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I found it for you: It was Lord Camden speaking about Donaldson v. Beckett. The full case proceedings can be found at http://www.copyrighthistory.co.... Lord Camden's commentary is quite long, so I won't copy/paste it here, but you can find it on the linked page if you search for "Lord Camden spoke as follows"

Ok, now we're confusing "means" and "end". So, let's start with the US Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

The "end" of copyright is to "promote ... useful arts". The means for doing so is by giving "for limited Times" certain "exclusive Right[s]." It doesn't say "To give authors control over their works..." That's a hint that this isn't about control.

Looking at pretty much any modern copyright law, there are three very clear ways to spot that the laws aren't about control. Firstly, they're time-limited. If copyright was about giving creators control, it would either last indefinitely, or as long as the creator lived - so they could control their work. This is particularly obvious in the early copyright laws were the duration was anything from 14 years to 5. In fact, in the Constitution quoted above, there's that "limited time" part, highlighting this.

Secondly, copyright isn't absolute. While the early copyright acts (the British Copyright Act 1709, US Copyright Act 1790) didn't contain them, defences to copyright cropped up fairly quickly (with "fair abridgement", the precursor to "fair use" being created in 1740, in Gyles v Wilcox. These days they tend to be enshrined in legislation (fair use is in the 1976 US Copyright Act and the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has a whole host of "permitted acts"). Again, if copyright was about control, why would there be exceptions and defences? This takes away control from creators.

Thirdly (perhaps the weakest argument) copyright is transferable or revocable. It can be bought and sold like any other intangible property (at least, in some jurisdictions; some or all of it in others are bound to the creator); this gives creators control over their works by allowing them to give up control over it. That seems a rather odd way of doing so.

Of course, when I wrote that comment I didn't have the US Constitution in mind; I was thinking of the original Copyright Act 1709 (8 Anne c.21, often referred to as simply the Statute of Anne), or to give it its full title:

An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.

Again, this is about "encouraging learning", not about giving authors control. In fact, if you read the text (which I recommend, it's a good read; particularly comparing it with modern copyright laws) the purpose it gives (along with the above) is to prevent booksellers and publishers from printing works to the "very great Detriment" of authors and the "Ruin of them and their Families." In order to fix this, it gives authors (or those who would become known as copyright owners) the "sole Liberty of Printing and Reprinting" their books for 14 years (subject to some qualifications about price and registration). [If it helps, the 1790 Act was mostly copied (ah, the irony) from the 1709 Act.]

To me, this implies that copyright was originally about money, not control. It was a means to ensure that authors had the first chance at getting a reasonable financial return on their books, not a means to give them complete control over their works.

Anyway, I hope some of this will help convince you that copyright isn't entirely about control (or wasn't originally), but by giving copyright owners some limited control (as a means to an end), has led them to feel entitled to greater control. Perhaps that might encourage you to revise your opinion of my post...

Given that the Statute of Ann begins:

Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken
the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Print-ed, Reprinted, and Published Books,and other Writings, without the Con- sent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings

here

It does not sound like there was copyright before then.

There was a monopoly on printing, which arose out of government efforts to censor what was printed by restricting control of the printing presses. Sounds familiar.

Copyrights were originally an arrangement to promote public works by letting the creators have a monoply of copy rights on their works for a period of time (20 years originally) before the works become public domain.

Not sure where you're getting your information from, but the original copyright period was 14 years, not 20. And they only applied to books.

As an aside: copyright celebrates its 300th birthday in just under a year's time. What are we going to do to mark the occasion?

Art has always been funded through individuals or bodies with money (commissions or sponsoring), and still is: the professional art world is still largely based on commissions. However we are now facing a system where the crowd can sponsor or commission as in certain cases the 'art' itself can be reproduced without expense. This however goes hand in hand with rising quality standards.

I have however not seen the artists life become more lucrative or sustainable with the coming of intellectual property, except for maybe a handful of populair artists. The problem with any system based on artificial selection (by selective broadcasting and popularisation) will always result in a small body of popular artists and a very harsh 'underworld' for those who are not celebrated but might be invaluable.

invention of copyright in, what, the 18th century?

Statute of Anne (1710) was commissioned by the Stationers which were a state-run censorship body, had a monopoly on bookprinting. original text. Back then, no such things as royalties existed, only an initial fee.

Since the birth of bookprinting there had been censorship (the Stationers were legally empowered to seize "offending books" that violated the standards of content set by the Church and State) which eventually led to the primary version of copyright, (The Stationers' charter, establishing a monopoly on book production, ensured that once a member had asserted ownership of a text (or "copy") no other member would publish it. This is the origin of the term "copyright"). When censorship became less strict, the government abandoned the Stationers' monopoly on bookselling, in order to maintain it, they proposed the Statute of Anne.

