COPYRIGHT AND OTHER RIGHTS

The practice of a writer or artist laying claim to his or her own work is an ancient one in the West and goes beyond the limitations of literacy into textual communities that included both oral and written transmission. By 500 BCE, for example, chefs in the Greek city of Sybaris in Calabria were granted year-long monopolies on their culinary creations. The authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey was long attributed to Homer even before they were transcribed into writing. In ancient Rome writers like Cicero would have their own literate slaves, or would rely on those of friends, to produce multiple copies of their works to be distributed among their textual community. The accuracy and authenticity of their texts would be guaranteed by their authors' direct supervision of this process. Writers like Virgil and Horace became celebrated writers in their own lifetimes, and the Roman poet Martial complained of piracy of his works when they were recited without attribution. By the late eleventh century in the medieval West, the oral traditions of the chansons de geste were slowly taking on ascribed authorship as various versions became recognized. Under the late medieval patronage system, the dedication of an author's book to a wealthy patron not only guaranteed some form of income or social promotion but also acted as a means of informal princely protection for authorship.

During the Renaissance the first Florentine law that can be characterized as patent or copyright was granted to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi in June 1421. It is probably no coincidence that the first satire of this concept was Antonio Manetti's fictional tale, The Fat Woodworker (c. 1450). Manetti relates how – in revenge for a social slight – the craftsman in question is duped in a practical joke by Brunelleschi and his friends into believing that he longer existed, but that he was actually someone else, a copy of himself.