Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business.
This is very different from the digital age.
It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original!
I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.)
Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.
I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
Why write (compose) new stuff if money is flowing in because of old stuff.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused.
I'd agree—and I'm not contradicting my earlier comment by saying that. It's that what passes as breach of copyright and patent law is so finely ground that neither corporate or national interests are properly served.
So much time is wasted on protecting stuff that either isn't really a breach (so close to prior art) or on developments that are so trivial that they effectively amount to very little, that is the overall net result/outcomre is negative (even the winners only achieve a Pyrrhic victory).
The only people who truly benefit from this over-grinding of the law are those in countries whose laws allow more flexibility. The over-fine grinding of law also acts as a disincentive as it's intimidatory, people aren't going to invest in developing products if they have to spend most of the profits from them on litigation brought on by competitors whose principal aim is to just thwart competition.
It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Ope...>
Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchr...> <https://archive.ph/B88pV>
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
<https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-ag...>
That's literally a chilling effect on new authorship.
There's also the fact that there is now a "copyright hole" of extant published works still under copyright which are simply not available, see:
<https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/>
I strongly recommend Nina Paley's "Copyright is Brain Damage" TEDxMaastrict talk:
Copyright has nothing to do with it. Printing press did that.