>Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it.
Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business.
This is very different from the digital age.
It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original!
I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.)
Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.
It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused.
I'd agree—and I'm not contradicting my earlier comment by saying that. It's that what passes as breach of copyright and patent law is so finely ground that neither corporate or national interests are properly served.
So much time is wasted on protecting stuff that either isn't really a breach (so close to prior art) or on developments that are so trivial that they effectively amount to very little, that is the overall net result/outcomre is negative (even the winners only achieve a Pyrrhic victory).
The only people who truly benefit from this over-grinding of the law are those in countries whose laws allow more flexibility. The over-fine grinding of law also acts as a disincentive as it's intimidatory, people aren't going to invest in developing products if they have to spend most of the profits from them on litigation brought on by competitors whose principal aim is to just thwart competition.
I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
Why write (compose) new stuff if money is flowing in because of old stuff.
Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
Copyright has nothing to do with it. Printing press did that.
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Ope...>
Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchr...> <https://archive.ph/B88pV>
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
<https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-ag...>
That's literally a chilling effect on new authorship.
There's also the fact that there is now a "copyright hole" of extant published works still under copyright which are simply not available, see:
<https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/>
I strongly recommend Nina Paley's "Copyright is Brain Damage" TEDxMaastrict talk:
The truth is probably the opposite of what you are claiming.
Increased literacy resulted in incentives to create copyright legislation.
Yes, back in the ages when you needed a scribe or a huge printing press. It's not like knowledge and books were magically free.
Now in the digital age we can create as many copies, without consuming physical material, as we want and distribute it globally.
The realities are extremely different. Perhaps copyright could be amended, but I can't envision its complete removal being net beneficial.
Don't have a citation off the top of my head though.
I think there's a somewhat irrational fear from publishers that anyone with a personal computer can create 1 million copies of a book almost instantly (ok, maybe a few hours, depending on disk speed), and distribute them almost as quickly.
I imagine there were similar fears of the printing press from book scribes back in the 16th century.
The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
One copy in memory can serve millions on your website.
My mind was dead-set on the printing press analogy for some reason.
But they have to download it, and you might not have the bandwidth to service millions of downloads in less than a few hours ….
Yes, just so. The parent seemed to be arguing that it was too much to claim that it would take a few hours. I'd definitely call 22 hours at least a few!
It's not. They want you to pay them for the book instead of just getting it for free.
Luckily, for now, piracy doesn't seem to be making that huge a dent in author income as far as I know. Many people find it easier to buy their book with one click on Amazon or one of the other storefronts, or read through a bunch of books with a single Kindle Unlimited subscription.
I'm not sure how long that will last. Some authors are updating their business model to include subscription services like Patreon, where they sell more direct interaction, character naming rights, early access, and additionally gated materials to dedicated readers. This is probably good to secure their income stream in the long term.
There was even a period (ancient greece to middle-ages) where the very notion of "author" did not make much sense as books would get copied and augmented many times over by new copyists/contributors.
Kind of a sad that we lost this practice along the way, where a book was a living, evolving thing.
A chief difference is that with a wiki there's a canonical current version which everyone is working from. With written manuscripts there's ... just a bunch of different (usually handwritten) variations and modifications of a manuscript.
(Modifications wouldn't have been made to a single print copy, usually, though there are such practices as marginalia.)
What you'd see especially are commentaries on works. E.g., Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle, or the many commentaries which accompany Sun Tzu's text (itself likely a compilation) in Art of War.
That said, good observation. I've been suggesting for some years that the wiki is itself a distinct form of literature, though itself with some precursors, such as loose-leaf bindings which enabled the notion of a loose-leaf service in which a book could be continuously updated over time, dating to the late 19th century:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_leaf>
See for example Nelson's Encyclopedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson%27s_Encyclopaedia>
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Homiletic_Review/YN...>
These were advertised (and I'm pretty certain patented) in the late 19th / early 20th centuries.
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Magazine_of_Busines...>
But as an evolution of recordkeeping forms: clay/stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, codices, moveable type (15th c), card catalogues (18th/19th c), punch cards (19th c), loose leaf (19th/20th c), databases (1950s), revision control (1970s) (Wiki entry: <https://expertiza.csc.ncsu.edu/index.php/History_of_version-...>), online books (Project Gutenberg), hypertext, and wikis, might be one phylogeny.