Re: History of copyright

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

I had mentioned the "establishment of Her Majesty's Stationery Office,"
which Leslie helpfully attributed to "Statute of 8 Anne 1714." As that
date was considerably later than the facts I was thinking of, I went and
checked my source (as I should have done in the beginning), and should
now say that what I meant was the incorporation by royal charter, in
1557, of "the Stationers' Company, whose history can be traced back to
1403." As C. S. Lewis points out (English Literature in the Sixteenth
Century, p. 62) this was important because "copy, duly entered in the
company's register, became the property of the bookseller who entered it.
As a result booksellers were now prepared to buy copy from authors," and
so the "professional author in the modern sense, the man [sc.
homo, not vir] who writes for the booksellers" could come
into existence. Interestingly, Lewis mentions that "gentlemen" disdained
such mercenary writing,and among them the age-old mechanism of living
while writing by finding a patron, who either paid one directly or found
some nice sinecure for one, continued to be the pattern.
	By the way, as an interesting example of what can happen if a manual
doesn't get reproduced, consider one client of mine: they're still using
PageMaker 5.0 (published by Aldus, and written to run under Windows 3.1),
because no one on the staff (it's a small weekly town paper) has the time
to learn the newer versions. When they upgraded their computers, they
simply copied the whole hard drive from the old one (with Win 3.1,
WordPerfect 6--one of the buggiest version of WP ever--and a whole lot of
other stuff) to a folder on the new hard drive. The result is that
they're running two or three "virtual DOS machines" under Win 98, and
though there's 128 Mb of physical RAM in the PC, there often is no more
than 1 or 2 Mb available. As a result, the setup is highly flaky and
prone to crash (even more so than is usual with MS's bloatware). I want
to reformat and reinstall everything, but cannot, because there is some
information about installation ONLY in the manual (which was lost,
stolen, or tossed years ago), and I cannot find a copy of this version's
manual ANYPLACE. Google never heard of PageMaker 5.
Patricia