Google Sends Repeat Infringers To Copyright School 182
maczealot writes "Google is launching a new 'Copyright School' for use as a re-education tool for offenders on YouTube. The apparent purpose being to head off additional legislation, lawsuits, regulation and other negative impacts to the site. They even have campy cartoon videos for this school."
Finally. (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, a sensible approach to copyright infringement. Instead of suing everyone in sight into oblivion, they've decided to follow the model used by traffic police. Force violators to attend "school" and try to educate them about the law and the dangers of violating it, instead of the shoot first, ask questions later approach.
I'm sure this won't work for everyone, but hopefully it will save a good number of people from being bankrupted.
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For copyright infringement? what dangers?
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For copyright infringement? what dangers?
The danger of being sentenced to watch those hybrid Rick Roll & Tube Girl videos. [shudder]
Re:Finally. (Score:4, Funny)
I'll spare you the link.
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But, but, but... That's how the law works. (Score:2)
You get into a lot of trouble.
That' the law's purpose. That's why it exists. They made up a law to get people in trouble for doing harmless stuff.
That video taught me that.
I say we listen to the fine video and abolish such a law.
It is clearly evil and endangers people and sea otters by making them juggle piranhas while firing themselves from a cannon.
It also promotes property damage and spontaneous litigation.
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"The danger of being sued." Exactly! And the first critical lesson in copyright school is... Don't upload anything involving Metallica in any way, shape, or form.
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Nah, the first lesson is not to watch or listen to anything which involves Metallica in any way, shape or form... :)
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I'm pretty sure it's a civil offense.
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or cause more $1,000 in 'damages'
Even using their logic, how can they prove you caused $1,000 in "damages"?
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I know, but they can't prove that any of the people would have bought it in the first place. They merely assume that everyone would have and go off of that.
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I'm fairly certain the only way you can get a criminal charge without distributing for profit is pre-release which is not only a criminal charge, but a felony.
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No. No they are not. They are neither criminals nor offenders at this stage.
They may be is they are found guilty or plead so in court proceedings, but an accusation alone does not make one a criminal.
"Alleged offenders" or "alleged criminals" would be more accurate.
Re:Finally. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally. (Score:4, Interesting)
There are further, and quite massive differences. Speed limits are a good idea, and, barring things like speed traps, are mostly fair. They make our roads safer. We have studies showing that there are fewer fatalities when speeds are lower. Saves gas too, which was the original intent of the national 55 mph speed limit.
Copyrights on the other hand, are legal fantasies, largely unenforceable on individuals. They are blatantly unfair. They cause more harm than good. What of all the works that were removed from the public domain without any compensation whatsoever to the public, each time copyright terms were extended? Robbery! Many of us understand this about copyrights, and no cheesy "educational" film is going to persuade us otherwise. I'm sure Google understands these films are nothing more than bad jokes at best, offensive to our intelligence and common sense. The propaganda is so badly done it should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent kids. Couldn't be any better than Capt. Copyright! It's little better than forcing rape victims to watch films implying it is all their fault because they didn't dress appropriately. But if it serves to appease the idiotic copyright extremists who might well be the only people on the planet who actually believe these films will win others over, while backfiring by helping to persuade more people that copyright laws are crazy, Google likes that. And so should we.
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You're comparing asking people not to breach copyright with blaming victims for the occurrence of crime.... talking of idiotic extremism.
Re:Finally. (Score:5, Insightful)
People really don't understand copyright - I've seen hundreds of videos with things like "I DO NOT OWN THIS SONG", "No Copyright infringement intended" etc. Admitting you don't own a song does not make it legal to copy it, and you are taking part in copyright infringement just by uploading a video you don't have copyright on. Whenever I've tried to point this out to people, I get the usual Idiocracy "you're a fag and your shit's all retarded" type responses from morons.
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I get the usual Idiocracy "you're a fag and your shit's all retarded"
Well, that's what you get for participating in YouTube comments.
I think it goes to show people do understand copyright - at least, they understand the moral premise that copyright should be based on, which is the right to be identified as the author of a work.
