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Originally Posted by j.p.s
Your statement implies Roman law had nothing to do with government.
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The Romans didn't have copyright. In the West, the concept of copyright didn't come about until the printing press. Originally copyright was exactly what it said, a government granted monopoly on the printing of a given work. At first, it had nothing at all to do with the author.
Before the printing press, all books were hand copied by scribes. Copying books is what many monasteries did. The famous library of Alexandria was built by requiring anyone who entered Egypt with a "book" (technically they didn't have books as we think of them) to allow the library to make a copy of the work. Frequently, the library kept the original and give the owner the copy.
The original copyrights was simply a Royal decree, like most monopolies of the time. A printer might have the sole right to print the Bible. Another printer might have the sole right to print a different book. Like most government granted monopolies, there was no property in any sense of the word. It was simply a royal edict that could be given and removed at whim.
If you want to put copyright in perspective, it helps to look at how things worked at the time of the Constitution. Franklin initially made his fame as a newspaper publisher and to help circulation, he would write various articles under an assortment of pseudonyms. Those articles became quite popular, so other publishers would copy the articles and print them in their papers. From a practical point of view, there was little that Franklin could do to stop it.
One of the great truths is that ideas are not property. They are not physical, but more to the point, for all practical purposes, there is no way an individual can keep others from copying a give work or idea. I can keep someone from taking my house or my car, and I can keep someone from taking a physical copy of a book, but once I sell the book, I no longer control it. Simply stating that it is property doesn't make it so, anymore that me saying that I've 6'5" makes me 6'5".