Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
It seems that the policy behind the Copyright Clause in the US Constitution, at least so far as books are concerned, is to create a large, rich and diverse range of books available to the public, consisting of books still subject to copyright and books in the public domain. It envisages that the former will of course be more expensive, but that all works will ultimately join the public domain.
Having books in either category not available to the Public is in my view completely foreign to the very purpose of copyright laws. It is my view that once a book has participated in the Copyright system, usually by being published, it should always be available for purchase by members of the Public. Full stop.
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It is useful to know the history of the times to understand the intent of the Copyright Clause.
Ben Franklin started the first lending library in 1731, in Philadelphia.
At the time, books were extremely expensive and most people had maybe a couple of books - the Bible, a primer and perhaps a couple of the old classics if you were particularly well read. Only the very wealthy such as Jefferson had large libraries. The majority of reading material for most was a combination of pamphlets and newspapers. It was common for newspapers to print a wide array of information, not just the news.
Copyright as such did not exist in the US. There was the copyright act of 1710, aka The Statute of Anne, which shifted the copyright from the monopolistic Stationer's Company (basically the printer's guild which was granted exclusive right to copy all works in 1662) to the authors. In order to be copyrighted, the author had to register the book with the Stationer's company and then provide copies of the work to a number of institutions (Stationer's company, the royal library and various universities). If one considers that a big print run would be perhaps 250 copies, that was somewhat of an expensive burden. The copyright term was 14 years, plus a renewal of 14 years. There were restrictions on how much one could charge for a book and foreign books were banned, except for the various Latin and Greek classics.
One sees the echo's of this law in the US Constitution and the initial copyright act in the US. The idea that one would use copyright to withhold literary works from the public was quite foreign.
The Library of Congress was burned out during the war of 1812 and the the burning of Washington, DC. Jefferson offered his personal library to help jump start replacing it. Jefferson's library was most likely one of the largest and most diversion in the US at the time. He had some 6,487 books. That gives an idea of how rare books were.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, at one time, the US copyright laws required anyone who wanted to copyright a literary work, to provide two copies to the Library of Congress.