SF woman countersues porn producer: Says porn is not copyrightable.

[Stavros]

Read my post again. I did not say that all scribes went out of business, I said 'all the scribes who went out of business' and the simple fact is that prior to printing, the only way that books could be reproduced was by being copied by scribes, a business model that died. Q.E.D.

As for your latter point, I refer you to the Larry Flynt case in which it was established that porn came under the protection of free speech established in the US Constitution. HOWEVER, while the production of porn may be protected under the Constitution, the copyright in it is not, and indeed it is the same Constitution that is being used in this case to attack the copyright protection of porn.

Reading is your friend.

Splitting hair really, but neither of us has established a time-frame in which scibes declined and neither you nor I have produced figures to prove it; printing presses -yes; learning to write: also yes.

As for the US law, the fine points being debated are best left to experts; I am not one of them.

[BeardedOne]

This all has a whiff of the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue's push against Fat Jack's over whether or not comic book sales qualified for sales tax. The state's sales tax law stated that, to qualify as a non-taxable item, it had to be a periodical (Published three or more times a year at regularly scheduled intervals), contain art, literature, or items of current events and general interest. The state, in its case against Fat Jack's, tried to say that comic books (Typically published ten to twelve times a year) were not periodicals, did not contain art, did not contain literature (Though that word could have multiple interpretations), or items of current events or general interest.

I don't recall how the case played out (This was a good fifteen or twenty years ago), but the Commonwealth's case was pure and ignorant bluster at the outset.