All About the Money? Authorship and Copyright in Ancient Rome

Abstract

This paper aims at studying some aspects of intellectual property in ancient Rome, from the beginnings of Roman literature to the times of Trajan, and especially the tie between writing and rewards. If this tie is clearly established for some authors such as Plautus, it was not the most important for most of Roman authors of the Republican times, and the material rewarding was even inexistant for many of them including Pliny the Younger. Thus the ancient Rome offers an another model to consider at a time where the copyright rules in the field of intellectual property.