Re: Napster destroys Western Civilization

On Tue, May 09, 2000, John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 08 May 2000, Pete Lukacs <p.z.lukacs[_at_]city.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 06 May 2000, John Lederer <johnl[_at_]ibm.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > (1) Technological change. The core premise of copyright is that
> > > dissemination of content costs a lot of money. It doesn't anymore.
> >
> > I disagree, the premise of copyright is that creation of works costs
> > a lot of money and distribution doesn't.
>
> My history is dimly remembered, but wasn't the primary reasoning of
> the original copyright statute (Statute of Anne?) based on the
> considerable capital expense of setting print?

This is partially correct. The considerable capital expense of setting print (and the financial risk it represented with a new book) is why the Statute of Anne granted the copyright to the printer rather than author. Parliament assumed the author would write anyway; it was the printer who faced opportunity costs by forgoing publishing an established classic in favor of a new untried work.

Of course, it is anachronistic to use economic terms of art developed hundreds of years later to describe the reasoning of the time, but I think this was what was going on in an intuitive way.

-David

David Hale
<dhale[_at_]aggt.com> Received on Thu May 11 2000 - 13:34:07 GMT