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Old 04-03-2012, 10:57 AM   #103
HansTWN
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer View Post
Unfortunately, the "what's mine is mine" isn't actually the law as it applies to copyright, no matter how much some think it should be. It was in fact the law that created copyright for the purpose of encouraging the creation of more creative works for, you guessed it, the benefit of society. The Copyright Act of 1790 in the U.S. granted creators a limited monopoly on their creative expressions of 14 years (renewable once if the creator was alive I think).

Given the long history of copyright law, it's a little silly to suddenly ignore all of that and say that copyright is only for the benefit of creators and ignore the rest of society even though copyright was/is meant to benefit society.
We discussed this previously in other threads, the first Western example of copyright I know of was granted by the king of Spain to Antonio Pigafetta in 1523 (Pigafetta was the chronicler for Magellan's expedition and the king did not want to pay him, so he gave Pigafetta 20 years copyright on the published expedition record. This agreement even stipulated large fines for any offending printers). There were earlier cases, but I don't remember the details. Chinese copyright (they had printing presses much earlier than Gutenberg) dates back to 1068. The earlier Western cases were all expressly to protect the rights of the authors and their publishers. Before printing presses copyright was pretty much useless, you had to thank the heavens if someone took the time to copy your book by hand.

The act in 1790 you mentioned was the first general copyright act. As you can imagine they didn't sit down and decided out of the blue "now we will introduce" copyright. At that time they already had 100s of years of experience to look back onto and just went from case by case to general copyright. But the 1790 was the first to mention anything about "the public". The origins of copyright were not concerned with the public good. And lest we forget who "the public" in 1790 really stood for. White, male property owners.

Last edited by HansTWN; 04-03-2012 at 11:02 AM.
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