zlacker

> Prior to 1710 there was no copyright, yet culture, art and civilization flourished. People were entertained, and entertainment products were certainly produced.

People, if they were entertained at all, were mostly self-entertained back then - they played instruments and such. There was hardly if any passive content consumption back then. Before 1710 there were no novels (novels as literary form weren't invented yet), obviously no movies, video games or music recordings. There was practically nothing to protect, apart from musical scores or theatre plays.

>>badpun+(OP)
And books.

I find it amusing that you reduced the works of Greek and Roman philosophers and poets, the entire Renaissance, the whole Library of Alexandria and indeed, the Bible, to "practically nothing."

I fail to see how, say, the Nth installment of Marvel movies is somewhat more worthy than all of that.

Movies which, I might add, are already hugely profitable, even though they're massively pirated.

>>badpun+(OP)
The modern novel predates 1710 by 50 to 100 years and was itself predated by many, many other forms of literary entertainment.

The sheer amount of work and content you are dismissing as "nothing apart from musical scores or theatre plays" is mind boggling.

>>shkkmo+Z8
They didn't exist as mass market products. Printing was expensive, so they were only accessible to the rich and literate. With one exception being the clergy.

>>senko+78
The OP was talking about "being entertained" - very few of the older works were written to entertain.

>>badpun+Ne1
Apart from being inconsequential (copyright makes no distinction between products for entertainment or otherwise), this is also incorrect.

Here are just a few examples off the top of my head, to whet your appetite:

- The OG superhero story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

- A fairly popular adventure story you might have heard about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey

- This one even has "comedy" in its name, if you needed convincing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy

>>paulry+hE
You should probably read the Cheese and the Worms, about how an average cheese seller in 1500s Germany read hundreds of books and talked about them passionately. Printing was expensive in the beginning of print but book historians have demonstrated convincingly that there was a huge circulation of books and copied media (i.s. teams of professional copyists) pre and antedating the printing press. Less than 30 years after the introduction of the press humanists talked about how the flood of books was so massive that no one could read them all in a lifetime. You are operating on an image of print that is historically wrong.