Piracy and Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual property piracy has a long history. Today, corporations in the United States lose billions of dollars every year to intellectual property theft. However, this may just be bad karma coming back around. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790. The act implicitly allowed for the theft of foreign works, and that implication was taken advantage of as American authors profited off of foreign works passing off others written knowledge as if it were their own. However, to find the birth of intellectual rights, one must travel all the way back to seventeenth century London to a historical location known as Stationer’s Hall.

If an author was considering publishing their works, they would make an entry in a 650 page registry. This would provide some proof that the author was the original producer of the published works. The keepers of the registry held their duties to the upmost importance. Dating back to the sixteenth century, the book has survived such catastrophes as the Great London Fires. Formal meetings were held among prominent booksellers and publishers to constitute the authority in which they invested in the registry. Unfortunately this authority vested in the founders of the registry book would not go unopposed, medieval politics would soon intervene.

In the middle ages, no one was to challenge the king’s authority. Although the powers to protect the intellectual thoughts of writers did not oppose any laws made by the king at the time, it did however place a sort of power in the hands of a small faction that was not appointed by the king making it seem as if the founders of the registry felt empowered enough to enact their own laws. A political battle that ensued would ...

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...tuted The National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), for the purpose of establishing and regulating “minimum standards of educational fair use.”

The 1976 revision of the U.S. Copyright Act would is the last major revision to date. Currently courts rely on precedent to settle most case disputes. Today there are many more new acts and laws that cover new technologies that were unforeseeable in 1976 and small extensions on property ownership term lengths. Today, the registry that started it all, the Stationers Hall Registry, can be found at the National Archives in the United Kingdom. Its story is still held to this day to be one of the main reasons that started the English Civil War. The fact that a civil could have been started by a simple registry gives credit to just how important intellectual property rights are to society.