Actually, Random, Google did no such thing. When I went to go "manage" books I had authored (every one of which featured my name in the credits, and two of which were not even out of print), I found nearly a dozen works that had been "acquired" by Googlebooks. I had not been contacted in any way, shape or form by Google before this was done, and as Dami stated above, I was one of the publishers whose work had been "acquired." In this matter, you are wrong.
(I also add that "managing" my work away from Google's "we downloaded it so we own and can sell it" venture took me the better part of a day's worth of deeply frustrating work. Their interface was extremely awkward, time-consuming and labor-intensive. And that was just to "manage" - read: re-acquire rights I had already owned - 10 or 12 books. A more famous or prolific author - like Elizabeth Moon, who alerted us to the Googlebooks fiasco - could easily spend several days doing so.)
As for the history of copyright, it's worth noting that mass recording and distribution technology did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of it did not exist prior to the 20th century. The printing press alone did not suddenly transform the distribution of creative work. Until the mid-1700s, the majority of printed works were bibles, political broadsides (themselves a creative work, but one meant for public distribution) and a handful of scientific works. As the Industrial Revolution made printing and distribution cheaper, the battle between authors and publishers intensified. Many authors saw their labor - and, as I point out below, writing is labor - exploited by anyone with a printing press. The "starving artist" archetype dates to the time when people like Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent van Gough were swindled out of the money their work should have earned because some dude with a printing press thought it'd be nifty to reprint their works without offering compensation or sharing the generated profits. It took authors and artists who had either the resources of nobility (Lord Leighton), the means and willingness to fight for their rights in court (Charles Dickens), or both to make copyright law as we now understand it exist. The "lousy" expansion of "privilege" regarding copyright has involved a hard-fought battle between producers of content (aka writers, artists and musicians) and people who have little or no connection to the labor involved but who merely own the means of replication and distribution. With the current technology, that battle is larger and more important than ever.
By the way, the "privilege" you refer to is no more or less than the right of a person to be compensated for his or her labor.
You say an artist should "charge per job." Random, until the last two centuries, that's exactly what creative professionals did. A tale-teller told her story to the audience, and that audience rewarded her with sustenance. There was no way a mass audience could receive that person's labor without being in her presence. Sure, we have the occasional transcriptions of Classical Greek or Elizabethan plays, but those works were - until the 20th century - the property of a tiny audience that paid dearly for the privilege of acquiring them. Until the combination of printing and recording equipment, mass production, widespread distribution, and cheap materials and manufacture, creative property involved the immediate labor of the artist and the immediate presence of the audience. Even the painters and sculptors whose work adorned palaces and cathedrals were rewarded with patronage; their works could not be reproduced without additional labor (often by apprentices or students, who were likewise rewarded), and even that process was limited to small-scale reproduction. Art was paid for "by the job," and creative professionals were regarded far more highly that we are today because remote access to our work simply didn't exist.
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(I also add that "managing" my work away from Google's "we downloaded it so we own and can sell it" venture took me the better part of a day's worth of deeply frustrating work. Their interface was extremely awkward, time-consuming and labor-intensive. And that was just to "manage" - read: re-acquire rights I had already owned - 10 or 12 books. A more famous or prolific author - like Elizabeth Moon, who alerted us to the Googlebooks fiasco - could easily spend several days doing so.)
As for the history of copyright, it's worth noting that mass recording and distribution technology did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of it did not exist prior to the 20th century. The printing press alone did not suddenly transform the distribution of creative work. Until the mid-1700s, the majority of printed works were bibles, political broadsides (themselves a creative work, but one meant for public distribution) and a handful of scientific works. As the Industrial Revolution made printing and distribution cheaper, the battle between authors and publishers intensified. Many authors saw their labor - and, as I point out below, writing is labor - exploited by anyone with a printing press. The "starving artist" archetype dates to the time when people like Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent van Gough were swindled out of the money their work should have earned because some dude with a printing press thought it'd be nifty to reprint their works without offering compensation or sharing the generated profits. It took authors and artists who had either the resources of nobility (Lord Leighton), the means and willingness to fight for their rights in court (Charles Dickens), or both to make copyright law as we now understand it exist. The "lousy" expansion of "privilege" regarding copyright has involved a hard-fought battle between producers of content (aka writers, artists and musicians) and people who have little or no connection to the labor involved but who merely own the means of replication and distribution. With the current technology, that battle is larger and more important than ever.
By the way, the "privilege" you refer to is no more or less than the right of a person to be compensated for his or her labor.
You say an artist should "charge per job." Random, until the last two centuries, that's exactly what creative professionals did. A tale-teller told her story to the audience, and that audience rewarded her with sustenance. There was no way a mass audience could receive that person's labor without being in her presence. Sure, we have the occasional transcriptions of Classical Greek or Elizabethan plays, but those works were - until the 20th century - the property of a tiny audience that paid dearly for the privilege of acquiring them. Until the combination of printing and recording equipment, mass production, widespread distribution, and cheap materials and manufacture, creative property involved the immediate labor of the artist and the immediate presence of the audience. Even the painters and sculptors whose work adorned palaces and cathedrals were rewarded with patronage; their works could not be reproduced without additional labor (often by apprentices or students, who were likewise rewarded), and even that process was limited to small-scale reproduction. Art was paid for "by the job," and creative professionals were regarded far more highly that we are today because remote access to our work simply didn't exist.
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