Comments on: History Swallowed Whole

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:34:35 +0000

Good point, but it’s the intellectual property regime that follows which is more my concern.

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:11:20 +0000

IIRC, Viagra was originally developed to address a different umm symptom, so is probably a patently bad counterexample.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 02:48:37 +0000

I think the point is that payment was available, that a model of profit-from-cultural-work was coming into being in early modern print culture. More people wrote in post-Gutenberg print culture than before, and money was part of it. It’s true that the creators of such work didn’t get much from initial performances or distributions and nothing later. In that sense, copyright was an answer to a problem. But it was first and foremost the publishers’ answer, secondarily one for authors.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:50:21 +0000

Shakespeare is a bad example, because he was a shareholder in the company that exploited his creative work. Other playwrights in his period did much worse, since they had no continuing rights in what they wrote. They accepted what payment they could get for selling their copy. Writing wasn’t profitable prior to effective copyright (which is actually much later than the passage of Queen Anne’s law).

It is, of course, true that people write whether writing is profitable or not. And profitable writing is often worse writing (see, for example, Dan Brown).