10 ms·

Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright. I’ll take today’s world any day.

derefr 4y ago
There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.) Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
- georgyo 4y ago
  A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press. And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business. This is very different from the digital age.
  - thatcat 4y ago
    You mean bc they were just printing the bible over and over?
  - derefr 4y ago
    You’re thinking about books, but the content that everyone was trying to claim copyright over at the time was news, in newspapers (broadsheets.) It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original! I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.) Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.
btdmaster 4y ago
The introduction of copyright by the royal censor had measurable negative effects on literacy in England[0]. [0] https://archive.ph/ybifz https://archive.ph/ybifz
- cfn 4y ago
  This is a very interesting take on the history of copyright I had not come across before. It is interesting because the historic facts don't match the pro-copyright narrative. It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
  - IX-103 4y ago
    And also echoes what happened in the early US (which didn't recognize foreign patents or copyrights).
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      And what happened in Germany (which didn't recognize patents) compared to the UK. Germany had a similar boom in technology.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  Yes, I'd agreed with that. The present day example is China which has only paid lip service to international copyright law and patents but which in practice has essentially ignored them. No other country is booming ahead like it is - it proves your point. We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated. I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few. When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
whatshisface 4y ago
Of course. The Gutenberg Copyright. :-)
faeriechangling 4y ago
Copyright wasn't the cause of the dropping price of books, copyright was a RESPONSE to the dropping price of books. I don't buy the causality you're drawing here at all. I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
- Eliezer 4y ago
  Assuming it worked as intended, you would not expect copyright to decrease the price of books, but to increase their number and quality.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I'd expect it to decrease the number and quality of books since it limits the number of things authors can write about and people can't write improved versions of other's people's books either. Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      Also, as coroborated by Verdi, creative output is negatively impacted by copyright. Why write (compose) new stuff if money is flowing in because of old stuff.
pessimizer 4y ago
The way that monopolies make everything cheaper.
xani_ 4y ago
Sure but I think we went too far. Current copyright protections are aimed squarely at keeping corporate profits, with insanely long protection periods that in most cases end up profiting the company insanely more than the author. Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
unity1001 4y ago
> Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright Copyright has nothing to do with it. Printing press did that.
ekianjo 4y ago
You are comparing two different periods with completely different environments. You would take todays world any day for virtually anything of the human condition nowadays, thats not an argument to justify copyright at all.
smegger001 4y ago
that was resources/materials problem not content problem. To make a book back then involved paying a scribe to handwrite on a parchment which is made of sheeps skins. it usually took about 425 sheep skin to make one bible for example. Yet libraries still existed. Copyright by contrast has never been about incentivizing literary creation but the opposite. It was in fact was put in effect as a censorship mechanism where the printers where given exclusive right to copy a written works in exchange for not printing book that parliament objected to. Under the Statute of Ann, the first copyright law, an author did not have right to his work the printer did.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley SIMS, EFF): "copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge". <https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-access-to-knowledge-4224697.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Ope...> Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-access-to-knowledge-4224697.php https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchr...> <https://archive.ph/B88pV https://archive.ph/B88pV>
- 7e 4y ago
  Access, maybe. But it contributes to knowledge creation and distillation. That’s more important.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Knowledge (and art) creation itself requires access. Which was what Aaron Swartz was hoping to achieve in compiling JSTOR's archive. He was effectively politically assassinated for this. Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper: Note that the copyright angle here is that: [T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible. That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes: [S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way. <https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-agree https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-ag...> That's literally a chilling effect on new authorship. There's also the fact that there is now a "copyright hole" of extant published works still under copyright which are simply not available, see: <https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/ https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/> I strongly recommend Nina Paley's "Copyright is Brain Damage" TEDxMaastrict talk: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc>
alexvoda 4y ago
Correlation is not causation. The truth is probably the opposite of what you are claiming. Increased literacy resulted in incentives to create copyright legislation.

