Quote:
Originally Posted by Iphinome
We're missing something from history but if people had been unable to copy it at will we'd still have it because um....
You lost me.
How would reducing the number of copies that could be made and the ability of people to freely preform over the years have increased the amount of work that has lasted to this day? Is there some magical conservation of bard-fu? One copy is has 1000 years of power but 1000 copies only last for a year each?
I don't normally use drugs but I'd very much like to try whatever it is you're on.
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The only drug you need is copyright itself.
Per Dr. Debora B. Schwartz (English Department, California Polytechnic State University):
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/problems.html
Quote:
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Plays were sold by the playwright to the company (i.e., by Shakespeare to the Chamberlain's Men, later called the King's Men), but printed versions became the property of the printers (who bought the manuscript from the theater troupe, the playwright, or an individual who had obtained or reproduced a copy of the text, with or without the authorization of the playwright). Because there was no such thing as copyright in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, playwrights and theatrical troupes tried to keep their plays out of print. Without copyright protection, there was no compensation to a troupe and/or playwright if a rival troupe obtained a copy of and produced a play, thereby cutting into the original troupe's audience (and profits). For this reason (and because copying handwritten scripts was a long and tedious task), individual actors generally received only a copy of their individual lines and cues. Some of the quarto versions of Shakespeare's plays seem to have been pirated from a single actor's partial script, with other passages reconstructed from memory or invented. A theater troupe would retain one or more copies of the full text to use as a prompt book; this master copy would be presumably be identical to or close to the "foul papers," Shakespeare's working manuscript of the full play.
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(emphasis added)
If your plays are protected by copyright, you get royalties for performances by other companies. Performances of what? Of scripts you sell them. So you are much more likely to prepare a formal script to actually sell. The number of copies is not
reduced - it is
increased. Further, since your work is protected by law, you aren't as concerned about other companies stealing it if you allow copies of the script to circulate.
It's
lack of copyright that reduces copies of scripts, because unprotected scripts are subject to pirating. So much of the play is kept in your head, or that of the actors. Probably, the only reason we have many of his scripts at all is that they had to be written down & presented to the censor before they could be performed.