The Case for Copyright Reform by Christian Engström, Rick Falkvinge Read Free Book Online Page A

property, but the copyright monopoly is a severe limitation on my
property rights for items I have legitimately bought.
     
    It is not possible to say that I own the the DVD when viewed in one way
but not when viewed in another. There is a clear definition of property, and
the receipt says I own the DVD in all its interpretations and aspects. Every
part of the shape making up the DVD is mine. The copyright monopoly, however,
limits how I can use my own property.
     
    This doesn’t inherently mean that the copyright monopoly is bad. It
does, however, mean that the monopoly cannot be defended from the standpoint
that property rights are good. If you take your stand from there, you will come
to the conclusion that the copyright monopoly is bad as it is a limitation of
property rights.
     
    Defending the copyright monopoly with the justification that property
rights are sacred is quite like defending the death penalty for murder with the
justification that life is sacred. There may be other, valid, justifications
for defending the copyright monopoly and these limitations of property rights
— but that particular chain of logic just doesn’t hold.
     
    But if copyright isn’t a property right, what is it and where does it
come from, and how did it become such a big thing in today’s society? To answer
these questions, we shall have a look at the history of copyright. It turns out
that it differs quite strongly from what you usually hear from the copyright
industry.
     
    1400s: The Printing Press Threatens To
Disrupt Power
    We’re starting with the advent of the Black Death in Western Europe in
the 1350s. Like all other places, Europe was hit hard: people fled westward
from the Byzantine Empire and brought with them both the plague and scientific
writings. It would take Europe 150 years to recover politically, economically
and socially.
     
    The religious institutions were the ones to recover the slowest. Not only
were they hit hard because of the dense congregation of monks and nuns, but
they were also the last to be repopulated, as parents needed every available
child in the family’s economy, agriculture, etc, in the decades following the
plague.
     
    This is relevant because monks were the ones making books in this time.
When you wanted a book copied, you would go to a scribe at a monastery, and
they would copy it for you. By hand. No copy would be perfect; every scribe
would fix spelling and grammatical errors while making the copy, as well as
introduce some new ones.
     
    Also, since all scribes were employed (read controlled) by the Catholic
Church, there was quite some limitation to what books would be produced. Not
only was the monetary cost of a single book astronomical — one copy of
The Bible required 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins (!!) — but there was
also a limit to what teachings would be reproduced by a person of the clergy.
Nothing contradicting the Vatican was even remotely conceivable.
     
    By 1450, the monasteries were still not repopulated, and the major cost
of having a book copied was the services of the scribe, an undersupplied craft
still in high demand. This puts things in proportion, given the astronomical
cost of the raw materials and that they were a minor cost in ordering a book.
In 1451, Gutenberg perfected the combination of the squeeze press, metal
movable type, oil based print inks and block printing. At the same time, a new
type of paper had been copied from the Chinese, a paper which was cheap to make
and plentiful. This made scribecraft obsolete more or less overnight.
     
    The printing press revolutionized society by
creating the ability to spread information cheaply, quickly and accurately.
     
    The Catholic Church, which had previously controlled all information
(and particularly held a cornered market on the scarcity of information), went
on a rampage. They could no longer control what information would be
reproduced, could no longer control what people knew, and lobbied kings