[net-gold] No Copyright Law - The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

From: "David P. Dillard" <jwne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:48:28 -0400 (EDT)

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Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:44:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sue Fraser <xcschild@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: Net-Gold <Net-Gold@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Net-Gold] No Copyright Law - The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial
    Expansion?

No Copyright Law - The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

By Frank Thadeusz

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an
absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive
proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the
country's industrial might.

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for
books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic
Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans "a people of poets and thinkers."

"That famous phrase is completely misconstrued," declares economic historian
Eckhard Höffner, 44. "It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and
Schiller," he explains, "but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading
material was being produced in Germany."

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and
reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France,
Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new
publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population
numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were
published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the
Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great
Britain," Höffner states.

Equally Developed Industrial Nation

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10
times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner
believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the
colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century,
while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming
an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in
his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in
Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United
Kingdom.

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html

The entire article can be read at the above URL.

Sincerely,
Sue Fraser
xcschild@xxxxxxxxx

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[net-gold] No Copyright Law - The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

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