QuestionCopyright.org -- Introduction and FAQ

No. Actually, it was invented by publishers, to preserve an information ownership monopoly based on a government censorship policy.

The first copyright law was a 1556 censorship statute in England. It granted the Company of Stationers, a London guild, exclusive rights to own and run printing presses. Company members registered books under their own name, not the author's name, and these registrations could be transferred or sold only to other Company members. In exchange for their government-granted monopoly on the book trade, the Stationers aided the government's censors, by controlling what was printed, and by searching out illegal presses and books — they even had the right to burn unauthorized books and destroy presses. They were, in effect, a private, for-profit information police force.

After the Revolution of 1688, the government loosened its control over the press. No longer desiring strong censorship, Parliament decided to allow the Stationers' monopoly to expire. This was a direct economic threat to the Stationers' monopoly-based livelihood, and they responded by proposing a compromise: they argued that authors have a "natural right" of ownership in their works, and that furthermore this right could be transferred to others by contract. The placement of original ownership with the author was a smart political ploy, by which the Stationers avoided charges that they were attempting to resurrect the old (and unpopular) monopoly mechanisms. But the stipulation that these new copyrights were a form of property, and therefore transferrable, showed the real motive behind their proposal. The Stationers correctly foresaw that authors would need to transfer copyright to a publisher as an inducement to print, and that therefore the publishers' position would about the same as it had been before. Indeed, their hand would be strengthened, because now the exclusive "ownership" of a work would now be based on well-established property law, instead of the temporary whim of the government.

The Stationers persuaded Parliament, and the result was the Statute of Anne: a copyright law created by the publishing industry, designed around the interests of the publishing industry, and modeled on a defunct censorship system. The Stationers' argument was essentially economic: they claimed that they could not afford to print books (and thus encourage authors to write books) without protection against competition. There were some technological and economic reasons why the Stationers' argument was plausible; remember too that they were monopoly-softened trade group worried about suddenly being asked to survive without special protections.

But there was no uprising of writers, clamoring counterintuitively for the right to prevent people from copying their works. The writers themselves didn't participate much in the debate around the creation of copyright. The argument was crafted and presented by publishers.

Thus copyright is not really about subsidizing creation; it is about subsidizing replication, and it was designed around the dominant replication technology of its time: the printing press.

For more detailed information about the history of copyright, see our bibliography [2] page.

The vast majority of musicians, writers, and artists will never see a dime of copyright royalties in their lives. For the small percentage who do, it will mostly amount to beer money — a nice consolation prize, but hardly enough to make a real difference in their lives, let alone to provide an economic incentive to create.

The copyright lobby rarely talks about the majority of artists. It prefers to talk about the superstars: the tiny, tiny minority of famous artists whose works are backed by the marketing power of the publishing and record industries. There's nothing objectionable about these superstars, some of whom are quite talented, but to treat them as representative of artists in general would be to confuse marketing with reality. Most artists' lives look nothing like theirs, and never will, under the current spoils system.

This is one of the favorite ploys of the copyright industry: to pretend that preventing people from sharing your work is somehow related to preventing people from claiming that they wrote your work. For example, here's Hilary Rosen, the former head of the RIAA, describing the speeches she gave at schools and colleges, in which she urged students to adopt the industry's views about information ownership:

Analogies are what really work best. I ask them, "What have you done last week?" They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, "Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?" So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people.

Of course, people who swap music files do not replace the artist's name with their own. If Hilary Rosen had asked instead: "Would it bother you if somebody could just show a copy of your paper around, so other people could benefit from what you wrote, and see that you got an A?" the students would have answered "No, we aren't bothered by that at all," which isn't what Rosen wanted to hear.

Copyright does not prevent plagiarism, it prevents copying — that's why it's called "copyright". They're two unrelated things, and it's a pity the copyright lobby tries to make people think that permitting copying would somehow encourage plagiarism. (If anything, the free flow of copies in electronic form encourages accurate attribution, because when there are many copies available, a quick Internet search easily reveals the original author.)

If I steal your bicycle, now you have no bicycle. If I copy your song, now we both have it.

When the industry uses loaded words like "stealing", "theft", and "piracy", they are using linguistic tricks, trying to equate copying with deprivation of property. Increasing the number of copies somehow results in a decrease in... what, exactly? Certainly not in the amount of money available to creators, which is precious little to begin with.

Sharing isn't stealing, it's the opposite of stealing. And sharing certainly isn't like boarding ships on the high seas, holding the crew at gunpoint, and stealing their cargo!

If there had been no worthwhile or enduring artistic work produced before copyright, this would be a more plausible argument. But the world before modern copyright was hardly a barren cultural desert: Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, Li Bo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo... The history of human cultural production shows no evidence that sustaining creativity somehow depends on restricting its fruits. And no one can look at the wellspring of artistic activity that has emerged on the Internet in the last few years and come to the conclusion that allowing people to copy is somehow an obstacle to artistic progress.

Copyright does not support creativity, it supports distribution. As distribution costs drop slowly to zero, copyright becomes more of a hindrance than a help to creators.

We're trying to make it possible for people to consider what abolition would actually mean, by changing the way copyright is thought about and debated. Real understanding will lead to better policy; if abolition is that better policy, then so be it.

We do advocate, at the very least, a drastic reduction in the scope and duration of copyright terms; we've found it hard to avoid that conclusion after looking closely at the effects of copyright in the Internet Age. But whether outright abolition is preferable to simply taming copyright is a more complex question, and one we don't pretend to be able to answer with certainty.

It's also not a question that can be answered in the current rhetorical climate around copyright, which is too often still concerned with mostly unrelated issues like attribution, plagiarism, and the economic basis of creativity. Many people think [3] those are what copyright is about, and are unaware that copyright was actually designed around the limitations of the printing press, not around the needs of creators, and that even today, copyright is far more valuable to publishers than it is to artists. In a world where distribution costs are quickly dropping to zero, and ambient findability [4] is making successful plagiarism a thing of the past, it is important that we skeptically examine any policy that interferes with the free flow of information.