The legislative evolution of copyright in the late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Printing enabled rapid and practically unlimited distribution of works. It further gave rise to new questions: Who had the right to copy and sell books: the author or the publisher? And how could governments control the dissemination of undesirable works? The concept of copyright first took shape with the development of the printing press.1 Copyright was invented to answer these questions. The copyright holder was given right to control the public life of a work. During the sixteenth century, in England and France, entrepreneurs dealing with printing business asked their respective monarchs for ‘letters patent’ or privileges granting the right to print documents, such as statutes, religious books and legal texts.2 In the early eighteenth century, however, copyright law reshaped with the Enlightenment in the UK, when the Statute of Anne bestowed copyright to authors to break publisher’s monopolies. This legislation encouraged the creation of new works and...