Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
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.
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Actually the first public libraries were opened in the early C17th. Bristol had one, and Manchester claims (falsely, probably) to have had the first in the 1650s. What you're referring to is the Public Libraries Act of the 1850s, but there were over 200 subscription libraries (some of which were widely accessed by the working man, and were intended for that purpose) in England, and about the same in Scotland. The Public libraries act made membership free, but that's more a matter of public funding, than anything to do with fundamental lending/borrowing rights. Many of the earlier libraries were owned and run by towns, even if membership was not free.
A similar thing happened in the US, which had much looser IP rights.
Incidentally, I think the money on lending books applies only to municipal libraries. If you borrow a book from a private library (which includes university ones), the author gets nothing.