Copyright
The need for copyright did not arise until the
invention of the printing press in the 16th century,
when the copying of documents became easy. In
England a monopoly was granted to the Stationers’
Company. Members of this company
were the only people who could print documents,
and in exchange for this monopoly they undertook
to censor, on political and religious grounds,
everything which was printed. This is another
example of a ‘deal’ being struck between the
state and the owner of the intellectual property.
Nowadays no such ‘contract’ applies, as in the
U.K. copyright is usually automatic, so long
as date and exclusivity of authorship can be
demonstrated.
Whereas patents are meant to protect an
inventive idea, copyright is meant to protect an
embodiment of that idea. For example the plots
of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘Romeo and
Juliet’ are Shakespeare’s original ideas, and ‘Kiss
Me Kate’ and ‘West Side Story’ are embodiments,
fashioned by others, of those ideas. These
separate embodiments have their own protection
in copyright. Copyright protects literary, dramatic,
musical and artistic works, sound recordings,
films and broadcasts by giving legal
rights to the originators so that they may control
the copying, adaptation, publishing, performing
and broadcasting of the material (Hodkinson,
1987). Additionally in the U.K. it is sometimes
possible to protect the design of an industrial
product by means of the copyright which resides
in the original drawings on which the product is
based. Copyright is a collection of separate legal
rights each of which is specific to the type of
material in question