Surprising History of Copyright

This Thursday, 27 July 2006, Karl Fogel (of Google) is scheduled to chair a session at OSCON entitled: The (Surprising) History of Copyright, and What It Means for Open Source. You can view the abstract online, whence the following:

Much of today’s copyright debate is predicated on the notion that copyright was invented to subsidize authors, when it was actually invented to subsidize distributors … viewing copyright in this new light transforms the question from “Does copying hurt artists?” (no, and anyway copyright wasn’t about the artists) to “What kind of support mechanisms should distribution have today?”