Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I think the original laws about copyright (again, going back to the Statute of Anne) were designed to protect authors, inventors, etc., but didn't necessarily draw the analogy to "intellectual property." I believe that's a more modern construct, and a problematic one.
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Actually, they weren't. The statute was instated to take away the king's right to arbitrarily sell monopolies to the highest bidder. Before, random people/corps could buy monopolies on creating/selling different items, most specifically books, but different things as well, and the king used this right to find money for himself. The "moral rights of the author" are a later, mostly French/Hegelian invention, encoded in the Berne convention.