[digi_owl]

As best i can tell (not a copyright scholar) that is a generalized version of the French "rights of the author".

While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed.

This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar).

The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw).

The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...

[angersock]

It's a cute and anachronistic practice. Unfortunately, it seems to have in mind some ministrel or author scraping-by in poverty instead of the more likely modern publishing/licensing corporation.

[digi_owl]

And that was the case when it was put in place.

When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits.

Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds.

Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...

[Vespasian]

Quite some civil law countries in europe have this system. For example "droit d'auteur" in france, "derechos de autor" in spain and "Urheberrecht" in germany both named not after the work or the act (to copy it) but after the author.

[digi_owl]

I think most of them got the idea from France.

As best i recall, Germany was a latecomer to the whole copyright thing. As such, they had wide and cheap access to all kinds of texts. Both informative and entertaining.

This in turn supposedly helped them bootstrap their industrial base.