ABSTRACT
There are several historical reasons that can be given for the series of variations in the development of IP between Western and Eastern Europe. Copyright in East and West Europe was launched from different starting points. In the pioneering countries such as Britain and France, modern copyright legislation was introduced in consolidated and already commercialized literary print cultures, with the intention to break up well-established guild monopolies in the production of culture. 1 Such had indeed been the case with the print monopoly of the Stationers’ Company in Britain and the preponderance of the Paris Book Guild in France or the performance monopoly over French-language repertory in the case of the Comédie-Française. Such long-established professional groups and deep-rooted monopolies in the sphere of culture did not exist in East and Southeast Europe. By contrast, there was almost a chronological overlap in the emergence of the cultural professions. The author and the publisher began their careers concurrently, while in the early stages of print, in an analogous experience to parts of Western Europe, the functions of author-publisher-printer were at times united in one and the same person. Moreover, due to the priority given to nation-building, both authors and publishers perceived themselves as being involved in a common endeavour that was predominantly defined in patriotic terms. The differentiation therefore between political/cultural tasks and commercial objectives was a much slower and more ambiguous process, and it took some time for the actors involved to realign their positionalities.
