Copyright law was developed in the 1700s precisely to prevent people from exploiting the limitations of physical formats for profit.
It's the opposite of what you've stated.
Authors, composers and publishers needed protection against cheap printing presses that would just print anything that was popular and flog it in the marketplaces.
>Authors, composers and publishers needed protection against cheap printing presses that would just print anything that was popular and flog it in the marketplaces.
The limitations I mention are the difficulties and cost of the printing itself.
What authors wanted was to restrict who can print their work -- but it's not true that authors "needed protection" because printing presses started appearing.
That makes it sound like authors were paid for the work until those "cheap printer" pirates appeared. But on the contrary it was the invention of the printing presses themselves that gave authors an industry in the first place -- for millenia authors just wrote for free.
Yes; a good read is "The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World" [1] which I think is from Karl Fogel, the author of the (Free, Libre, CC-BY-SA) book "Producing Open Source Software" [2]
The reason the industry of paid authoring could develop is because of copyright. Without it, all the value of the new printing industry would have accrued to the printers, and none to the authors.
It's the opposite of what you've stated.
Authors, composers and publishers needed protection against cheap printing presses that would just print anything that was popular and flog it in the marketplaces.