion of people, who currently invest in developing IP with the expectation of "owning" the resulting product, would reduce their level of investment. Why invest in R&D if you can just wait for someone else to find a successful idea and then copy them? Why spend a billion dollars testing a drug if its market price is immediately dropped to generic level by cheap manufacturers? The only option left is secrecy, which is worse for society than patents.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
"The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today."
- hasmanean 5y ago
  TIL there are “principles” in leather tanning?
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    Leather tanning is, apparently, a fairly complex subject (I have a pair of full-grain boots going on a decade plus of consistent wearing, and others that haven't lasted anywhere as close as long).
  - bserge 5y ago
    You are basically chemically altering the structure of a material. It's like treating steel - much harder than you'd think and yes, there are principles.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
If the US was nuked into oblivion the only things remaining would be cockroaches and intellectual property attorneys. I don't know why I repeated myself just there.
Barrin92 5y ago
I think the notion of proliferation of broadly available technical knowledge is correct, but I'm not entirely convinced whether literature in particular was so relevant. In How Asia Works, a great book on industrial expansion in Asia, Studwell notes that when Taiwan was moderately prosperous and dominated by industry half of the workforce could not even read. What really benefited East-Asia was a grey-collar culture, a national, egalitarian educational system and corporatism rather than a white-collar, classist and academic culture more common in say, England. This is something you also find in Germany. The education system was designed to be broad. Schools were universal and focused on practical knowledge, with few ivory towers. Knowledge was historically and is still spread around between institutes (Frauenhofer say), firms, and industry-friendly universities, dispersed and practical rather than concentrated, theoretic and elitist. This Prussian style system which is really where most German institutions come from also was quite literally copied by a lot of now industrial powerhouses in Asia.
- baybal2 5y ago
  A tidbit: English bureaucratic system was in part copied from pre-1905 China, through East India Company.
  - jimnotgym 5y ago
    And we still call government bureaucrats 'Mandarins' for that reason. Especially, 'Whitehall Mandarins', Whitehall being the area of London where several government ministeries are based.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Linguistic curiosities abound. “Mandarin” also being the name of a particular type of orange (fruit) because of the Chinese connection. The Dutch word for the fruit being “sinaasappel” — Modification of earlier “Chinas-appel” (close enough to English to guess) — https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel However, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland is named after the Dutch King William of Orange, whose title “Prince of Orange” derives from a principality in southern France — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange — but this in turn is probably etymologically derived from the Gaulish ar-aus(i)o- ('temple, cheek': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse) while the fruit and colour come from the Arabic nāranj (نارنج) which is probably close to the original name for the fruit in Asia.
gmathews 5y ago
The paper's author, Höffner, names the fragmented German states as the reason IP claims (in this case copyright) was so difficult to enforce. Now we have international trade agreements enforcing IP in most places. Could this effect partially explain China's rise in tech? They ignored IP for ages. I mean it's certainly easier to innovate when you're not looking over your shoulder or stopping to ask IP lawyers if they think you've breached anything in trivial parts of your tech.
- inciampati 5y ago
  It might, but it needs to be weighed against the active suppression of information flow into the country. I collaborate with researchers in China. They all report that, to search for an access scientific and technical work, they must use a VPN. To make a broad generalization for the sake of argument: in China there are often excellent implementations of contemporary technical ideas. In contrast, there is little true innovation. To me this suggests that communication and interaction are also important parts of the development of societies. The current Chinese model would seem to draw on both the pattern of control by an elite hierarchy seen in 19th c England and the liberal copyright situation of the German states of the same period.
  - stkdump 5y ago
    They are still playing catch up in many areas. Wait a few more decades, and they are sure to also innovate. Probably China will open up, just like they opened up economically, when it suited them.
deltron3030 5y ago
The printing press (1500s), bible distribution and gained literacy was the main reason I think, it created a knowledge culture earlier than elsewhere, basically an offline web. The industry in Germany has strong protestant and prussian roots. Families with a protestant background got wealthier earlier when more land and resources were up for grabs, kinda like digital entrepreneurs in the 90s or early 2000s. I think it's quite comparable to computers, Silicon Valley and the internet these days, and why it's dominated by US companies.
WalterBright 5y ago
One reason colonial America prospered was they ignored British patents in setting up the textile industry. Minimizing the friction for reuse is a central theme of the D programming language - we use the Boost license: https://www.boost.org/users/license.html https://www.boost.org/users/license.html In particular, it does not require attribution in the generated binaries, nor does it require any patent licensing, nor does it prevent any use for profit, nor come with any agenda whatsoever. I would have simply made it Public Domain, but PD is not recognized in some countries. So Boost is the next best thing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
What I have heard is that Germany was kind of what China is today. First they produced cheap copies of the high tech coming out of places like the UK. Eventually they established quality standards (the TÜV, an organisation ensuring quality of products, still exists today), and eventually "Made in Germany" even became a marker of quality.
- phist_mcgee 5y ago
  Given the size and diversity of their industrial consumer output, I doubt they will achieve an average of 'marker of quality' for quite a while. Phones are probably these highest quality consumer goods produced in china at the moment.
  - bserge 5y ago
