Pirates of the Commons

Nice essay in the Hindu by Sudhakar Thaths Chandrasekharan yesterday. Thanks to Peter Suber for the link.

"CONTROLLING access to literary works to prevent copies from being made is a practice that goes back millennia. The Royal Library of Alexandria was so notoriously difficult to get into that Ptolemy III had to bribe his way in with 15 talents of silver.

Innovations do not bloom in an intellectual vacuum where access to knowledge is controlled. Jared Diamond, in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed says that societies that restricted mobile exchange of ideas sowed the seeds of their own demise...

During Europe's Dark Ages many treasures of classical antiquity almost disappeared in book burnings by religious zealots. They were only saved from oblivion by a few pious Irish monks committed to copy and share works of learning."

The latter paragraph strikes a particular resonance at the moment, as the first chapter of my forthcoming book deals with a dispute between two monks in Ireland in the 6th century over the copying of a book, which led to the deaths of 3000 men. The remarkable thing is that the arguments over copying have lasted through the centuries and re-appear in modern day copyright cases. The only thing that has changed is the context.