Quote:
Originally Posted by cian
Libraries happened long before modern ideas about intellectual property really existed,
|
Not really. Public libraries were introduced in the UK during the 1850s, and copyright law at that time was pretty similar to what it is today; the copyright terms were shorter, but the fundamental concepts were the same. Britain was the world's leading industrial nation at the time, and it was the middle of the industrial revolution, so IP law, especially when it came to things like patents - was highly developed and extremely important. Read Dickens' "Little Dorrit" (published between 1855 and 1857) for a very amusing description of the complexity of English IP law at that time.