23 April—If people who actually intend to cast ballots in the upcoming presidential election are desperately looking for a reason to vote for Joe Biden, political cartoonist Gary McCoy came up with the perfect one yesterday, printed in today’s Republican-American: vote for Joe Biden “because his uncle chose to sacrifice his life in order to feed hungry cannibals.” Oxfam, take note.

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Today is World Book and Copyright Day, as The Monitor’s National Day panel notes. It’s not mere coincidence that 23 April is also William Shakespeare’s birthday and death day—born 1564, died 1616—though that’s likely a coincidence.

Possibly excepting the authors and editors of assorted best-selling religious fiction, Shakespeare is by far the most quoted author of all time, in his Elizabethan English, modern English, and virtually all modern languages. He’s also the most performed playwright. He certainly was successful in his time, but no more so than contemporary playwrights like Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster.

Contrary to the ravings of critics, scholars, and other bardolators, Shakespeare wrote to attract and entertain audiences simply to make a living (while getting by the considerable political censorship of the day, of course; kind of like today, when you think about it). It’s highly unlikely that he intended to be profound or otherwise philosophical; never-ending interpretation of his words is the stuff that generates boring lectures and dissertations and keeps professors out of the poor house.

Copyright as such didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time. Governmental and religious controls of publication—privileges—came in with the spread of movable-type printing in the late 15^th century. The first actual copyright in the world, as far as we know, wasn’t legislated until the British Copyright Act of 1709 or 1710 (take your pick, sloppy British parliamentary record-keeping) known as the Statute of Anne (specifically, “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”).

The Statute of Anne didn’t apply to the colonies, of course. The thinking was, why the hell would illiterate agrarian colonials need copyright protection? So after the Revolutionary War the literate states passed versions of copyright legislation. Then the Constitution, in the so-called Patent and Copyright Clause, gave Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

That was codified by the Copyright Act of 1790. And today copyrights and patents are diligently guarded and enforced by individual and corporate entities that stand to lose big bucks when they’re infringed. But our good friends in the Russian Federation (Russia) and The People’s Republic of China (China) infringe copyrights and patents as the spirit moves them, with the same impunity the State of Connecticut, among others, infringes the Second Amendment . . .