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Originally Posted by Giggleton
Yes it was harder to make copies in the 19th century, but the first copyright laws were brought about precisely because people were making copies of books and then undercutting the original producers of the work. You can't compete with free, as it were.
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That's not quite how I read Wikipedia's description of the
Statute of Anne:
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
The Statute replaced the monopoly enjoyed by the Stationer's Company granted in 1557 during the reign of Mary I which, after several renewals, expired in 1695. Under this regime, company members would buy manuscripts from authors but once purchased, would have a perpetual monopoly on the printing of the work. Authors themselves were excluded from membership in the company and could not therefore legally self-publish, nor were they given royalties for books that sold well.
The statute of 1709 vested authors rather than printers with the monopoly on the reproduction of their works.
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To me, that looks more like the point was to take the monopoly away from the publishers and gave it to the authors instead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
I was thinking about comparing uploads between a Creative Commons type site and a site like Amazon, If you know of any data like that please link.
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Unfortunately not. I'd really like to see some good, reliable data about some of these issues. I suspect the people who have such data prefer to simply release their conclusions based on the data rather than the actual data.