Chris writes:
"Copyright is not necessary for the arts -- but only for those who want to
make money from reproductions."
Not correct, Chris. Copyright is necessary for all those who don't want to
lose every dollar they put into fostering -- i.e. financing, "producing" --
the
"work of art". Your word 'reproductions' misleads (especially darkened by the
word 'only'). They want initially to at least recover their money on the
original production.
Chris goes on:
>
> But there are so many important examples to contrary, aren't there?
>
> Including everything written (in England) before 1710, and even your
> beloved Jane Austen.
>
Your locution here is confusing, because Jane Austen didn't flourish until a
hundred years after The Statute of Anne in 1709. ("From 1811 until 1816, with
the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813),
Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published
writer."
-- Google)
The point of the Queen Anne Act was the parliamentary (correct) conviction
that the publication of more books was good for the nation, but what
printer/publisher could continually put money into the costly business of
paying an
author, typesetting, buying paper, printing, and binding of books if every
other
printer in town could immediately produce copies? (They still had problems
with
printers in Ireland and America -- and even publishers of translations on the
continent -- and it took three hundred more years to extend copyright
protection internationally. Even then it's been imperfect, with, to this day,
publishers in the likes of China, Taiwan, and Korea ripping them off. These
new
publishers can really do it it on the cheap: No typesetting costs for them,
they simp
ly photocopy the pages of the U.S. or Brit edition.)
Added note: There was no such thing as royalty centuries ago: the printer
just bought all rights from the writer for a lump sum.
Chris goes on:
>
> "The only expense involved in writing is time -- and somehow, and many great
> things seem to have found an audience without copyright protection."
>
But, of course, as the writers of the Queen Act observed, how many possibly
useful/desirable works were NOT being written and published because entities
--
writers, publishers -- could not afford to expend money/time, with no
monetary return? Even publishers have to pay employees -- and feed their own
families.
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