The Statute of Anne however had only one purpose, to privatize rights for book printers; as the author was still bound to a printer before and after the statute. Now only a single printer had the rights to print the book (after buying them from the Author, who could only get his book printed by these printers anyway), thus still only popular books were paid large sums. One can for example read (in his confessions) that Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote his novellas to please the public interest (thus earn income), however his most important textes (social contract for example) were totally inprofitable, and these are what we remember Rousseau for.

Company of Stationers

I know tl;dr and lots of remixing.

Yes, but we won't all be in a position to mass produce, distribute and market the work in question, and to make a profit because people want the original work but will still purchase a specific article embodying a copy of the work in order to experience it.

Copyright is about securing a living for creative "folks", and thereby giving them an incentive to create. It's exactly what it was originally designed for - there was a view that many authors of great books had suffered material hardship because their dedication to writing had prevented them from making a living, and that they should be given some way to make a living so that writing books was less of a burden.

From the Statute of Anne:

Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other
Persons, have of late frequently taken
the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting,
and Publishing, or causing to be Print-
ed, Reprinted, and Published Books,
and other Writings, without the Con-
sent of the Authors or Proprietors of
such Books and Writings, to their
very great Detriment, and too often
to the Ruin of them and their Fami-
lies: For Preventing therefore such
Practices for the future, and for the
Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write use-
ful Books;

More or less. And it came with some consumer protections sorely lacking today. Note the part on excessive prices.

The problem with copyright right now is that the common modern conception is out of line with why it was created. It was created as a ploy to encourage writers to write books.

Actually, that's almost exactly the opposite of the truth. Copyright was originally a tool for censorship. Copyright in the USA originally had the intentions you describe, but copyright has been around a lot longer than the USA, it certainly isn't an American invention. The first "modern" copyright law is widely considered to be the Statute of Anne, which had the express purpose of the encouragement of learning.

The whole purpose of the copyright is to ensure progress, not individual riches.

With respect, I think you're confusing copyright with USA copyright, the latter of which was originally defined in the US constitution as being for the purpose of encouraging progress (in so many words). In other countries it's not so defined. eg. The Statute of Anne, which originally defined copyright in Great Britian, also referred to the "moral rights" of authors and their families, and could be extended to a meaning that authors should have exclusive rights over their creations forever.

That law has been there for almost 300 years.

I will first respond to your last statement and then address the rest of your post in its original order.

And, by the way, don't bother replying. I've expended all the time I can afford in this discussion.

You are a very interesting person. Like most people from North America, or perhaps the English speaking world, you consider it acceptable to repeatedly call someone's arguments "bullshit" and then claim you are finished with the argument and that the discussion is a waste of time. If it was a waste of time, why did you bother to respond in the first place? Is this the way you always back out of arguments that you are losing?

Given that you are forcing me to defend my point of view by attacking it, I feel compelled to do just that. I also cannot let your arguments, however irrational, pass into the future unanswered. Your opinions are too threatening to the very concept of Free Speech to be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Do you honestly think that this argument is not costly for me as well? Do you think you are the only person that has better things to do with his free time? If it was not for this whole copyright thing, I would be able to devote more time to creating and learning. It may surprise you to learn that copyright suppresses a lot of art as well as encouraging it.

Finally, I have to make it clear that these arguments are not merely intended for you. They are primarily intended to add my voice to the growing public outcry against unjust and immoral information land grab perpetrated by monetarily lascivious businessmen and facilitated by the nefarious manipulation of legal systems and treaties worldwide and a few generations of indoctrinated sheep like yourself.

You know, you are very good at trying to put words in my mouth. The problem is that you have made a number of assumptions about me and my knowledge, and pretty much none of them are right.

Touché. I have made some assumptions, and for instances where I was wrong, I apologise.

"It is funny how people who work with publishers of this and that frequently think they are knowledgeable about copyright after listening to their publishers tell them about the issue."

Now there's a load of bullshit. The reason that any successful writer needs an understanding of copyright law is to PROTECT him/herself from the publishers. My training came from actually reading the laws themselves, interpretations of the laws from commentators, and interpretations from my agents. As a result, I can recognize a bad contract when I see one.

In that case, you should read more about the tradition and the intent of copyright. The letter of the law often does not correctly respect its spirit. Recognising bad contracts for yourself as an individual is one thing, but the law is very much like a contract for everyone. While the contract embodied in the Statute of Anne was one that might be acceptable to societies in general, the current state of copyright law worldwide should be considered unacceptable by everyone. In my previous post, I listed a few of the reasons why the Berne Convention, specifically, has harmed our common intellectual landscape greatly.

Funny how anti-copyright people tend to accuse those who disagree with them as being in league with distributors and guilty of groupthink or being easily led. Mind you, I've also been called a thief and a murderer because I believe in fighting for my rights under the law, so groupthink is the least of those things I can be accused of.

