Re: copyrights

[Lili Velez <lv08+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Just a bit of trivia:  I think that copyright laws were something of a
German invention --- or rather that they were drastically affected by
the plethora of mini-states in the area now considered Germany.  An
author would discover multiple editions of their works being profitably
(for the publishers) sold in each separate jurisdiction, with little to
no recompense (sp?) for their work.  It was one of the reasons for
theories about Genius, as a matter of fact.  Authors began arguing that
divine inspiration/gift/whatever made the act of producing texts somehow
more special than the manual labor in producing the design for an
object, like a chair.  (The publishers had been saying things like "You
don't continually pay the designer for creating a chair, you just pay
for the raw materials to mass-produce them.  Why should we continually
pay an author after we buy the manuscript?")

Lili

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Lili Fox Velez
Rhetorician in Residence            "Rhet in the Blue Linen Labcoat"
Department of Biological Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University            lv08@andrew.cmu.edu.BITNET
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