Copyright

:For copyright issues in relation to Wikipedia itself, see .

History of copyright

:Main article: History of copyright

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Authors, patrons, and owners of works throughout the ages have tried to direct and control how copies of such works could be used once disseminated to others. Mozart's patron, Baroness von Waldstätten, allowed his compositions to be freely performed, while Handel's patron (George I, the first of the Hanoverian kings) jealously guarded "Water Music."

Related Topics:
Patron - Mozart - Baroness von Waldstätten - Handel

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Access control was always used as a measure to disallow works from being copied without the consent of the author/owner. The Library of Alexandria (a.k.a. “The Kings Library”) wasn’t a place that an average person could walk into and borrow a book from. Ptolemy III paid the sum of fifteen talents of silver to be allowed to copy the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Related Topics:
Library of Alexandria - Ptolemy III - Talents - Aeschylus - Sophocles - Euripides

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Two major developments in the 14th and 15th centuries seem to have provoked the development of modern copyright. First, the expansion of mercantilist trade in major European cities and the appearance of the secular university helped produce an educated bourgeois class interested in the information of the day. This helped spur the emergence of a ?public sphere,? which was increasingly served by entrepreneurial ?stationers? who would produce copies of books on demand. Second, Gutenberg's development of movable type and the development and spread of the printing press made mass reproduction of printed works quick and cheap. Before these two developments, the process of copying a work could be nearly as labor intensive and expensive as creating the original, and was largely relegated to monastic scribes. It appears publishers, rather than authors, were the first to seek restrictions on copying printed works. Given that publishers now obtain the copyright from the authors as a condition of mass reproduction of a work, one of the criticisms of the current system is that it benefits publishers more than it does authors. This is a chief argument of the proponents of peer-to-peer file sharing systems.

Related Topics:
University - Bourgeois - Public sphere - Gutenberg - Movable type - Printing press - Labor intensive - Scribes - Publishers - Authors - Peer-to-peer

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While governments had previously granted monopoly rights to publishers to sell printed works, the modern concept of copyright originated in 1710 with the British Statute of Anne. This statute first accorded exclusive rights to authors rather than publishers, and it included protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years, after which all works would pass into the public domain.

Related Topics:
Monopoly - 1710 - Statute of Anne - Public domain

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The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 first established the recognition of copyrights between sovereign nations (copyrights were also provided by the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, but that today this agreement is largely only of historical interest). Under the Berne convention, copyrights for creative works generally are not granted, but rather automatically assumed; an author does not have to "register" or "apply for" a copyright. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all exclusive rights to the work and any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires.

Related Topics:
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works - 1886 - Universal Copyright Convention - 1952 - Creative works

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