[NoMoreNicksLeft]

No, that isn't what led to the creation of copyright in the first place. The concept predates Gutenberg's printing press.

Copyright in the United States was drafted into the Constitution as a way of rewarding creators so they could create more.

They're already being rewarded, perhaps too handsomely, there is no need to extend it further. If they persist in trying to take more than they're given, then the public will just need to revoke the privilege. It's not a human right.

[ceejayoz]

The concept only barely predates the press, with the first actual copyright laws being in the 1700s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Proto-copyright goes back centuries before that. I think around 600AD, King Dermott said "to every cow its calf, and to every book its copy". Then it really picks up in the Middle Ages.

It's in your own fucking link for godsakes.

[ceejayoz]

As I said, barely.

Also in my "own fucking link":

> Prior to the invention of movable type in the West in the mid-15th century, texts were copied by hand and the small number of texts generated few occasions for these rights to be tested. During the Roman Empire, a period of prosperous book trade, no copyright or similar regulations existed, copying by those other than professional booksellers was rare. This is because books were, typically, copied by literate slaves, who were expensive to buy and maintain. Thus, any copier would have had to pay much the same expense as a professional publisher. Roman book sellers would sometimes pay a well-regarded author for first access to a text for copying, but they had no exclusive rights to a work and authors were not normally paid anything for their work. Martial, in his Epigrams, complains about receiving no profit despite the popularity of his poetry throughout the Roman Empire.

> The printing press came into use in Europe in the 1400s and 1500s, and made it much cheaper to produce books. As there was initially no copyright law, anyone could buy or rent a press and print any text. Popular new works were immediately re-set and re-published by competitors, so printers needed a constant stream of new material. Fees paid to authors for new works were high, and significantly supplemented the incomes of many academics.

Incidentally, if you click the link about King Dermott and get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_C%C3%BAl_Dreimhne, it says that's "an account that first appears... nearly a thousand years after the alleged events supposedly took place, and therefore a highly unreliable source".