Copyright history. Part 1: The Black Death
About the author: Ricard Falquing is the founder of the Pirate Party of Sweden. In 2009, the Pirate Party passed to the European Parliament, gaining more than 7% of the vote. In 2010, Ricard Falquing entered the list of the 100 most influential people in Sweden according to the Fokus magazine. In 2011, he gave way to the party leader Anne Troberg and focused on promoting the ideas of the Pirate International, delivering lectures throughout the world.
In this series of seven articles, I want to tell the story of copyright from 1350 to the present day. This story is quite different from what is usually told by representatives of the copyright industry.
We will start with the arrival in Europe of the black death in the 1350s. European countries suffered from a plague no less than the rest of the world. It took Europe more than 150 years to regain its political, economic and social position after the epidemic.
Religious institutions recovered more slowly than others. They not only suffered more because of the compact residence of monks and nuns in monasteries, but also did not make up for the losses so quickly, since in the decades after the plague, the economy experienced a strong shortage of workers, and people rarely went to monasteries or gave their children there .
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What does all this have to do with the topic of the article? The fact is that then it was in the monasteries that the lion’s share of books was produced. If you needed a copy of the book, you ordered it in the monastery scriptorium, and the monks copied it for you. Manually. Copies were not perfect - some errors were corrected by the scribe, but new ones were added as well.
In addition, since all the census takers worked under the authority of the Catholic Church, there were strict restrictions on which books could be copied and distributed. Anything that at least slightly diverged from the official position of the Vatican, it was almost impossible to get. And the production of books required a lot of very expensive raw materials - 170 calf or 300 sheep skins took one copy of the Bible.
By 1450, the monasteries still lacked labor, and the census takers were very expensive. And without that huge because of materials the price of the book became just astronomical, taking into account the cost of work. In 1451, Johannes Gutenberg worked out a typography technique using a printing press, metal type-setting fonts, and oil-based inks. Around the same time, the paper-making recipe brought from China was spread. Manual rewriting of books quickly turned out to be outdated technology.
Typography produced a revolution in society, creating the opportunity to disseminate information quickly, cheaply and efficiently.
The Catholic Church, which used to completely control the distribution of books (and made a good profit on their shortage) was furious. She could no longer influence what information could be disseminated, could not decide what people could know and what could not, and therefore pressed on the secular authorities to forbid technology that was so dangerous for them.
To convince people of the advantages of the old order, many arguments were used. It is worth noting one of them: "How now the poor monks will earn a living?".
In the end, the church was forced to retreat, freeing the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation, but only after a lot of blood was shed in the fight against accurate, fast and cheap spread of ideas, knowledge and culture.
This struggle culminated in January 13, 1535 in France, when, at the request of the Catholic Church, a law was passed completely prohibiting typography and any use of printed presses on pain of death by hanging.
And the law was extremely ineffective. A dense chain of pirate printing houses grew along the borders of France, and books were easily smuggled into the country, satisfying the thirst for knowledge.
The second part: Bloody Mary .
In this series of seven articles, I want to tell the story of copyright from 1350 to the present day. This story is quite different from what is usually told by representatives of the copyright industry.
We will start with the arrival in Europe of the black death in the 1350s. European countries suffered from a plague no less than the rest of the world. It took Europe more than 150 years to regain its political, economic and social position after the epidemic.
Religious institutions recovered more slowly than others. They not only suffered more because of the compact residence of monks and nuns in monasteries, but also did not make up for the losses so quickly, since in the decades after the plague, the economy experienced a strong shortage of workers, and people rarely went to monasteries or gave their children there .
')
What does all this have to do with the topic of the article? The fact is that then it was in the monasteries that the lion’s share of books was produced. If you needed a copy of the book, you ordered it in the monastery scriptorium, and the monks copied it for you. Manually. Copies were not perfect - some errors were corrected by the scribe, but new ones were added as well.
In addition, since all the census takers worked under the authority of the Catholic Church, there were strict restrictions on which books could be copied and distributed. Anything that at least slightly diverged from the official position of the Vatican, it was almost impossible to get. And the production of books required a lot of very expensive raw materials - 170 calf or 300 sheep skins took one copy of the Bible.
By 1450, the monasteries still lacked labor, and the census takers were very expensive. And without that huge because of materials the price of the book became just astronomical, taking into account the cost of work. In 1451, Johannes Gutenberg worked out a typography technique using a printing press, metal type-setting fonts, and oil-based inks. Around the same time, the paper-making recipe brought from China was spread. Manual rewriting of books quickly turned out to be outdated technology.
Typography produced a revolution in society, creating the opportunity to disseminate information quickly, cheaply and efficiently.
The Catholic Church, which used to completely control the distribution of books (and made a good profit on their shortage) was furious. She could no longer influence what information could be disseminated, could not decide what people could know and what could not, and therefore pressed on the secular authorities to forbid technology that was so dangerous for them.
To convince people of the advantages of the old order, many arguments were used. It is worth noting one of them: "How now the poor monks will earn a living?".
In the end, the church was forced to retreat, freeing the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation, but only after a lot of blood was shed in the fight against accurate, fast and cheap spread of ideas, knowledge and culture.
This struggle culminated in January 13, 1535 in France, when, at the request of the Catholic Church, a law was passed completely prohibiting typography and any use of printed presses on pain of death by hanging.
And the law was extremely ineffective. A dense chain of pirate printing houses grew along the borders of France, and books were easily smuggled into the country, satisfying the thirst for knowledge.
The second part: Bloody Mary .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/162005/
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