    Try most electronics. Their problem is that "made in China" has a negative connotation and they produce a lot of cheap stuff, which inevitably breaks or doesn't work properly so people just go "damn Chinese shit". It seems they're getting to the point where the cheapest stuff is made in other countries. Have to wonder what happens when the world runs out of cheaper countries to outsource to.
    - plmu 5y ago
      I can only assume that, just like "made in germany" in the 19th century, after a while the "made in china" will transform from a sign of inferior, into a sign of superior quality. I think we're already seeing that. Also, the increased assertiveness also led to military agression (2 world wars). China seems to be copying that too, alas.
      - bserge 5y ago
        Likely, "made in Japan" had the same journey (also I'll always remember that scene in Back to the Future).
- cycomanic 5y ago
bullen 5y ago
"Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire." Compared to: "First Congress implemented the copyright provision of the US Constitution in 1790" Copyright abolished by 2070?
imtringued 5y ago
If it's really that simple then it would explain why North America was considered the land of the free. The farmers that lived there didn't have to bow down to existing land owners they owned their own land. In that sense Germans didn't have to bow down to existing intellectual property owners.
- bserge 5y ago
  They do now heh
zeristor 5y ago
I have wondered that with so much knowledge freely available on the web, via YouTube, and via sci-hub too should we expect to a large increase in new ideas and quickening of pace of the world? Some knowledge could be quite esoteric, and whilst books would help, experience, exposure, and mentoring onemight might expect to be more important. Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant, more of an issue if you have a huge amount of information available. Perhaps the key thing would be works like the academic review papers that survery an area of knowledge and look to integrate it together.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant, more of an issue if you have a huge amount of information available. Agreed, have you heard of a new open acces project by the scientist Alex Freeman, called Octopus? I'm super excited about it: "The overall idea behind the new platform, which I called Octopus, is to break the standard unit of publication up into eight smaller stages or pieces. These include formulated scientific problems, hypotheses, methods and protocols, data, analysis, interpretation, and real-world applications. The eighth piece is reviews where people share their comments about the other stages, but it's also treated as a publication itself because it is a constructive piece of collaboration. Researchers will be able to revisit their publications to acknowledge others' comments or suggestions and even include some of the useful reviewers as authors, with the old version remaining available so that readers can track the evolution of ideas. The formulated scientific problem automatically becomes the beginning of a chain, and all the other pieces are vertically linked upward. If you have a great hypothesis, you can publish that and link it straight up to the problem that it is trying to address. And if you've collected some small amount of data, you can publish that, linking it directly up to the protocol that you followed. It will also be possible to create horizontal links between publications; maybe somebody has come up with an amazing algorithm whilst studying starling flocking behavior and somebody else working on oil pipelines has decided to use it. Octopus will thus allow researchers to publish in much smaller author groups, and that can make the system much more accountable and meritocratic. If, say, you're an applied statistician, at the moment you're very rarely a first author on anything. But with Octopus, statisticians can do analyses of anybody else's data and get credit for it as the author of that publication. Octopus will also be made language-agnostic through automatic translation to lower language barriers and broaden access." https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vision-scientific-publishing https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vis...
kleiba 5y ago
Copyright is a mechanism that directly serves only a few, where - in its absence - a lot more people could benefit. There are, of course, valid justifications for the existence of copyright. Like so often in politics, the difficult question is how to balance interests - and (like so often in politics), it's debatable whether the status quo has achieved at least something near a fair balance.
dude4you 5y ago
More about the progressive thinking if Frederick the great. Afaik the fist steam engine in mainland Europe was deployed in Prussia.
- JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
  > mainland Europe First time I here that phrase! A testament to the rise of China? The proper term is continental Europe. Digging a bit further, Wikipedia's[0] article is titled "Continental Europe", but says "mainland" is also used. Time to speculate: for the British speaking English, the "main" land are the British Isles, so they prefer the term "continental". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe
  - dude4you 5y ago
    while I am not a native speaker, I am a us citizen and it is a term that would be used by an uneducated American. but continental is indeed better.
gego 5y ago
...only years late but better late than never... there is a lot of research, eh by Giesecke or Eisenstein, that is decades old.. the question has already been answered multiple times... and has been ignored as often... yes! The weak copyright protections especially in contrast to GB, where there were strict and centralized rules in early modern Europe is a first indicator, this only intensified in the later centuries leading to piracy making information affordable - thus preparing a whole population for industrial production...
mlinksva 5y ago
Love seeing discussions of Eckhard Höffner's comparative work on English and German copyright history. This Spiegel article has probably given it the most visibility. Höffner has written extensively on the history of books and copyright, all in German (which I do not read). https://www.fatto.de/wiki/ https://www.fatto.de/wiki/ and https://twitter.com/EckhardHoeffner https://twitter.com/EckhardHoeffner are their site and twitter. I think https://archive.org/details/102026Band2 https://archive.org/details/102026Band2 is the relevant book. For how copyright restricts learning in other parts of the world now, I like https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol92/iss1/7/ https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol92/iss1/7...
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Of course! See [©] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History :-)

