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COPYFIGHTER - attacking a ship
[ ... ] In the ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and anybody who knew how to read and write could copy a book about as efficiently as anybody else. Now somebody who did it all day would probably learn to be somewhat better at it, but there was not a tremendous difference. And because the copies were made one at a time, there was no great economy of scale. Making ten copies took ten times as long as making one copy. There was also nothing forcing centralization; a book could be copied anywhere. [ ... ]

Now as far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the ancient world. Anyone who wanted to copy a book could copy the book. Later on, the printing press was developed and books started to be copied on the printing press. Now the printing press was not just a quantitative improvement in the ease of copying. It affected different kinds of copying unevenly because it introduced an inherent economy of scale. It was a lot of work to set the type and much less work to make many identical copies of the page. So the result was that copying books tended to become a centralized, mass-production activity. Copies of any given book would probably be made in only a few places.

It also meant that ordinary readers couldn't copy books efficiently. Only if you had a printing press could you do that. So it was an industrial activity.

Now for the first few centuries of printing, printed books did not totally replace hand-copying. Hand-copied books were still made, sometimes by rich people and sometimes by poor people. The rich people did this to get an especially beautiful copy that would show how rich they were, and poor people did it because maybe they didn't have enough money to buy a printed copy but they had the time to copy a book by hand. As the song says, “Time ain't money when all you got is time.”

So hand-copying was still done to some extent. I think it was in the 1800s that printing actually got to be cheap enough that even poor people could afford printed books if they were literate. [ ... ]

Computer networks and digital information technology are bringing us back to a world more like the ancient world where anyone who can read and use the information can also copy it and can make copies about as easily as anyone else could make them. They are perfect copies and they're just as good as the copies anyone else could make. So the centralization and economy of scale introduced by the printing press and similar technologies is going away.

And this changing context changes the way copyright law works. You see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers. Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial. It didn't restrict the general public. Now that's not true. If you have a computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest priority. Copyright was easy to enforce because it was a restriction only on publishers who were easy to find and what they published was easy to see. Now the copyright is a restriction on each and everyone of you. [ ... ]

And, finally, propaganda, starting in childhood. That's what the word “pirate” is used for. If you'll think back a few years, the term “pirate” was formerly applied to publishers that didn't pay the author. But now it's been turned completely around. It's now applied to members of the public who escape from the control of the publisher. It's being used to convince people that only a nasty enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying. It says that “sharing with your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship.” [ ... ]

RICHARD STALLMAN - Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks

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