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Lack of attribution is a subset of copyright - it involves you copying it and passing the copy off as your own. People intrinsically see this as wrong - as opposed to copying, which is intuitively (and naturally) moral. It's only when you get governments handing out artificial monopolies that it becomes problematic. The fact that people's first reaction to defending themselves against copyright is to explicitly include attribution shows what people in general consider to be the most important - and the disj
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Because it's free (Score:2)
Because once it's created, making an extra copy doesn't cost anything.
Or rather, it costs the electricity of performing the copy operation, but that cost isn't borne by the creator, it's borne by the source of the copy, who (e.g.) in a peer-to-peer file sharing system volunteers that electricity to the recipient. On youtube, they have Google volunteering the electricity (so they can sell ads, of course).
So in the way people most often obtain copies in violation of copyright, they are not doing anything tha
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Right - there's a fairly sophisticated argument that can be put forward as to why it's a good idea to grant people a monopoly on the right to copy a work. The fact that you have to make that sophisticated argument, which only applies in certain times and places, supports the previous poster's claim that copying stuff isn't "intuitively and naturally" immoral. It might still be bad, even immoral, but what makes it bad isn't necessarily immediately obvious.
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I take issue with the fact that a writer expects to make $100,000 for writing a book for two years. The writer may put in only one year's worth of work into that book. If people believe the writer's work is worth that much, they can all buy a copy and make the author $1,000,000. Or, if it's not that good, maybe he or she will only make $50,000. The problem with artistic employment such as writing is that, since you don't punch a clock, you're inherently saying that you allow others to set the worth of your
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Meh, and I think people that believe copyright is the way things ought to be are brainwashed by the status quo, and lack the imagination or intellect to think beyond the current circumstances.
Things spread "virally" all the time. Someone tells a joke, which someone repeats to a friend. Should they go back and pay the originator a shiny nickel for the privilege? The only reason we think they should when it comes to books and music is that we've artificially commoditized those things via legislation. Jump bac
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I honestly think Stephen King is a decent writer, but doesn't deserve anywhere near the amount of money he makes.
There's an extremely simple reason that he makes a lot of money, which is that a lot of people buy his books, because a lot fo people enjoy reading his books. If all writing was freely copyable and distributable, he would make the same as a struggling, really bad poet who can't even get his friends to buy his books, i.e. nothing.
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Because once it's created, making an extra copy doesn't cost anything.
Or rather, it costs the electricity of performing the copy operation, but that cost isn't borne by the creator, it's borne by the source of the copy, who (e.g.) in a peer-to-peer file sharing system volunteers that electricity to the recipient. On youtube, they have Google volunteering the electricity (so they can sell ads, of course).
So in the way people most often obtain copies in violation of copyright, they are not doing anything that hurts the rights holder, and the people who bears a cost does so willingly. "No one was aggressed against" seems like an intuitive and natural moral standard, which is lived by in this scenario.
Look, you fucking moron, if everyone just copied everything, obviously no-one would ever get paid for anything. I would love to live in a moneyless utopia, but until we do, it is ridiculous not to see that artists need some compensation for their work.
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Copying another's actions is something else entirely. If someone else picks coconuts and sells them, and you also pick coconuts and sell them, you're simply competing fairly and equally. If someone else writes a book and sells it, and you get it for free and give it to others for free, that's not competing fairly and equally. It took you less work to copy the book than it did for the author to write it, so you need little or no compensation for your meager effort.
Put another way, if you wrote for a living a
Re:Finally. (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the usual Idiocracy "you're a fag and your shit's all retarded" type responses from morons.
I call bullshit. Even on the odd chance one of them didn't abbreviate "your" as "ur", no one commenting on Youtube uses apostrophes correctly.
Good faith (Score:2)
Admitting you don't own a song does not make it legal to copy it
However, as I understand it, good faith in identifying an underlying work's author does score brownie points for the "character of the use" factor if you are trying to build a fair use rationale for your transformative work.
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Admitting you don't own a song does not make it legal to copy it
However, as I understand it, good faith in identifying an underlying work's author does score brownie points for the "character of the use" factor if you are trying to build a fair use rationale for your transformative work.
The definition of "fair use" is not "I couldn't find out who owns the copyright so I copied it wholesale anyway".
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"Whenever I've tried to point this out to people, I get the usual Idiocracy 'you're a fag and your shit's all retarded' type responses from morons."
