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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 4700076" data-attributes="member: 30936">Mainly because every time it's occurred in the past few hundred years it's been a bad thing.Socialist realism, Nazi propaganda films, the Stationer's Company.Heck, let's actually look at the Stationer's Company, as that was what lead to the creation of copyright in the first place. It used to be in England that if your wrote a book you had two choices. You could make manuscripts (this was before the printing press) on your own and give them away, or you could sell the book to the Stationers Company and go write something else while they copied it and sold the copies and kept all the money. When the printing press came along, nothing changed, except that the Company made more money because printing was cheaper the copying, and printing was far faster.This, combined with a few short stints as the Crown's censor, led to the Statute of Anne which granted the sole right to copy a work to the author for a period of 14 years. Copyright came into existence to allow authors to get paid for their work, rather then having to sell it to a government monopoly for a one time fee and then starve while they became rich off it.</blockquote>