[plug] Re: "stealing"?

Colin Muller colin at twobluedots.com.au
Mon Nov 18 12:39:38 WST 2002


On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 11:36:12AM +0800, James Elliott wrote:
> The reason copyright laws exist is partly so that the community as a
> whole can share one human's contribution to the advancement of man.

Here are some things which were invented and shared before copyrights
and patents were:

Fire, Paint, Ceramics, Bow and Arrow, Needle, Boat, Brick, Irrigation,
Writing, Wheel, Ink, Plumb Line, Lavatory, Tunnel, Chariot, Alphabet,
Sling, Bells, Saw, Aqueduct, Coins, Map, Abacus, Catapult, Archimedes'
Screw, Mill, Paper, Dome, Windmill, Napalm, Gunpowder, Cannon, Hand
Cannon.

And here are some which came before copyright, but after patents were
introduced, although I do not know whether patents were ever issued
for them: Trigger, Grenade, Diving Bell, Condom, Pencil, Logarithms,
Submarine 

Source for the above items:
http://www.grimsbywebfind.com/sites/inventions_of_the_world_timeline.htm
Source for patent info:
http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/history/fivehundred/origins.htm

You could add to that the compass (ancient China), and no doubt a lot
more.

> Who would bother writing a novel if they were not gong to get paid
> for it?  Are you saying the world would be better off with no books?

Copyright and getting paid are not necessarily the same thing (which
was the point of my original response to Leon, who, unlike some
others, immediately saw what I meant).

Here are some of the things which were written before copyright
recognised the rights  of authors (in 1710); most were written before
the first great printers' monopoly, which started in 1556 in England
and is seen as the first step towards copyright:

800 or earlier B.C.E. Homer's Iliad & Odyssey
400 B.C.E. Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles - Greek tragedy
Aristophanes - Greek comedy
400 B.C.E. Plato - The Republic, Dialogues
350 B.C.E. Aristotle - Logic, Physics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetics
250 B.C.E. Septuagint translation of Hebrew Scriptures (Pentateuch)
into Greek
50 B.C.E. Cicero
25 B.C.E. Vergil - Aeneid
117 Tacitus - Historiae
150 Greek Canon (New Testament) writing completed
400 Jerome translates scripture into Latin
413-426 Augustine - City Of God
700 Beowulf
1000 Beginning of Arthurian Legend
1200 Thomas Aquinas - scholasticism
1300 Dante - Divine Comedy, Inferno
1400 Chaucer - Canterbury Tales
1525 Luther translates scripture into German
1600 Shakespeare
1611 King James translation of scripture

For these items, see http://www.textweek.com/litline.htm

You have to wonder why they bothered, don't you?

Colin



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