Welcome to Youtube, the biggest pile of stupid commenters since IMDB.
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No one understands copyright law, for that matter no one understands the law any more. Last weekend I was boxing up some old law books, specifically a copy of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations from about 15 years ago, this process took a couple of hours, resulted in 30+ linear feet of open shelf space. This is just the U.S. federal laws, not cases about interpreting the laws, or implementations of the law.
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in the case of traffic violations it makes for an effective transfer of money from citizens to the companies that run the traffic schools...
It also acts as a deterrent: if you don't stick to the rules you'll have your time wasted.
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I think you are missing the point of traffic school. Largely it's not to educated people on the laws it's to educate them on the potentially fatal consequences of their actions. Something that a lot of people don't understand. I'd wager that most people in traffic school have never been in a serve collision, had a loved on die, or understand 1/2mv^2 very well.
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What about the people who thinks that the current copyright laws are immoral and should not be accepted as a form of civil protest? Like the people who demonstrate in Egypt. Not that I make the situation in Egypt the same as the situation in Germany, but copyright law is of high concern to me because it invades my privacy and restricts my freedom unnecessary.
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What about the people who thinks that the current copyright laws are immoral and should not be accepted as a form of civil protest?
Yeah, that's what I think of when I think of copyright violators: "Courageous Freedom Fighters."
Like the people who demonstrate in Egypt
Here's the difference: The protestors in Egypt bravely marched in the streets, staring down heavily armed soldiers. Copyright violators cower in their parents' basements, staring down bags of Doritos.
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There's a massive difference between fighting for your fundamental human rights and disobeying an unpopular law but that doesn't mean ignoring the unpopular law is in some way an invalid protest. Many people in the UK refused to pay the poll tax, for instance, a few protested but many more just didn't pay it. Technically all they were doing is cowering at home but it was sufficient to get the unpopular law reversed.
No, if you didn't pay the poll tax you were on a list of people who still owed the money, and could have been pursued for it. Deliberately not paying a tax for which you are liable is a classic act of civil disobedience, the key thing is that it is not anonymous.
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People don't violate traffic laws because they don't understand them, they violate traffic laws because they don't think they'll get caught
That's true for some laws, but not all of them. For instance, how many drivers understand the exceptions for speed limits when overtaking? How many drivers understand that, if someone passes you on the right side, you are the driver who is violating the law? The general assumption is that the driver who generally behaves like an asshole is always right, and the driver who shows more ability to control the car and more awareness of what's happening around him on the road is in violation.
A similar situation e
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Honestly curious, why are you violating the law if someone passes you on the right?
You are blocking traffic
What are you expected to do?
Move to the right.
And: do you think it is true in every case?
Not in every jurisdiction, but there are many places where you can get a ticket for not using the rightmost available lane. Well, in theory at least, this seems to be one of the most ignored traffic rules.
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The Uniform Vehicle Code states "Upon all roadways any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic..."
While this is not 100% applied in every state, this is the generally accepted state of law in most states. Note it does not reference "the legal speed limit" but rather the "normal speed of traffic".
Whether a slower driver is in the legal right or
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This is such an issue that many states have laws requiring drivers to use the fast lane only for overtaking drivers in the slow lane.
It's an issue, but it's not an issue for the police. I frequently watch cops go around people on the right with no more than a glance to find out if the driver is a member of a targeted class, and I live in California where we need these laws the most because we have the most highways and the most drivers.
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Two words for you: wilful infringement
Once you have had the education about copyright and how what you are doing is bad you can no longer claim that you didn't realise, or didn't understand. You are educated, and there is a record of your education.
And as I understand it, wilful infringement hits you with triple damages... Hmm, well it appears to be that way for patent infringement but a quick scan doesn't seem to have the triple damages rule for wilful copyright infringement but does impact your damages.
There is a point to it, quite a nasty one.
1. Google gets to look good, educating the copyright infringers. Helps get the *IAAs off their back, probably because of point 2.
2. The *IAAs get to get higher damages and lower burden of proof for repeating offenders. After all if you've violated copyright many times before and been educated it's going to have a bearing on the trial judge and jury.
Z.
