ABSTRACT
Similar to other parts (perhaps even the greatest part) of the world in the nineteenth century, the belated, slow and uneven infiltration of copyright into East and Southeast Europe rested on a combination of socioeconomic, historical and cultural factors: (1) The preconditions for copyright’s inception and/or expansion, such as a proper commercialization of cultural production, were weak or missing. (2) The advancement of the field of culture dictated, or rested upon, other priorities. (3) Actors negotiated their antagonistic relationships in the field of cultural production via other mechanisms of social control and customary practices of regulation. (4) Copyright as a monopoly instrument was not conducive to serving the governance rationale of demographically complex state formations such as the multilingual empires of East and Southeast Europe. (5) The actors who usually play the role of protagonist in the expansion of copyright (lawyers, authors, lobbyists, publishers) were either missing, insufficiently organized or inadequately motivated to enforce such an institution. Multifarious factors therefore affected the degree of readiness to conceptualize and apply copyright. This chapter discusses in a general and comparative manner some of those general preconditions for the region of East and Southeast Europe through thematic clusters covering broadly the period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the First World War.
