WI: Limited Copyright Laws

What if copyright laws were limited only to those that concerned distributing other people's work for profit, or fraudulently claiming to be an author of something?

How would such laws influence popular culture? It it possible that the kind of mass media that exists today would not exist?
 
Okay so to be clear, the only time you could stop someone is when they are selling your expression of an idea for profit (what about for break-even?) or if they aren't giving you the credit.

While I support massive changes to the current system I think a change like you describe will slow innovation. There are a few reasons for that, capital didn't move nearly as easily or well as it did before, you didn't have such a huge arena for people to see your idea and want to invest in it, and it was a lot harder to know if someone was selling your contraption somewhere you weren't. Thus the inventors aren't going to do terribly well unless they can leverage government to allow them a monopoly. So invention becomes far less attractive. Now in the early periods most people didn't get rich on inventing, but the slowdown will become more marked in later centuries. Certainly the 20th century had a lot of corporate driven research that is going to be a lot smaller under this system...

...unless you want to keep the same rules for patents but then you will have huge arguments about the differences.
 
Profit Motive

There would by less profit in mass media. It could be it's current size but, be a small, part time industry. Theres little money in it so why invest?
 
A relevant article from “Der Spiegel” translated with Google from German to English so it isn`t grammatically correct but should be sufficiently understandable:). (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,709761,00.html)

Explosion of knowledge

By Frank Thadeusz

Germany has in the 19th Century witnessed an industrial rise because the country did not have copyright laws? With this analysis, a Munich-based economic historian causes a stir.

The whole country is obsessed with reading. Even booksellers find the sudden inclination to read scary. The German notes, the literary critic Wolfgang Menzel 1836, are a "nation of poets and thinkers".

"This famous phrase was misunderstood," claims the economic historian Eckhard Hoffner, 44 "He did not aim at the cream of literary figures like Goethe or Schiller, but to the fact that in Germany an incomparably great mass of reading material was produced."

Hoffner has shed light on the early heyday of print media in this country and comes to a surprising finding: Unlike in neighboring countries, England and France, in Germany in the 19th Century, an unprecedented explosion of knowledge occurred.

German authors wrote at that time until their fingers became sore. In 1843 about 14,000 new publications appeared - in terms of the population then that was almost present level. Most printed novels were specialist scientific articles. Quite unlike the situation in England: "You see one in the UK for the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation lamentable history," says Hoffner.

In fact: Just a thousand new works appeared at that time in England a year - ten times less than in Germany. This was not without consequences: Because of the chronic weak book market, Hoffner believes, England lost within a century its extended lead - while the backward agricultural state Germany caught up to 1900 level and rose to an equal industrial nation, later even surpassed it.

In Hoffner views all the copyright law, which had already been introduced the British in 1710, had deserted the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
In Germany, however, for a long time nobody cared about copyright laws. Prussia introduced the copyright 1837th. However because of persistent petty state rivalries the law was initially not going to work in the kingdom.

Hoffner hard work is the first scientific work in which the impact of copyright on a comparable basis and a long period of direct comparison of two countries is examined. His findings provide an new perspective for the academic world.
Up to now, the copyright was considered a great achievement and a guarantee for a thriving book market. Accordingly, authors are being encouraged only to write, so the doctrine, if they know their rights respected.

But at least the historical comparison leads to a different result. In England the publishers have a monopoly position and took advantage of it. News appeared mostly in a small print run of more than 750 copies and at a price that was often the weekly wage of a skilled labor force exceeded.

The most prominent publisher in London earned still magnificent and drove partly around with gilded carriages. Their customers were rich and noble, the books considered as a pure luxury goods. In the few existing libraries, the precious tomes to protect against thieves were chained to the bookshelves.
In Germany, however, the publishers knew there were plagiarists in their neck, each new publication reprinted without fear of punishment and sold cheap. Successful publishers responded with ingenuity to the copied and invented a new form of publication, as is still common today: They gave out fine prints for the wealthy and cheap paperback editions for the masses.

The result was a completely different book market than in England: Best Sellers and scientific works were brought in large numbers and at trash rates to the people.
"So many thousands of people in the most hidden corners of Germany, who could think of buying impossible, the dear price because of where books have gradually brought together a small library of reprints," noted the historian Henry Bensen ecstatic.

The prospect of a broad audience motivated scientists to publish their research findings. "A completely new form of teaching set in," says Hoffner.

Besides the oral tradition by a teacher or scholar at the University people knew at that time little how to spread and acquire new knowledge. Now there were books circulating in the country covering a wide range of topics.
1826: "The greatest volume of writings is by nature objects of all kinds, and especially from the practical application of natural history in medicine and industries, agriculture & c."

A huge mass on scholars in Germany produced tracts, dealing with chemistry, mechanics, mechanical engineering, optics and steel production. In Britain, meanwhile, an elite circle indulged in a classical educational canon, which turned more to fiction, philosophy, theology, languages and history.

Practical guidance on how-to-do subjects were printed en masse in Germany - such as dike construction for a customer or to grain cultivation - largely absent in Britain . "In Britain it was dependent in the spread of modern knowledge useful to the medieval method of hearsay," said Hoffner.

The German Knowledge offensive led to a curious situation, then of course, hardly anyone would have noticed: So the long-forgotten Berliner Professor of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Sigismund Hermbstädt, with his "principles of the leather tannery" (1806) generated higher fees than the the British author Mary Shelley, with his to this day popular horror piece "Frankenstein."

The trade literature was so good that the publishers were afraid to constantly run out of supply. This placed science writer in a favorable position situation to negotiate with the publishers. Several professors earned an impressive addition to their salary with extra money earned through advisers and information brochures.

"This lively scientific discourse, has inspired a founding generation," said Hoffner. That time has produced later industrialist as Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens.

The market for scientific literature didn’t broke together, when in the forties of the 19th Century, Germany began to enforce the copyright. The German Publishers responded to the new situation, with similar restrictive rules as their counterparts in England: the prices of books, you screwed up and did away with the low price market.

The writers, now equipped with rights on their own work responded with irritation. Heinrich Heine wrote on 24 October 1854 in acidified mood to his publisher Julius Campe: "With the exorbitant price you set, I will experience difficulty as soon a second edition of the book is released. Set out lower rates, dearest Campe, or I do not really know anymore why I was so lenient with my personal material gains before. "
 
This is actually a familiar pattern, not revolutionary at all. Backward country needs to advance, ignores copyright laws so they can distribute information, advances, becomes a copyright supporting country when they begin producing as even the article hints. The US did the same in the early 1800s for example.
 
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