The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity.
Shepard Fairey
The most important thing about intellectual property
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Seems to me that copyright law was created to make money for lawyers. (Sorry, PG!)
No offense taken, M.
However when authors haven’t been paid by their publishers, they’re likely to turn to lawyers.
Any author can thwart the lawyers by setting their book loose in the public domain.
Actually, copyright law was created to protect publishers from the economic consequences of freedom of the press. Before that, nobody was permitted to run a printing press without an official licence, which not only allowed easy censorship, but tightly restricted the supply of books. Publishers wanted to do away with the censorship but keep control over supply.
Despite the lip service in the U.S. Constitution (decades after the first copyright laws appeared), encouraging creativity had precious little to do with it. This is why Dr. Samuel Johnson was opposed to copyright when it appeared.