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Originally Posted by mr ploppy
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There are some interesting facts, but taken together the article is incoherent.
It is true, for example, that kings and the church (and after the reformation, churches) feared that the printing press could be used to spread seditious or heretical material, respectively. And it's also true that printers were required to be licensed so that the king could have control over what they published.
But there's really no connection between these practices and copyright law, which came hundreds of years later and did none of those things. From the beginning, copyright has been about protecting the author from unauthorized printings. You can disagree that this is a good idea, of course...but it's purpose is to cause *more* books to be published, not fewer. It's not *at all* about the King suppressing seditious works.
Nor are people who download the latest Black-Eyed Peas or Avatar or Nora Roberts because they don't want to pay for them revolutionaries in the mold of Thomas Paine.