Libervis: Copyright... Copywrong

"The first copyright law, in the modern sense, was the English Statute of Anne, enacted in 1709. It granted exclusive rights to authors, rather than publishers, and it included protections for consumers of printed works, ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years (14 years with an optional renewal), after which all works would pass into the public domain.

"The purpose of the Statute of Anne, from the text itself, was to protect the author from unscrupulous publishers who would reprint and profit from the author's work without consent or compensation and thus lead 'too often to the Ruin of them and their Families...'"

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• Computerworld: It's Your Money(Nov 19, 2004)
• NewsForge: Why the Term 'Intellectual Property' is a Seductive Mirage(Oct 29, 2004)
• Community: Why Open Source IP Is Viable(Oct 25, 2004)