by Universal Cynic

Created on: June 15, 2009   Last Updated: June 16, 2009

Is copyright law a form of censorship?

For over at least 11 thousand years, civilization has managed to advance very rapidly thanks to the spread of knowledge. When writing first originated in Mesopotamia, it allowed the rapid spread of all kinds of wisdom and knowledge. Such knowledge includes the history of ancient societies, the stories of the Gods, technology, mathematics, science, finance, and politics. When the printing press was invented by Gutenberg in Germany during the 1400s, the spread of knowledge accelerated as more and more people are able to read and write. This allowed the society to flourish as it did in Europe. This also encouraged the spread of the Renaissance from Italy to the rest of Continental Europe.

Thanks to the lack of restrictions on information and thought, all kinds of ideas were permitted to travel around Europe, leading to new and better innovations and smarter ways of doing things. If there were restrictions on information, we probably would have never had a da Vinci, Galileo, Copernicus, Michael Angelo or any of the great thinkers, and polymaths of the Renaissance who aided the growth of European culture and society. Thanks to lack of control over information, many more people were able to think, and to write, and to speak their mind. Of course, while there were benefits, the Catholic Church also tried to use printing to spread its own discourse throughout Europe. Power itself was more diverted to the nobles and the middle class during the Renaissance as the printing press allowed free thought to prosper. Also, it allowed the rise of print propaganda and eventually, more subtle forms of censorship by omission.

Many inventions and ideas came out of the Renaissance period, thanks to the freedom of information. For four hundred years since then, there was little or no restriction on information, although the government and the state did become more and more ominous and opaque, and shady in their operations through the use of the printing press. Long before the American Revolution, there was no copyright law, and although there existed perhaps very subtle forms of censorship, copyright law did not exist.

It was around the 1700s that the British first enacted copyright law that was aimed at protecting the author of a particular work for a standard period of time. This was known as the Statute of Anne, written in 1710. The United States also copied this idea, or at least followed suit when Congress was allowed to make, "copyright

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