257 points by _Microft 5y ago

I have two reasons for supporting FOSS: 1) I should control all the software that runs on computers I own 2) Access to information is always preferable in all situations This article really jogged me on the second one. The caveat is that there wasn't much beyond correlation proving it. But regardless, I think it's a really cool example of why access to information is so important. What's tougher is drawing the line to connect access to information and direct benefit to the person giving up copyright. Presumably, most of Germany benefited from industrialization?

Torwald 5y ago
What do you mean with "access to information" in regards to FOSS? That you can examine the algorithm to see how it's done or somethng else?

hilbert42 5y ago

Another solid argument for serious copyright reform. It's not only 19th Century Germany that's demonstrated that ready access to information by many is one of the best ways to develop a country but it's been paralleled by China who has only paid lip service to copyright for decades. That's been demonstrated over and over in recent years. I'd go as far as to say that if the US doesn't seriously reform copyright and patent law it'll not only fall behind China but will fall so far behind that in decades to come it'll become just an also-ran. Look at it this way, when quality textbooks can cost anything upwards of $200 - $300 due to controlled monopolistic markets then many are deprived of access to the information they contain. I'd even put myself in that class, I can't afford books at that price and I know many others can't either. I'm not against reasonable copyright and patent law but what we have now is not reasonable by a long shot. As I see it, these laws are only benefiting a few and they're having a disproportionate negative effect on the economics and wellbeing of the country. Incidentally, one of the worst aspects of these laws is how easily they allow opportunistic people/organizations to lockup information that was once in the public domain by artifice and subterfuge.

beebeepka 5y ago
Regarding textbook pricing. I once ran into a person that said no one should be able to educate themselves/be educated for free. Guy was American. One of the weirdest things I've heard my entire life. Imagine having people with similar mindset running the show
- anovikov 5y ago
  He has a point. Crackdown on the higher education is coming because there is artificial, and needless, high demand for it - resulting in high prices and most people getting it just wasting years of their lives, additionally getting in debt. Much fewer people need to get higher education. It won't be much different if it was free: main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications. Because yeah, those jobs don't exist: society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.
  - tester756 5y ago
    >main thing is people wasting their time + becoming upset and angry at the society, perceiving themselves as the 'intellectual elite' that isn't getting 'valued' enough and unable to get jobs matching their qualifications Wouldn't higher edu degree becoming "common" invalidate it?
    - anovikov 5y ago
      That's the thing. It has become too common already to give people any actual benefit: it was a way to stand out and it no longer is.
      - nosianu 5y ago
        No benefit? They have a much better education. > it was a way to stand out and it no longer is Education is only good if you stand out? What a discussion.

manmal 5y ago

> Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker. This reminds me very much of our modern paywalls. It’s such a shame that people like Alexandra Elbakyan have to risk so much in order to even the playing field just slightly.

