One thing that sticks out to me on the subject of copier wars was the copy protection measures that were implemented on small booklet walk-throughs for adventure games.
Usually there were red marks over the text that I presumed prevent photo-copying, and a red film you would look through to read the booklet. At some point there was no use as these things would be posted on BBS sites and you could simply print them out.
Somewhat related...I've read about "copy shops" in medieval Paris. Since most university students couldn't afford to buy whole books of their own, professors would deposit books at one of these shops along with a reading list of passages. Students would then buy scribal copies as "course packets". This is a really, really old phenomenon.
They discuss a printer, suing the Catholic Church, but, if I remember, the Catholics had an issue with this Gutenberg guy, for coming up with a printing press, and thus, the ability to print lots of bibles.
A student buys a used book, goes to a copy shop,
spends a few hours copying, then returns and sells
the book back, saving lots of money in the process.
The article ends in a strange way:
> It’s hard to imagine that companies once sued churches for making copies.
That's the end of the article haha (and it's not that hard to imagine). I was hoping they would touch on Napster and CD burning and tie it all into what's going on today with AI, leaving the reader with an informed perspective on IP.
And since I'm apparently a writing critic now: The numerous links to court cases, articles, and interviews throughout made it read like a Wikipedia (in a boring way). Provide sources sure, but in a way that doesn't feel like stepping through the history section of a Wikipedia article. For such a relevant topic and decent headline I expected better writing.
I don't get the impression that things have changed all that much in Catholic music publishing since this FEL Publications case. It sounds very familiar. There are still major music publishers that require parishes to destroy all books at the end of the year. Its the old story of "you don't have ownership, you have a license." This grift predates the "purchasing" digital videos on Prime and the like.
If anything there are even more requirements now. Churches must now purchase individual licenses for music sung in live-streamed liturgies or printed out in programs (through websites like www.onelicense.net).
Thankfully, liturgical music is a pretty old genre (the oldest still around), so there is a huge corpus of public-domain works.
The title is excellent as summing up the long road that led us to where we're now, and I think it's a really good point in general:
> businesses that once relied on the scarcity of information found themselves leaning on courtrooms to protect their bottom line.
We'll always have a ton of laws passed because an industry had enough money to lawyer up its survival despite the technical advancements working against it.
On one side we'll have luddites who rightfully try to keep humans out of harm, and on the other whole industries which can only brake progress to stay mainstream. While I used to think that it was a lost cause for them, here we are in 2024 still dealing with call centers and getting snail mail spam.
It feels like some industries just found a position where nothing short of a country uprising will displace them, whatever technical advancements we see.