Three Eras of Copying

Randy Picker has been doing an excellent series of posts on the evolution of copying technologies. Today’s installment is particularly good:

In the monk era—the pre-printing press era—all copying was done by hand. These were manuscripts copied one-by-one in the scriptorium. There weren’t strong advantages—economies of scale if we are going to be economists—in producing second copies. All copies were expensive and the author/publisher, having produced one copy of the work, was no better situated to make another copy of the work than would be any holder of the work. To be sure, the technology of copying—the ability to read and write—may not have been widely distributed, so this was a key way in which copies were controlled, but presumably only the literate were much interested in copies anyhow, and for the literate, the costs of producing the second copy were high but roughly identical to the costs of the author.

The printing press changed all of that. The printing press obviously lowered printing costs generally, but note what it did for second-copy costs. Those costs dropped dramatically for publishers but changed very little for someone in possession of a physical copy of the book. Before, in the handcrafted era of the monks, publishers and copy holders faced the same, very high, second-copy costs. In the Gutenberg era, the author/publisher was much better situated than a copy recipient to produce another copy. That cost advantage served as an important way in which the effective rights of the author/publisher to control copies were made meaningful. This is not to say that we didn’t have piracy, but it was of a different sort, say a printer running a secret print runs for a pirate.

The third era of copying is defined by cheap, symmetric copying technology. The company then known as Haloid Co. created the modern era of copying in 1959, when it introduced its new 914 product line. Haloid had created the first automatic plain-paper copier based on its xerography copying process, and soon changed its name to Xerox. Before Xerox, copies were made using clumsy technologies such as carbon paper. I remember carbon paper from my childhood, but you might not even know what it is. You put a piece of carbon paper between two sheets of plain paper, rolled all three sheets together into a typewriter and banged away. The typewriter key struck the typewriter ribbon, which in turn made an imprint on the first plain sheet. The carbon paper then put that same imprint on the second plain sheet, so two copies were created. Don’t even ask how you fixed a mistake if you typed “there” when you really meant “three.”

Before Xerox, in the mid-1950s, we were making 20 million copies a year in the United States. With the 914, by 1965, we were up to 9.5 billion. One year later, 14 billion. By 1985, we were making 700 billion copies across the globe. The numbers are staggering, but also don’t miss the key change in control. Authors made carbon copies, not readers. The person who received a carbon copy of a manuscript couldn’t easily create another copy from that copy. You could retype the entire manuscript of course, but that is no different than our monks who could re-copy medieval texts by hand. But with xeroxing, you could make a copy from a copy. Xerox decentralized copying. It moved control from others to users and it altered the consequences of the copy. A copy carried with it the ability to be copied. Xerox broke the control defined by Gutenberg.

The central question of copyright law in the next 50 years or so will be whether that authorial control can be re-captured. The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is probably “no.” But I’m not sure exactly what implications this insight has for copyright policy.

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