hilbert42 5y ago
"at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker" Right, paywalls to knowledge are a disaster for any country that's trying to maintain an educated society/workforce and one of the great outcomes of what Elbakyan has done is to alert the world to the problem. We owe her a great gratitude. As I mentioned in my post the situation with with the price of books isn't that much different now to what it was in the UK in the 19th C. except that in rich countries a person can buy about two specialist textbooks for a week's salary. Of course that doesn't apply to those in less well developed countries, if anything at $300 per book they're worse off in this modern world than English citizens were back in the 19th C.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > except that in rich countries a person can buy about two specialist textbooks for a week's salary One has to remember that salary != disposable income. Perhaps especially in developed countries, most people spend more than 3/4th of their monthly salary on necessities such as food, rent, clothing, maintenance and healthcare. "A week's salary" is a couple months of saving up money, and buying a textbook for it means deferring other purchases like new (used) car, or vacation, or home appliance, etc.
  - hilbert42 5y ago
    Right, no disagreement. No matter how one looks at it a $300 textbook isn't small change for most people anywhere and it's going to be worse for those in poor countries. In some ways it's easy to understand why some countries are dragging their feet when it comes to enforcing copyright. Incidentally, the $300 I used may even be conservative, recently I was pricing specialist textbooks and one was over $500. If I'd bought the three books that I wanted it would have come to just under $1200. Instead, I managed to borrow one from a colleague and I'm trying to get the others on interlibrary loan but that's not yet been possible.

roenxi 5y ago

There are arguments in favour of IP law, but it is difficult to escape from the fact - intentional outcome, really - that it puts barriers in front of people making the most sensible decision based on the current state of knowledge. The more time passes, the more advantages accrue to open source software. It has been a true privilege to watch as the concept went from lunatic rantings to such an obvious pillar of the software industry that people in a workplace have to justify and argue for why they can't just run postgres on linux. We've seen it a few times now - if a society wants to actually make progress they loosen IP restrictions. Fast progress happens when people are free to make good decisions.

HPsquared 5y ago
Loose IP restrictions are a good policy when you are playing "catch-up" and basically need to implement a bunch of things already developed by someone else. For an advanced country that actually has to create new things, the cost:benefits shifts in favour of more IP then the earlier stage. It's still possible to have too much restriction though, I think the copyright duration is ridiculous for example.
- djbebs 5y ago
  Do the benefits actually change though? Or does the country now have established industries and companies with the power to influence the political process in order to cement their position against new entrants via IP laws?
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    All of these factors exist, but their relative importance and value is situational. Loosening IP restrictions would have first-order benefits to a lot of people who could now do things with existing IP that were previously impossible. The downsides would be delayed and second-order: a significant portion of people, who currently invest in developing IP with the expectation of "owning" the resulting product, would reduce their level of investment. Why invest in R&D if you can just wait for someone else to find a successful idea and then copy them? Why spend a billion dollars testing a drug if its market price is immediately dropped to generic level by cheap manufacturers? The only option left is secrecy, which is worse for society than patents.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

"The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today."

hasmanean 5y ago
TIL there are “principles” in leather tanning?
- zhdc1 5y ago
  Leather tanning is, apparently, a fairly complex subject (I have a pair of full-grain boots going on a decade plus of consistent wearing, and others that haven't lasted anywhere as close as long).
- bserge 5y ago
  You are basically chemically altering the structure of a material. It's like treating steel - much harder than you'd think and yes, there are principles.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

If the US was nuked into oblivion the only things remaining would be cockroaches and intellectual property attorneys. I don't know why I repeated myself just there.

Barrin92 5y ago

I think the notion of proliferation of broadly available technical knowledge is correct, but I'm not entirely convinced whether literature in particular was so relevant. In How Asia Works, a great book on industrial expansion in Asia, Studwell notes that when Taiwan was moderately prosperous and dominated by industry half of the workforce could not even read. What really benefited East-Asia was a grey-collar culture, a national, egalitarian educational system and corporatism rather than a white-collar, classist and academic culture more common in say, England. This is something you also find in Germany. The education system was designed to be broad. Schools were universal and focused on practical knowledge, with few ivory towers. Knowledge was historically and is still spread around between institutes (Frauenhofer say), firms, and industry-friendly universities, dispersed and practical rather than concentrated, theoretic and elitist. This Prussian style system which is really where most German institutions come from also was quite literally copied by a lot of now industrial powerhouses in Asia.

