Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-and-globalization--3183b1-Now as far as I can tell, ther/en

Now as far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the ancient world. Anyone who wanted to copy a book could copy the book. Later on, the printing press was developed and books started to be copied on the printing press. Now the printing press was not just a quantitative improvement in the ease of copying. It affected different kinds of copying unevenly because it introduced an inherent economy of scale. It was a lot of work to set the type and much less work to make many identical copies of the page. So the result was that copying books tended to become a centralized, mass-production activity. Copies of any given book would probably be made in only a few places.