New copyright laws. Who will they help.

Setting the historical record straight: copyright was designed by distributors, to subsidize distributors not creators.

Michel Bauwens  10th June 2011

A necessary reminder of the history of copyright as a tool for distributors, not authors and creatives, by Karl Fogel:

“The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors’ rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world’s first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads.

The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return for keeping a strict eye on what was printed. Their charter gave them not only exclusive right to print, but also the right to search out and confiscate unauthorized presses and books, and even to burn illegally printed books. No book could be printed until it was entered in the company’s Register, and no work could be added to the Register until it had passed the crown’s censor, or had been self-censored by the Stationers. The Company of Stationers became, in effect, the government’s private, for-profit information police force....

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/setting-the-historical-record-straight-copyright-was-designed-by-distributors-to-subsidize-distributors-not-creators/2011/06/10