Quote:
Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry
What was the copyright term in Shakespeare's day? Or Dante's? Were long copyright's necessary to Boccaccio or Du Fu? What's in our real interest here?
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For
unauthorized copies to represent a threat to one's writing income, one's writing income needs to be primarily dependent on sales of
legitimate copies.
This was not the case for any of the four people you've mentioned, whose writing income was primarily derived via the patronage system. (Shakespeare would have earned additional income from ticket sales, of course, but if I understand it correctly, the royal subsidies were what really made the new productions possible.)
Presumably, when poets died back then, their patrons stopped subsidizing them. There was nothing but already-paid commissions, and the investments of them, to pass on to one's heirs.
If anyone owned the rights to a poet's work under the patronage system, wouldn't it have been the patron, just as the patron would own a piece of artwork he or she had commissioned?* I can't see an artist's son waltzing into the Medici court and saying, "Hey, that's my late father's fresco, and you'll have to pay me to keep using it."
Nowadays, an artist's heir might still control sales of reproductions of such a fresco. But copyright as we know it today wasn't a concept back then. It wasn't until pirated copies of books started cutting into bookprinters' own profits--a situation requiring a critical mass of printing presses and a critical mass of literate people willing and able to buy printed matter--that anyone started making the kind of noises about copyright that sound anything like the ones of today.
(Actually, the very first rumblings about copyright were from Church and secular authorities, regarding whether or not something had passed their censors and been given their official permission to be circulated in the first place. Quite the opposite of protecting the author's or bookprinters' rights or freedoms. But I digress.)
*[Edited to say--I may be wrong about this. The folks who gathered Shakespeare's stuff into the First Folio didn't seem to have had to ask either the Crown's or Shakespeare's family's permission, or pay any fees. (I hope someone who really knows will pipe up. I don't have time to research this right now.)]