A really novel revisionist piece of historical research–excerpts from an article about it in Spiegel Online:
No Copyright Law
The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?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 [Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts] and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century…
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.
Germany, on the other hand, didn’t bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany’s biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany’s continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire…
In Germany…publishers had plagiarizers — who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment — breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.
A Multitude of Treatises
This created a book market very different from the one found in England. Bestsellers and academic works were introduced to the German public in large numbers and at extremely low prices…
The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his “Principles of Leather Tanning” published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel “Frankenstein,” which is still famous today…
Mark
Ottawa
[...] Earlier: And you thought the Rechtsstaat was central to Germans (until Hitler) [...]
[...] Economic historian Eckhard Höner’s research on 19th century Germany suggests that a weak copyright system for books may have spurred economic growth by making technical manuals and other practical books much cheaper than in Britain, the first industrial nation. For most the 19th century, the German-speaking countries lacked a unified copyright law, which meant that pirate printers were able to shop around for principalities with conveniently lax laws. [It should be noted that the US in this period was also notorious for pirated editions of British authors]. The German-speaking countries lacked such a copyright law because they were politically fragmented, even after 1871. Höner has argued that Germany’s rapid catch-up with England was due, in part, to the absence of copyright laws. It was sort of a substitute for technical colleges, although Germany had plenty of those too. See here, here, and here. [...]