Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-versus-community--7fb8ed-That went on for thousands of/en

That went on for thousands of years, but then there was a big advance in copying technology, namely the printing press. The printing press made copying more efficient, but not uniformly. [This was] because mass production copying became a lot more efficient, but making one copy at a time didn't benefit from the printing press. In fact, you were better off just writing it by hand; that would be faster than trying to print one copy.