I have no difficulty believing you have been accused of many things, but you are a victim of groupthink. Whether or not you learned about copyright on your own, your reasoning

This 'License' business is way out of control.

It seems that way from my point of view also, but apparently business is thriving as IP law becomes more powerful.

When and how did this ever change?

297 years ago.

You're on a good rant. It should be heard far and wide.

Yes, since there was no copyright law at the time, so it certainly wasn't that that made Beethoven write music.

The *original* copyright was actually 21 years

Read the whole thing. The statute specified 14 years plus a 14 year extension. 21 years was just grandfathered in for existing works.

Even cooler is that there was only a three month statute of limitations for bringing actions for copyright violations.

Civilisation didn't actually start with the US constitution! The *original* copyright was actually 21 years, specified in the British Statute of Anne in 1710, unless you count the licencing act of 1662, which granted rights that never expired.

While I'm in favour of much shorter copyright terms, I'm not sure your analogy works very well, since dead garbagemen don't clear up much rubbish, but dead musicians do sell a lot of records.

If you want to find enlightenment on the subject of copyright, there are a few neat things you can read, like this wiki page or maybe this little blurb... You could always read the original statute of anne upon which US [and most all modern] copyright law is based, or maybe even glance over this. Copyright is bad for society, at least in its current form. Remember that it is essentially a right provided by the people, and the people have the power and the right to take it back.

Go lay the blame elsewhere (hrmm.. maybe Sonny Bono?), but t'was not Dubya.

I blame that Queen Anne bitch from 1710 for our current copyright laws. What we are seeing is simply the only logical path the law could possibly take over time. A perfect examplt of how greed works. I blame all of us for our failure to do anything about it. It was the first to spew the FUD that it somehow promotes innovation. This will be proven wrong if and when copyright goes away.

But it's outright silly to say that without copyright, there would be no free software when it's the other way around.

Let me se if I understand:

Without copyright, there would be no free software. Which reverses to:
Without free software, there would be no copyright.

No, I don't understand at all. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, passed by the British Parliament in 1710. Software, per se, didn't really get going till the mid-20th century (ENIAC was finished in 1945). So copyright pre-dates software (free or otherwise) by about 235 years.

Are you trying to say that if there was no copyright, then all software would be free? If so, I disagree. If software was not covered by copyright, then it would be public domain material. There would be no legal basis for asking people to share their innovations back to the community. You could take code, modify it, improve it, and then sell binary versions without releasing your improvements. You wouldn't be required to acknowledge the original author, and you could put the code into commercial projects whether the original author liked it or not. In short, none of the provisions that you find in existing free or open source licenses would be the least bit enforceable. The free/open source movements need copyrightable software - without it, we would have to rely entirely on people's goodwill and charitable impulses, which is a much more dubious proposition, especially where software intersects business.

This might be a good place to bring up the old suggestion that anything out of print for a year become public domain. A newspaper publisher could then maintain their copyright by setting up a method of reprinting old issues. But most of them wouldn't find this lucrative enough, and would just let the copyright expire. Then the LoC could include most newspapers after a year.

While I approve the impulse, I think this would be a nightmare to maintain, particularly if the "expire after a year" idea was applied to all copyrighted material. If applied to books, that means that anything that is not successful enough to need reprinting every year would soon go out of copyright, thereby making it much more difficult for anyone to even make a pretense at supporting themselves through writing. Our very first copyright legislation, the Copyright Act of 1790 provided a term of 14 years, extensible to 26 on application; that's how long the founding fathers (many of whom were in Congress at that point) felt was necessary to adequately fulfill the Constitution's requirement to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in Section 8 Clause 8. You could argue that they were just copying the Statute of Anne (1710) which set forth the same period of protection for copyrighted works; but I would argue that if they had felt that a longer or shorter period of coverage was required, they'd have changed it. Anyway, having the copyright expire after one year out of print would drastically reduce the coverage period of any work that failed to stimulate instant and ongoing demand.

Furthermore, how would we apply "out of print" to works that are copyrighted but never printed? Take software. You can download programs that are years old -- shareware, old open source stuff, etc -- long after the original copyright holder has lost all interest in the program. Is that "in print" or not?

All that said, I can see you reason for wanting to apply such a rule specifically to newspapers, and perhaps to other current-events publications whose value declines rapidly with age (news magazines, etc). If the rule was limited to those sorts of publications, I guess I'd support it. Though I should point out that leaving those sorts of things under copyright for a somewhat longer period of time has two benefits: recycling material from an old article that is copyrighted is plagiarism; but doing so from a public domain article is perfectly kosher. Letting the news into the wild too soon might serve to decrease the originality of the news, particularly in opinion pieces. Second, some article writers sell their articles to multiple publications over time. It is sometimes easier to re-sell an article once it's been out of the public view for a while. Therefore, in order to protect the livelihoods of struggling writers, it would be better to give them a longer grace period before the work goes public domain.