baybal2 5y ago
A tidbit: English bureaucratic system was in part copied from pre-1905 China, through East India Company.
- jimnotgym 5y ago
  And we still call government bureaucrats 'Mandarins' for that reason. Especially, 'Whitehall Mandarins', Whitehall being the area of London where several government ministeries are based.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Linguistic curiosities abound. “Mandarin” also being the name of a particular type of orange (fruit) because of the Chinese connection. The Dutch word for the fruit being “sinaasappel” — Modification of earlier “Chinas-appel” (close enough to English to guess) — https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel However, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland is named after the Dutch King William of Orange, whose title “Prince of Orange” derives from a principality in southern France — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange — but this in turn is probably etymologically derived from the Gaulish ar-aus(i)o- ('temple, cheek': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse) while the fruit and colour come from the Arabic nāranj (نارنج) which is probably close to the original name for the fruit in Asia.

gmathews 5y ago

The paper's author, Höffner, names the fragmented German states as the reason IP claims (in this case copyright) was so difficult to enforce. Now we have international trade agreements enforcing IP in most places. Could this effect partially explain China's rise in tech? They ignored IP for ages. I mean it's certainly easier to innovate when you're not looking over your shoulder or stopping to ask IP lawyers if they think you've breached anything in trivial parts of your tech.

inciampati 5y ago
It might, but it needs to be weighed against the active suppression of information flow into the country. I collaborate with researchers in China. They all report that, to search for an access scientific and technical work, they must use a VPN. To make a broad generalization for the sake of argument: in China there are often excellent implementations of contemporary technical ideas. In contrast, there is little true innovation. To me this suggests that communication and interaction are also important parts of the development of societies. The current Chinese model would seem to draw on both the pattern of control by an elite hierarchy seen in 19th c England and the liberal copyright situation of the German states of the same period.
- stkdump 5y ago
  They are still playing catch up in many areas. Wait a few more decades, and they are sure to also innovate. Probably China will open up, just like they opened up economically, when it suited them.

deltron3030 5y ago

The printing press (1500s), bible distribution and gained literacy was the main reason I think, it created a knowledge culture earlier than elsewhere, basically an offline web. The industry in Germany has strong protestant and prussian roots. Families with a protestant background got wealthier earlier when more land and resources were up for grabs, kinda like digital entrepreneurs in the 90s or early 2000s. I think it's quite comparable to computers, Silicon Valley and the internet these days, and why it's dominated by US companies.

WalterBright 5y ago

One reason colonial America prospered was they ignored British patents in setting up the textile industry. Minimizing the friction for reuse is a central theme of the D programming language - we use the Boost license: https://www.boost.org/users/license.html https://www.boost.org/users/license.html In particular, it does not require attribution in the generated binaries, nor does it require any patent licensing, nor does it prevent any use for profit, nor come with any agenda whatsoever. I would have simply made it Public Domain, but PD is not recognized in some countries. So Boost is the next best thing.

deleted 5y ago

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notanzaiiswear 5y ago

What I have heard is that Germany was kind of what China is today. First they produced cheap copies of the high tech coming out of places like the UK. Eventually they established quality standards (the TÜV, an organisation ensuring quality of products, still exists today), and eventually "Made in Germany" even became a marker of quality.

phist_mcgee 5y ago
Given the size and diversity of their industrial consumer output, I doubt they will achieve an average of 'marker of quality' for quite a while. Phones are probably these highest quality consumer goods produced in china at the moment.
- bserge 5y ago
  Try most electronics. Their problem is that "made in China" has a negative connotation and they produce a lot of cheap stuff, which inevitably breaks or doesn't work properly so people just go "damn Chinese shit". It seems they're getting to the point where the cheapest stuff is made in other countries. Have to wonder what happens when the world runs out of cheaper countries to outsource to.
  - plmu 5y ago
    I can only assume that, just like "made in germany" in the 19th century, after a while the "made in china" will transform from a sign of inferior, into a sign of superior quality. I think we're already seeing that. Also, the increased assertiveness also led to military agression (2 world wars). China seems to be copying that too, alas.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Likely, "made in Japan" had the same journey (also I'll always remember that scene in Back to the Future).
cycomanic 5y ago

bullen 5y ago

"Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire." Compared to: "First Congress implemented the copyright provision of the US Constitution in 1790" Copyright abolished by 2070?

