#SaveOurInternet 2: THE FIRST COPYRIGHT WAR EVER

This Christmas may be the last one that a free Internet exists within the EU, to the detriment of many people in the creative professions. When I first went into blogging and publishing fanfiction online over five years ago, I thought this day would never come. There would be a requiem and a ban on parodies, on sharing images and stories that move us for free, on filk lyrics and fanfiction, and pirate translations of works outside the public domain... The Members of Parliament turn a deaf ear to all of us in the creative and the electronic world, and thus, next year... if we all don't come together and do something against this Article 13, everything we know and love will fall apart.
Now I know how Odin must have felt with the forebodings of Ragnarök. But who am I to be then... Odin or Enjolras? Feeling powerless against the rising tide, or not? Not only is my career as a currently unemployed translator at stake; many other creative professionals will be facing the same dire consequences - if we don't do something ourselves.
Most surely, this year's Advent Calendar will be about Save Our Internet and have to do with the history of copyright and resistance to it - maybe this very introductory article will be barred because the name of Enjolras (or any other Les Mis character) would be as encouragingly mentioned as Macbeth, if we just sit there idly instead of coming together for the cause.

St. Columba - patron of information pirates - and the first copyright war ever

St. Columba (sometimes Columbkill, Columcille, Calum Cille, or other variations) was an Irish Gaelic missionary and one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. Those twelve were saints who studied under St. Finian at Clonary Abbey.

Columba was known for constant study and prayer--really, really constant. He is said to have written 300 books, by hand of course, continuing to transcribe up to the night before he died.

Finian and Columba got into a disagreement over a psalter. Columba borrowed the manuscript of the Cathach, a very rare item in medieval Ireland, from Finian--possibly without permission--and secretly copied it entirely by hand, with the intention of keeping it for his own use. But Finian said no, that this was theft--illegal copying! He demanded that Columba hand over the copy he had made.

Finian took the matter to King Diarmait mac Cerbhiall, the High King of Ireland, for arbitration. Believing he had done nothing wrong in his attempt to spread the word of the church, Columba agreed. (It didn't hurt his expectations that Diarmait was a relative.)

Finian's argument was simple: My book. You can't copy it. He felt that if anyone was going to copy it that it should be done through certain procedures and certainly not in secret under his own roof.

Columba's response was not all that different from those in favor of less restriction in digital duplication--that the book had not suffered by his copying. "It is not right," he said, "that the divine words in that book should perish, or that I or any other should be hindered from writing them or reading them or spreading them among the tribes." In his closing address, he told the court that those who owned the knowledge through books were obligated to spread the knowledge by copying and sharing them. He felt that to not share knowledge was a far greater offense than to copy a book that lost nothing by being copied.

But the king ruled in Finian's favor, famously saying, "To every cow belongs her calf; therefore, to every book its copy." In other words, every copy of a book belonged to the owner of the original book.

Of course, the story didn't end there. After more arguing and Columba's next offense (harboring a fugitive from Diarmait), the result was the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne, the death of 3,000 people on the battlefield, and Columba's exile to the island of Iona, which then belonged to Scotland. The Cathach, the hand-copied manuscript that started the war, and that he brought along to Iona (for, though losing the war, he had won the battle, so he got to keep his own copy), became a rallying cry and battle protectorare for the O'Donnell clan -significantly, the Isabelline general who vanquished Cabrera in the Castellón Province and founded its Liberal Party, Irish-Canarian Leopoldo O'Donnell, from a branch of O'Donnells turned Spanish sword nobility, descended from this clan.