No Copyright Law may have fueled German Development

Germany's intellectual and economic development apparently was aided by the lack of enforceable copyright law.

According to a recent article in Der Spiegel Germany's rapid industrial advance, extraordinary production of books. and country-wide interest in reading was due to not having an enforceable copyright law, whereas in England books were kept scarce by monopoly copyright holders.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,00.html#

This sounds right given my experience trying to make material available to my students. The gift economy of the mind and the commodity economy of the market have very complex inter-weavings - not all of which are friendly.

For an interesting supportive example, The United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology has vaulted to being by far the largest such association in no small part because they make cutting edge research free to anyone. Their "Knowledge Hub" gets tens of millions of hits annually, worldwide, and now dwarfs more traditionally organized sources of information in pathology.

http://www.uscap.org/index.htm?hub.htm