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The fact that all slashdotters ( and no, I'm not necessarily including you) lump all Apple users, or all Windows users, etc, into one group that is identical. Why can't we generalize about all slashdotters?
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Pffft! The only sensible approach now is an alternative to youtube that's more resistant to this bullshit. Some 'distributed' format maybe. Gotta be encrypted, or at least well hidden.
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Pffft! The only sensible approach now is an alternative to youtube that's more resistant to this bullshit. Some 'distributed' format maybe. Gotta be encrypted, or at least well hidden.
Oh, that site rolled out five years ago. But if you don't already know about it I'm not allowed to tell you any details. :)
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However, based on France's recent draconian data retention law [bbc.co.uk] I think I'll be closing my Dailymotion account.
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They should use this link (Score:2)
To professor Eric Faden @ Bucknell University's video, A Fair(y) Use Tale [youtube.com]
As their copyright school
What they should do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is force copyright owners who flag videos for no reason whatsoever to watch that as well.
Don't infringe copyright (unless you're a megacorp (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hi kids, today's topic is copyright law and how we're allowed to copy anything we like because we're a multi-billion dollar company and can afford more lawyers than God, while you're just a schlep at a computer who's going to have their ass sued and thrown into jail.
By the way have you heard of Google books....that's right if you can't find it at a used book store, chances are we've copied it to put online.
So remember kids, don't infringe copyright. Let us do it for you, and enjoy the ads!"
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The video sucks doubly for that reason...
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Have you ever seen what happens when some megacorporation like, say, Google, copies something from some other megacorporation like, say, Oracle?
This. [cnet.com] The litigation of which will probably outlive the comma and result in legal fees larger than the federal debt.
So, no, you can't make the blanket statement that corporations can just steal what they want because they have lawyers and money. Corporations have whole departments to prevent their employees from even inadvertently violating intellectual property r
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(and Hollywood ends up filming because it's realized the audience is incapable of spending money on original ideas, but really, they're only doing that because of market research, so it's the same dopes who send in their unoriginal ideas who are demanding and paying to see movies with those unoriginal ideas; it's all perfectly logical, and artless).
You're being unduly critical of the audience.
The reason Hollywood films are bland and derivative is because Hollywood makes blockbusters. A blockbuster might gross, say, $70 million. Now, that gross is from selling tickets at $7 a pop, meaning that they had to convince 10 million people to agree on what would be entertaining to watch.
If Hollywood was willing to make a movie that appealed to just one tenth the number of people, they could do far more novel stuff. But, they're in it for the money, and so they
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Well, no, I'm telling you what happened to the studios in the 80s that got us to where we are today where no Major studio makes anything other than a blockbuster.
They stopped listening to the artists and started listening, intently and without question, to the focus groups.
And as a result every one of their movies clocks that 10% penetration, and many go to 20% or more, and if Jimmy Cameron wants to film his next turd in 4-D Shittovision he'll probably pull another $billion from the trough. They don't give
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I can always afford more lawyers than someone who is committing a federal crime.
school? (Score:2)
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If this is anything like schools here are already, as soon as they show up, the doors will be locked and barred, they'll be run through the metal detectors, relieved of anything sharp or electronic, then shoveled into a cramped, hot room where they'll have to endure hours of someone talking at them and there will be no breaks to go to the bathroom.
That sounds like the last time I went through US Customs. And me being a US Citizen . . .
And after, you'll be fed a crappy lunch and told what a rotten person you are, and be given a letter to take home instructing everyone to love you less.
I thought that parents were there to tell you that. But they still won't kick you out of the basement . . .
Pot Calling the Kettle Black (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, I just watched the video... (Score:2)
I'm not really sure how effective it will be. The cartoon seemed more of a satire then educational. They should take a lesson from School House Rock on how to make educational cartoons that will be taken seriously.
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Viacom (Score:3)
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Very, very few people understand what "fair use" really is.
I'd estimate that for every hundred ignorant, entitled teenagers screaming about their fair use rights being violated, there's one person who actually does have his fair use rights violated. In my mind, that's an extremely generous and optimistic statement, because just about every single one of the screaming idiots I've seen so far thought that because they attributed the music in their video, it was now fair use. Sorry, but that's just not the w
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just about every single one of the screaming idiots I've seen so far thought that because they attributed the music in their video, it was now fair use.
