The well-pilfered clavier: does copyright protection prevent creators from making stuff and selling it?

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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HE HAS BEEN called the "immortal god of harmony," "the beginning and end of all music," "the supreme genius of music ... who knows everything and feels everything," and "a benevolent god to which all musicians should offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity." Yet he behaved like any unauthorized music sampler, mash-up artist, or file-sharing college student. He recirculated other people's music--sometimes with attribution, sometimes not--with often minor changes. He cribbed material, borrowed music to plug gaps in his work, and reused his own creations with an abandon that would shame a freelancer for Demand Media.

This punkish intellectual property scofflaw was Johann Sebastian Bach, master of the baroque style, spiritual father of modern Western music, literal father of a family of musicians, and inspiration to working creators everywhere. He was also--maybe not coincidentally--a serial user of other people's work. According to one legend, as a child Bach would jailbreak and copy music his family had locked away. Later, he came into his own as a composer in part by taking a large body of work by Antonio Vivaldi and transposing it for the keyboard.

He was even more aggressive in cannibalizing his own output. Music for the funeral of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Kothen turns up later in The St. Matthew Passion. All six parts of the The Christmas Oratorio are retreads from a secular work Bach had written on commission for the Saxon court. Bach's Mass in B Minor, described by one 19th-century musician as "The Greatest Artwork of All Times and All People," is almost entirely recycled. "Almost movement by movement you can trace the Mass in B Minor to earlier work," says Daniel R. Melamed, professor of music at the University of Indiana. "Bach was not captive to his own material."

How was he making money on this output? How can a creative work have value in an environment without any intellectual property protection?

A new study by a German economic historian hints at an answer. In his two-volume History and Nature of Copyright, Eckhard Hoffner compares and contrasts the industrial-age economic histories of Britain (which provided copyright protection beginning with the 1710 Statute of Anne) and the 39 German states (where a uniform copyright code was impossible to enforce across a loose federation).

Hoffner's discovery: German writers produced more books and made more money than their English counterparts...