There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.) Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.

georgyo 4y ago
A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press. And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business. This is very different from the digital age.
- thatcat 4y ago
  You mean bc they were just printing the bible over and over?
- derefr 4y ago
  You’re thinking about books, but the content that everyone was trying to claim copyright over at the time was news, in newspapers (broadsheets.) It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original! I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.) Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.

btdmaster 4y ago

The introduction of copyright by the royal censor had measurable negative effects on literacy in England[0]. [0] https://archive.ph/ybifz https://archive.ph/ybifz

cfn 4y ago
This is a very interesting take on the history of copyright I had not come across before. It is interesting because the historic facts don't match the pro-copyright narrative. It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
- IX-103 4y ago
  And also echoes what happened in the early US (which didn't recognize foreign patents or copyrights).
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    And what happened in Germany (which didn't recognize patents) compared to the UK. Germany had a similar boom in technology.
hilbert42 4y ago
Yes, I'd agreed with that. The present day example is China which has only paid lip service to international copyright law and patents but which in practice has essentially ignored them. No other country is booming ahead like it is - it proves your point. We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated. I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few. When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).

whatshisface 4y ago

Of course. The Gutenberg Copyright. :-)

faeriechangling 4y ago

Copyright wasn't the cause of the dropping price of books, copyright was a RESPONSE to the dropping price of books. I don't buy the causality you're drawing here at all. I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.

Eliezer 4y ago
Assuming it worked as intended, you would not expect copyright to decrease the price of books, but to increase their number and quality.
- autoexec 4y ago
  I'd expect it to decrease the number and quality of books since it limits the number of things authors can write about and people can't write improved versions of other's people's books either. Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    Also, as coroborated by Verdi, creative output is negatively impacted by copyright. Why write (compose) new stuff if money is flowing in because of old stuff.

pessimizer 4y ago

The way that monopolies make everything cheaper.

xani_ 4y ago

Sure but I think we went too far. Current copyright protections are aimed squarely at keeping corporate profits, with insanely long protection periods that in most cases end up profiting the company insanely more than the author. Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).

unity1001 4y ago

> Look at what books and literacy cost before copyright Copyright has nothing to do with it. Printing press did that.

ekianjo 4y ago

You are comparing two different periods with completely different environments. You would take todays world any day for virtually anything of the human condition nowadays, thats not an argument to justify copyright at all.

smegger001 4y ago

that was resources/materials problem not content problem. To make a book back then involved paying a scribe to handwrite on a parchment which is made of sheeps skins. it usually took about 425 sheep skin to make one bible for example. Yet libraries still existed. Copyright by contrast has never been about incentivizing literary creation but the opposite. It was in fact was put in effect as a censorship mechanism where the printers where given exclusive right to copy a written works in exchange for not printing book that parliament objected to. Under the Statute of Ann, the first copyright law, an author did not have right to his work the printer did.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley SIMS, EFF): "copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge". <https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-access-to-knowledge-4224697.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Ope...> Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-access-to-knowledge-4224697.php https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchr...> <https://archive.ph/B88pV https://archive.ph/B88pV>

7e 4y ago
Access, maybe. But it contributes to knowledge creation and distillation. That’s more important.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Knowledge (and art) creation itself requires access. Which was what Aaron Swartz was hoping to achieve in compiling JSTOR's archive. He was effectively politically assassinated for this. Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper: Note that the copyright angle here is that: [T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible. That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes: [S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way. <https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-agree https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-ag...> That's literally a chilling effect on new authorship. There's also the fact that there is now a "copyright hole" of extant published works still under copyright which are simply not available, see: <https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/ https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/> I strongly recommend Nina Paley's "Copyright is Brain Damage" TEDxMaastrict talk: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc>

alexvoda 4y ago

Correlation is not causation. The truth is probably the opposite of what you are claiming. Increased literacy resulted in incentives to create copyright legislation.