Page 36 - A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law：An Intermediary-oriented Approach

A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law: Chapter 2 Copyright in the Pre-Internet Age: An Intermediary-oriented Approach
An Intermediary-oriented Approach

and parchment, speech was the only medium through which knowledge could be created and
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distributed. During the oral cultural era, when social production was critically deficient, cultural
products, such as folktales, songs, dances and symbols were created. These were not for profit or
entertainment, but for social-political purposes such as enhancing the sense of community and
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solidifying the status of the ruling class within the community. Serving as a community-specific
‘collective representation’, cultural products were intended to express a sense of identity and
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unity, and were distributed within close-knit communities. Only a few members of the ruling
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class, often the wizards, clergy or priests, had the time, incentives and qualifications to create.
The limited scope of creators, the social-political purpose of the cultural products and the social
norms within an acquaintance society could prevent so-called ‘copyright infringement’ disputes
such as unauthorised copying that would later occur under modern copyright law.
As time passed, more mundane cultural products such as fairy tales, poems and songs
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were created by folk storytellers, jongleurs and troubadours. The interactivity of oral
communication promised continuous updates to these kinds of folk creations, incorporating
the contributions and feedback of a widely dispersed audience. Under the context of
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collective intelligence and the non-commercial use of cultural production, disputes over
authorship seldom emerged.
2) Scribal culture: Cultural products as social glue
The invention of writing materials and language altered the form of knowledge from
‘liquid’ and ‘unfixed’ to ‘linear’, ‘structured’ and ‘rational’. This enabled cultural products
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to be packaged and demarcated, ensuring their broadened distribution. However, due
to the unaffordability of written materials and scarce reading and writing skills, access to
knowledge remained ‘a privilege largely limited to the clergy’. In an age where the skin of
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a cow or sheep would only make enough parchment for two or four pages of a book, books
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were luxuries that only monasteries, noblemen and royalty could afford. Becoming literate
also involved costly training. Thus, only a small group of people, called scribes, had reading
and writing the skills, and could copy books.
Because the transcription process was time-consuming and labour-intensive, word-

16 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Topographic Man (University of Toronto Press 1962) 45.
17 Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (AldineTransaction 2012) 9.
18 Emile Durkheim, ‘The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations’ in Charles Lemert (ed), Social Theory : The
Multicultural and Classic Readings (Westview Press 2004) 90.
19 Carla Hesse, ‘The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 BC-AD 2000: An Idea in the Balance’ (2002) 131 Daedalus 26, 26-27.
20 John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge
University Press 2004) 52, 55.
21 Lessig (n 5) 7.
22 McLuhan (n 16) 177.
23 Tom Standage, Writing On the Wall: Social Media-The first 2,000 Years (Bloomsbury Publishing USA 2013) 23.
24 Ibid 49. It was reported that in 1074 a priest in the Bavarian town of Benediktbeuern exchanged a missal for a vineyard. In
1120, the monastery of Baumberg exchanged a missal for a large piece of land.
25 Ibid 48.

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