> What I wonder is why did we end up with the copyright model in the first place? See Karl Fogel's excellent essay "The Surprising History of Copyright and The

> What I wonder is why did we end up with the copyright model in the first place? See Karl Fogel's excellent essay "The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World" for a good overview of how copyright laws came about back in the day: http://questioncopyright.org/promise http://questioncopyright.org/promise TLDR: copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. Copyright was designed by and for distributors. The modern romantic notion of copyright existing to protect authors is, at best, a post-hoc rationalization.