Rick Falkvinge, pirate

Copyright’s shameful origins, part 1 of 2

Most people believe that copyright came to be as a result of great elaboration and almost Solomonian insight in order to benefit culture, both to help starving artists and to have the citizenry enjoy a larger wealth and choice of music and culture.

Reality tells a completely different story.

Copyright was created as an instrument for censorship against political dissidents in a time when such were tenaciously persecuted – especially the poor souls who confessed to the wrong religion: Protestants. Hundreds were executed. Hundreds more fled the country. Copyright was created to make sure that they could not communicate. And this was not a side effect, it was the main purpose of copyright.

(One might want to keep this in mind the next time anyone atrociously claims that copyright is a necessity for freedom of speech, as one Swedish politician did quite recently. It was created as the exact opposite.)

The story begins with Henry VIII. English king. Most people have heard of him. He grew up as a Catholic, but did not care much for piety at all; he was more interested in sex. He married Catherine of Aragon, and they had a daughter, Mary. He eventually grew tired of this marriage and desired a divorce, but in order to do so, he would need approval from the Pope. And such an approval would not be seen.

Henry VIII’s answer to this was quite pragmatic. He flipped the bird at Rome, converted England to protestantism, and so could divorce without trouble. He then proceeded to marry five other women in rapid succession and had so many mistresses that historians still break out in fist fights over their numbers. In his many marriages, he had one more daughter who reached adulthood, Elizabeth.

Both daughters would eventually succeed him on the throne.

During roughly the same time period, the printing press made its first appearance in Europe. It is unknown exactly when the first printing press was considered to be finished, but i was some time during the early 1450s. In 1480, there were 110 printing presses in Europe, 50 of which were in Italy. The first one in England arrived around 1485.

At this time, the concept of copyright simply did not exist. Earlier, if you wanted to copy a certain piece of writing – or manuscript – you had to enlist the services of a scribe, a person who copied the manuscript by hand. The craftsman would almost never produce an exact copy. He would take the opportunity to correct a spelling error here, perhaps introduce an error of his own there, alter facts for noble or not so noble reasons, etc. So when it was suddenly possible to produce tens of thousands of exact copies, it opened up new realms of opportunities. Everybody was able to publish, and so they did. Everybody who could afford it printed everything they could get their hands on. Galilei. Socrates. Poetry. You name it.

Attribution wasn’t always perfect. Plagiarism – to put your own name under someone else’s work – happened on occasion. Reverse plagiarism – to put the name of some famous author on your own work, in order to make it more widespread – was even more common. (See the Uncyclopedia article “making up Oscar Wilde quotes” for a bit of comic relief on the subject.) Overall, it was a Wild West – but a very prosperous one, full of opportunities, just like the Internet today.

In 1553, Queen Mary I ascended to power. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the same Catherine who had been stripped of her titles, first to become a princess, and later just a lady. Mary was not entirely happy with the way her mother had been treated, and in particular, she was not very happy at all with the king having made England protestant in order to get himself a divorce. Mary was a Catholic From The Grace Of God and saw it as her mission to restore order (meaning catholicism).

She initiated a ruthless persecution and slaughter of protestants. About 300 prominent protestants were executed. The families that could afford it, around 800, fled the country. Far more than that were imprisoned. Her brutality earned her the nickname Bloody Mary.

But importantly, she was bothered by how the protestants could get their story out using the new printing press. Outside the control of the Crown and the Church. Also, she realized that she could not destroy their newfound communications channels using the King’s (Queen’s) armed forces. She needed an ally within the printing industry.

She went to London’s printing guild – the London Company of Stationers – and offered them a deal: they would only print books and pamphlets that the Crown approved, and in return, they would get a complete monopoly on printing. They would get confiscation rights if somebody else than them used a printing press, and book burning privileges for materials printed outside of the monopoly.

Stationers happily agreed: this meant a guaranteed customer base for highly demanded goods. They got their monopoly charter on May 4, 1557. In practice, this also turned them into the Crown’s private censors — imagine how immensely popular they were, almost overnight.

Now, Mary was not successful in her attempts to root out protestantism. She died just one year later, in 1558, and was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth I. A protestant. So much for that. And not only was Elizabeth a protestant, she is also considered one of England’s greatest rulers of all time, even today, 500 years later. All that remains of Queen Mary I’s persecution and oppression is the printing monopoly, and it goes under the name copyright.

The word itself has its origins in an internal mechanism within the printing guild. The members within the guild had their own agreements about who had the right to print (”copy”) which manuscripts, and this was entered into a large register at the London Company of Stationers. (In other words – not only did they enjoy a monopoly on the market as a group, they also cartelized within that monopoly.) The large register would tell who had the right to copy which scripts – tell who had the copyright.

Fast forward 150 years, and winds of change were blowing through Europe. Something called Freedom of the Press had become all the rage. In 1688, there was a short but intensive civil war in England. History knows it as the “Glorious Revolution” (isn’t it funny how the winners always get to write history?). It has also been called the “Bloodless Revolution”, a name which ignores the fact that there were at least three big battles in Scotland and major bloodshed in Ireland.

Without going into too much detail on the short war, one of its outcomes was that Parliament received power at the expense of the Crown. The new Members of Parliament were largely people who had previously been censored by the Stationers – and they were not happy at all about that concept. Thus, the new Parliament announced that London Company of Stationers’ monopoly and censoring privileges would be allowed to expire in 1695, and Freedom of the Press would once again reign in England, as it had before Queen Mary I.

To be continued in part 2.

(This post was originally written in Swedish and kindly translated by a reader named Hans. Gratitudes squared.)