One of the very real problems with copyright law is that it allows publishers to "capture" our history and prevent access to some of the most important primary documents.

I agree. I just think that your solution has a lot of side-effects that would need to be carefully weighed and balanced before it was put into effect.

This comment by Sancho is just begging for a reply, so here goes:

Of course, the copyright system itself is the reason we have book, media, etc.

I have been meaning to say this for a long time: People write books for other reasons than profit. The claim might even be made that works for hire are not art at all since profit is not a motivation for true art. Whether or not that is true, people write books for lots of reasons. Some people, on occasion (like thousands of Slashdotters, for instance) might actually have something to say to the world.

The system allows for the (supposedly limited) monopoly on ideas so that artists could make a living and produce their content.

Without such laws in the first place, it's unlikely that we'd have the variety and multitude of movies, books, television shows, etc. that are out there.

Some say it's a bad thing, some say it's a good thing, but in a free society that should be all about choice, it's pretty definitive of our ideals. Lots to choose from.

I just happened to see your name while meandering around the site. So I thought I'd give a shout out to ya.

I'm going to read through this, this, and this. (should be old stuff to you) among other things to provide a more informed response in the morning. (I'm a slow reader...:-) At this point , after taking a quick glance, you almost have me convinced. In this money mad world that we are prisoners of, a case possibly can be made for copyrights. One of the things I particularly(?) liked in the original copyright law in 1710 was that if anyone thought the price was too high for a copyrighted work, the gov't could step in and set a "fair" price. This makes sense to me. If you want copyright protection, then you have to accept the price set by the "protectors".

Is that painting on the top of their website copyrighted?

Well, the painting was finished in 1512 and copyrights didn't exist until 1710, so I doubt it.

Here's the funny thing to me about this debate.

The first copyright law (in Occidental history anyways) was the Statute of Anne, passed in England in 1710. The law was passed because of another technological innovation (albeit, by that time, a 250 year old one): the printing press.

Prior to printing, "artists" (in this case, mostly writers) were generally supported by "patrons," wealthy individuals who supported the arts for prestige or out of sense of religious need (which is why so much pre-printing western culture is directly related to the mass).

The arrival of printing created a market for books. A market that didn't previously exist. Printing commoditized literacy and literature. At first, the vast collection of classical literature was the source. Printers like Aldus Manutius made personal fortunes by printing vast numbers of classical texts. This re-emergence of classical learning spurred the Renaissance, and literally transformed European culture.

The pressure for a copyright law didn't exist. All of the "artists" being plundered were centuries dead. Over time, however, the vast distribution of learning and classical knowledge led to the existence of a significant community of educated men, and to the vast expansion of that radical late medieval institution: the University.

As the community of learned people grew, the reverence for the classics began to wane as people began to observe things that were, well, WRONG in those classical texts. (Take a look at the history of the University of Paris to see what questioning classical authority could lead to).

Printing can be said to be a major factor in both the Renaissance and in the Reformation. The Reformation is the other important ingredient in how printing made copyright law happen. The Reformation broke the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church. It became much easier to be an original scholar.

An era of intellectual freedom (some would say chaos) began. And for the first time in a millenium, Europe began to produce culture instead of merely to echo classical or biblical culture.

Prior to printing, writing was not terribly distinct in its mode of production from, say, painting or sculpting. The production of a book was an intensive labor, and a book was as unique an artifact, or almost as unique, as a painting or a sculpture.

Printing changed that. Printing made a book a commodity. Writers came to be paid by publishers, rather than being church men, wealthy men, or employed by patrons. Writers came to depend on payment by publishers. And this led to the problem.

The problem was that there were no laws to protect ownership of literary works. It was common practice for a publisher to take a book published by someone else, set it himself, knock off a few hundred copies, and sell it himself. In fact, this was much more profitable than seeking out new work. New work was risky -- it might not sell. But find yourself a popular book and then print a few hundred knock-offs and you'd make money for sure! Especially since you didn't have to pay for the creative act itself.

This was the situation engendered by printing technology, the Renaissance and its spread of universal literacy (universal compared to pre-printing anyways), and the Reformation (itself fueled by printing) and the intellectual freedom that came with it. Writers were making deals with publishers and then those publishers were being undercut by "fly-by-night" printers who would take no risk, make no investment, encourage no cultural production, and make fortunes off those writers and printers who were contributing to the culture.

The situation became so bad in England that the Statute of Anne was passed.

Without some legal protection, a living could not be made by creators. Nor could the owners of the means of production be encouraged to take risks on new material. When there is no exclusivity of right