Well, this all has gone in a very different direction than I expect when I posted the link. Interesting to be sure, but different.
One thing that I would point out is that different countries have very different traditions when it comes to copyright. The US tradition is very, very different than the English or European model which is different than other parts of the world, much of which has little tradition with regards to the idea of copyright, one of the reasons that what the West views as piracy is rampant in Asia and Africa.
The US did not implement the Berne Convention (sometimes known as the Victor Hugo Convention since he and his desire to prevent others from copying his works was the driving force behind it) until 1989. Pretty much the biggest reason that the US signed it was to protect the movie and music (remember the Sonny Bono Act?) industry. Prior to 1976, when it was greatly expanded, US copyright law was fairly static. Initially, it was 14 years, plus 14 year if the author was still alive and request the extension. In addition, copyright only applied to books that were formally registered and the vast majority of books from the time period were never registered. The requirement for registration was removed in 1831 and that was the last major change to copyright prior to 1976. So for most of US history, copyright was very much a limited concept that was balanced with the public good. When I was in college, teachers still had the right to make copies of articles for class use under the fair use doctrine.
The US view of copyright was heavily influenced by Ben Franklin and the various other founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson who were prolific writers and inventors. It should also be noted that Ben Franklin was the driving force behind the first public libraries in the US as well as a well known writer and publisher, so he was very much aware of the competing interests with regards to authors making money and making books widely available to the public. One can get an idea of how copyright and patents were viewed when the Constitution was written by reading Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to Isaac McPherson giving his views on what we now call intellectual property.
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/found...a1_8_8s12.html
This has greatly influenced the legal views of copyright in the US, even today. There is a tremendous pressure to move to a more European model since many business models are now built on the concept of intellectual property, which is why current copyright and patent law in the US is a bit of a mess and somewhat contradictory at times.
The European view of copyright started out more as a combination of Royal grants of privilege as well as attempt to control the flow of ideas than it did with the idea of a work being the property of it's author. As such, it doesn't really have the same tradition of balancing privilege with responsibility. Europe doesn't really have the concept of fair use like the US does.