Piracy in the printing industry  

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The movable type printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor by way of copyright. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking. Any person with a press and some skills could use movable type to publish books and other items. Scribes and scriveners were no longer needed.

Prior to the printing press, stories remained in the oral tradition or underwent the continual fixing of the text in monasteries. The advent of standardised printing blocks meant that text was now presented in a fixed manuscript in specific ways that could be attributed to singular writers. This introduced the concept of a correct or authorised version of a text, so that any cheap reproductions were then considered to be the act of unauthorized reprinting. Divergences between copies of early printed books were common, as proofs were not fully corrected until the actual time of production. Therefore, printed text in the hands of pirates often resulted in incorrect texts being sold to the public.

Legislation regarding unauthorized reprinting at the time was often local and government officials were powerless to prevent infringement of the law. In the early days of the printing press, there was nothing to prevent other printers producing the same work if it was worthwhile. As it was more cost effective to reprint existing texts, cheaper editions of lower quality were produced for the market. Unauthorized reprinting in particular thrived on giving the public access to cheaper copies, a practice that was carried out in Lyon, France with unauthorized versions of Venetian texts.

See also

piracy, printing industry, history of copyright, Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, hack writing




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Piracy in the printing industry" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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