imtringued 5y ago

If it's really that simple then it would explain why North America was considered the land of the free. The farmers that lived there didn't have to bow down to existing land owners they owned their own land. In that sense Germans didn't have to bow down to existing intellectual property owners.

bserge 5y ago
They do now heh

zeristor 5y ago

I have wondered that with so much knowledge freely available on the web, via YouTube, and via sci-hub too should we expect to a large increase in new ideas and quickening of pace of the world? Some knowledge could be quite esoteric, and whilst books would help, experience, exposure, and mentoring onemight might expect to be more important. Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant, more of an issue if you have a huge amount of information available. Perhaps the key thing would be works like the academic review papers that survery an area of knowledge and look to integrate it together.

beckman466 5y ago
> Also I would have thought one would have to have a lot of experience to discern what is right, wrong, or not relevant, more of an issue if you have a huge amount of information available. Agreed, have you heard of a new open acces project by the scientist Alex Freeman, called Octopus? I'm super excited about it: "The overall idea behind the new platform, which I called Octopus, is to break the standard unit of publication up into eight smaller stages or pieces. These include formulated scientific problems, hypotheses, methods and protocols, data, analysis, interpretation, and real-world applications. The eighth piece is reviews where people share their comments about the other stages, but it's also treated as a publication itself because it is a constructive piece of collaboration. Researchers will be able to revisit their publications to acknowledge others' comments or suggestions and even include some of the useful reviewers as authors, with the old version remaining available so that readers can track the evolution of ideas. The formulated scientific problem automatically becomes the beginning of a chain, and all the other pieces are vertically linked upward. If you have a great hypothesis, you can publish that and link it straight up to the problem that it is trying to address. And if you've collected some small amount of data, you can publish that, linking it directly up to the protocol that you followed. It will also be possible to create horizontal links between publications; maybe somebody has come up with an amazing algorithm whilst studying starling flocking behavior and somebody else working on oil pipelines has decided to use it. Octopus will thus allow researchers to publish in much smaller author groups, and that can make the system much more accountable and meritocratic. If, say, you're an applied statistician, at the moment you're very rarely a first author on anything. But with Octopus, statisticians can do analyses of anybody else's data and get credit for it as the author of that publication. Octopus will also be made language-agnostic through automatic translation to lower language barriers and broaden access." https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vision-scientific-publishing https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-vis...

kleiba 5y ago

Copyright is a mechanism that directly serves only a few, where - in its absence - a lot more people could benefit. There are, of course, valid justifications for the existence of copyright. Like so often in politics, the difficult question is how to balance interests - and (like so often in politics), it's debatable whether the status quo has achieved at least something near a fair balance.

dude4you 5y ago

More about the progressive thinking if Frederick the great. Afaik the fist steam engine in mainland Europe was deployed in Prussia.

JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
> mainland Europe First time I here that phrase! A testament to the rise of China? The proper term is continental Europe. Digging a bit further, Wikipedia's[0] article is titled "Continental Europe", but says "mainland" is also used. Time to speculate: for the British speaking English, the "main" land are the British Isles, so they prefer the term "continental". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe
- dude4you 5y ago
  while I am not a native speaker, I am a us citizen and it is a term that would be used by an uneducated American. but continental is indeed better.

gego 5y ago

...only years late but better late than never... there is a lot of research, eh by Giesecke or Eisenstein, that is decades old.. the question has already been answered multiple times... and has been ignored as often... yes! The weak copyright protections especially in contrast to GB, where there were strict and centralized rules in early modern Europe is a first indicator, this only intensified in the later centuries leading to piracy making information affordable - thus preparing a whole population for industrial production...

mlinksva 5y ago

Love seeing discussions of Eckhard Höffner's comparative work on English and German copyright history. This Spiegel article has probably given it the most visibility. Höffner has written extensively on the history of books and copyright, all in German (which I do not read). https://www.fatto.de/wiki/ https://www.fatto.de/wiki/ and https://twitter.com/EckhardHoeffner https://twitter.com/EckhardHoeffner are their site and twitter. I think https://archive.org/details/102026Band2 https://archive.org/details/102026Band2 is the relevant book. For how copyright restricts learning in other parts of the world now, I like https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol92/iss1/7/ https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol92/iss1/7...

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

Of course! See [©] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History :-)