Is it probably fair use if 1. you attribute the music, 2. your video includes only 20 seconds of each song in question, and 3. it is specifically about melodic similarities among multiple songs?
Re:Viacom (Score:4, Insightful)
Chances are they don't even own the rights, and so can't give you permission.
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Yeah, that's a distinct possibility, when you're dealing with modern media conglomerates, like the major labels or movie studios. While that does end up clouding the issue of whom to ask, it doesn't remove responsibility to do so. If the author doesn't have distribution rights, then I'm sure he/she/they can forward your request to the appropriate party.
I've found people using my photography without permission, and all it would have required is a simple e-mail. I've never done anything about it (life is t
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So are they going to send MAFIAA members to school too, when they claim that videos are infringing when actually they are making fair use?
It's not the MAFIAA lawyers' responsibility to determine what is and isn't fair use. If you're using something in a way that you believe is fair use, defending that assertion is your problem.
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Lenz v. Universal (Score:2)
Good Idea (Score:3)
Many people unknowingly confess to copyright violations in their You Tube postings.
They say things like: "I don't own this. It is owned by ViaNBCBS." That is like a total admission of guilt.
They need Copyright School to keep them away from civil liability!!
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Many people unknowingly confess to copyright violations in their You Tube postings.
I wouldn't say "unknowingly"...
But, really, given that Google's pretty good at identifying misappropriated content, one could say the only difference between being up-front about it and being evasive about it is that in the former case you're at least giving credit where it's due... That's not gonna help you legally, I think, but I think it's ultimately a more responsible way to conduct oneself.
Still, it's generally pretty funny when people try to legalese their way around the fact that they've just blatan
Bah.. Can Someone Send Me the Link (Score:2)
To the .torrent so I can watch it on my jail-broke iPad?
Campy Cartoon (Score:2)
HTF Seriously? (Score:2)
I am unable to believe that the authors of that video had any expectation whatsoever of it being taken seriously. It is clearly a parody of the heavy-handed system and ridicules the current state of affairs.
Happy Tree F(close page) (Score:3)
[Sees Happy Tree Friends.]
[Closes video damn fast.]
Watching the occasional campy video at work, I can get away with. Watching something with a rep for being NSFW no matter what the content of the actual video? Not so much.
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Campy Videos? (Score:2)
Lumpy and the Lumpettes (Score:2)
They should have a school for copyright trolls. (Score:2)
A few months ago another copyright troll (Kanobu Networks) tried doing this on a bunch of my videos that they ripped from my channel [youtube.com] (Yes they ripped my video, re-posted it and claimed copyright on the original vid
Irony (Score:3)
Unhappy Tree People Barred from Dislike (Score:2)
[Click anon shortened link]
[Sees start of Happy Tree Friends]
[Nauseated as soon as point becomes evident]
[Click DISLIKE button]
"This feature is not available right now. Please try again later."
Not to mention that comments are disabled on the video.
Yeah. And all te googlers bonus depends on social networky success this year. ROTFL.
Content was hammered in our brains without consent (Score:2)
News from a future newspaper: “A man was stopped yesterday at the boarder of Italy and France, his computer was scanned and pirated material was found, mostly Adobe software and songs by Beatles. The man was arrested at the spot”
From a poem to a drug, from an piece of software to a music record and from a film to a book, everything that’s famous and profitable, owns much of its economic value to the manipulation of the Multitudes. People haven’t asked to know what the Coca-Cola logo
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Back when "copy" meant "take a quill and scrawl out every single letter of the text yourself", and 99% of the audience was incapable of reading, there wasn't much theft of intellectual property.
Along comes the printing press and it still takes a major effort to individually lay out every single letter of the text on a plate, and paper still costs a fortune, and there's still no mass-market audience owing to the continuing single-digit literacy rate.
And then someone invents the linotype, and then photolithog
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He wrote plays though, which you could theoretically get away with a couple copies for an entire troupe. A copyright violator would only need to steal or create one copy to be able to replicate Shakespeare's act, which did happen more than once. Shakespeare himself complained about it, but that didn't stop him from writing more.
Also worth noting, the printing press was already in England by the time Shakespeare rolled around.
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"What??? Again?!?"