From the Forum on Intellectual Property in the February 2009
issue of Perspectives on History The New World of Publishing and
New Directions in Intellectual Property For the past 15 years or
so, historians have largely been the observers as new
technologies have precipitated a crisis in copyright. This
crisis is best understood by putting copyright into historical
perspective. The Electronic Communications Revolution and Open
Access to Scholarship English copyright law developed in
response to a great technological revolution—the development of
the printing press, and a great cultural revolution—the growth
of literacy. These revolutions led to a struggle over the
control of the value that could be secured from the transmission
of information, ideas, and art in print. The struggle was
resolved in law from the 1660s to 1710, a time in which
progressive forces that opposed monopoly and favored the dynamic
use of property—what we now refer to as entrepreneurship—were
stronger than conservative, static property in