Name: Technologies of freedom
ISBN: 9780674872332

What Hacker News says

njudahMay 2020

There is about 70 years of established case law on this. For a primer, read Technologies of Freedom. (https://www.amazon.com/Technologies-Freedom-Belknap-Press-It...)

All that said, the concept of where and how to apply common carrier is of course controversial, hence the entire net neutrality debate. If an ISP isn't required to carry content the idea of an information service (ie Twitter) being required to is borderline absurd.

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saurikOct 2022

FWIW, the most obvious Google search found this within a few seconds:

https://www.techdirt.com/2010/08/11/the-cycle-of-copyright-o...

Which references this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110616151937/http://www.telerea...

As its source for this:

https://open-spaces.com/articles/the-purpose-of-copyright/

Where we find an explanation:

> In 1557, the desires of the booksellers and the desires of the crown coincided. The crown perceived the need to gain greater control over “the dangerous possibilities of the printed word” and so granted a royal charter to the Stationers’ Company that limited most printing to only members of the company. This charter also empowered the company to search out and destroy “unlawful” books, which gave the guild the public enforcement mechanism for its private law. If a nonmember was printing a work that had been registered with the company by a member, the nonmember could now be stopped. It also meant that if a work which was disagreeable to the crown was being published, it too could be stopped. This arrangement provided the crown with added policemen to enforce its goal to control printed works. Censorship was born.

But like, once I found that, I immediately realized that we can just look at Wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

> The origin of copyright law in most European countries lies in efforts by the church and governments to regulate and control the output of printers.[9] Before the invention of the printing press, a writing, once created, could only be physically multiplied by the highly laborious and error-prone process of manual copying by scribes. An elaborate system of censorship and control over scribes did not exist, as scribes were scattered and worked on single manuscripts.[10] Printing allowed for multiple exact copies of a work, leading to a more rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information (see print culture).[9] In 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time.[10]

Which cites:

[9]: MacQueen, Hector L; Charlotte Waelde; Graeme T Laurie (2007). Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy. Oxford University Press. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-19-926339-4.

https://www.google.com/books?id=_Iwcn4pT0OoC&dq=contemporary...

[10]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2.

https://books.google.com/books?id=BzLXGUxV4CkC&q=Areopagitic...

There is another, much more detailed paragraph, which starts a bit later with:

> As the "menace" of printing spread, governments established centralized control mechanisms,[16] and in 1557 the English Crown thought to stem the flow of seditious and heretical books by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was limited to the members of that guild, and thirty years later the Star Chamber was chartered to curtail the "greate enormities and abuses" of "dyvers contentyous and disorderlye persons professinge the arte or mystere of pryntinge or selling of books." The right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had 53 printing presses. The French crown also repressed printing, and printer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546.

Citing a different page of the same source as 10:

[16]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2.

https://archive.org/details/technologiesoffr00ithi/page/15

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such12Oct 2022

Very helpful. So it's reasonable to concede that in Europe, and only in Europe, the origin of copyright was in censorship and the protection of profits for publishers.

However, the US is an entirely different story. Turning the page on your preferred source:

[16]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2. https://archive.org/details/technologiesoffr00ithi/page/15

We see the following:

American legislators and courts rejected these three abuses which publishing had suffered in their country of origin: licensing of the press, special taxes on the press, and prosecution for criminal libel.

The unconstitutionality of licensing, which the American courts referred to as "previous" or "prior restraint," was decided as early as 1825. The tradition against special taxes on the press, which British protestors such as Richard Cobden called "taxes on knowledge," was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1936 And the prohibition against criminal libel suits became an American tradition in the 1735 trial of Peter Zenger, accused of libeling the governor of New York.

The colonial jury, disregarding the judge's instructions on the law, acquitted Zenger and thus made the law. Since 1964, libel suits brought by public officials or public figures against their critics, even when brought in their own capacity and not by the state, have been greatly restricted by the courts.

The colonists' rejection of the various British attempts to impose government authority over the press were incorporated into the American Constitution by the First Amendment. This amendment creates a domain- of speech, religion, and press in which the activities of private citizens shall be unregulated by government. "Con-gress," it says, "shall make no law ... abridging freedom of speech or of the press."

But the First Amendment is just one of three clauses in the Constitution that deal specifically with communications. Another is the copyright provision in Article 1, Section 8: "Congress shall have the power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In Britain the practice of copyright, though not the word, began at the founding of the Stationers' Company when, for enforcement, the company was given the right to search for and seize anything printed contrary to statute or proclamation. Eight years later the company, under this power, created a system of copyright for its members. In 1709 the first copyright act for authors was passed by Parliament. The new notion of intellectual property represented by copyright was rooted in the technology of print. The printing press was a bottleneck where copies could be examined and controlled. In the passage from the author's pen to the reader's hand, the press was the logical place to apply controls, be it to censor sacrilege or sedition or to protect the author's intellectual property.

For modes of reproduction where such an easy locus of control as the printing press did not exist, the concept of copyright was not ap-plied. It was not applied to conversation, or to speeches, or to the singing of songs whether in private or in public. Copyright was a specific adaption to a specific technology. The common law recognized this fact. The landmark case in the United States denied copyright protection to piano rolls because they were not "writings" in a tangible form readable by a human being.

This concept of copyright excluded from protection many new technologies of communi-cation. But the motion picture industry, the recording industry, and more recently the broadcasting industry have all persuaded Congress to give them the protection that the courts proved unwilling to give.

The third provision in the Constitution dealing with communications gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads. 23 This provision put the federal government into the common carrier business. Only one of today's carrier systems then ex-isted, the mails. A post office had been permanently established in Britain in 1656 and in the colonies in 1711.

Before that, the crown had farmed out grants and patents to private entrepreneurs to carry government correspondence. To make these franchises attractive, the franchisees were also allowed to carry letters for the general public for a fee, and others were forbidden to compete with the chosen carriers in doing so. This scheme for providing government with cheap communication was the origin of the postal monopoly. When governments started carrying the mails themselves, the monopoly principle was further reinforced.

After American independence, the fiscal tradition of the post as a source of revenue was retained, and so was the practice of monop-oly. In the 1820s the balance of public policy shifted from one of subordinating the post office to the treasury department as a producer of revenue, to promoting it to a full-fledged department of government, consecrated above all to extending the benefits of development to remote parts of the country at a rapid pace. Still another important as well as expensive social goal pursued through the post office in the nineteenth century was the diffusion of knowledge.

Newspapers, and later books and magazines, were given large subsidies in mail rates. The constitutional injunctions to the federal government with regard to communications were thus in appearance somewhat contra-dictory, though in fact their goals were quite consistent. In one clause the government was told to keep its legislative hands off of speech and press, while in two others it was told to promote the conveyance of knowledge by means of copyright and postal service. But both the injunctions to restraint and the injunction to governmental activism had the common goal of facilitating autonomous communication by private individuals.

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