The story is different if a book costs 10,000 DM to produce and is priced at 20 DM a copy with a potential readership of 1,000,000 readers. This is the theory. But the facts are tellingly different. Moreover, piracy thrives in very poor markets in which the population would anyhow not have paid the legal price. The answer lurks in history.
Intellectual property is a relatively new notion.
The artist was but a mere channel through which divine grace flowed. True, the chosen ones, the conduits, were honoured but were rarely financially rewarded. They were commissioned to produce their works of art and were salaried, in most cases. Only with the advent of the Industrial Revolution were the embryonic precursors of intellectual property introduced but they were still limited to industrial designs and processes, mainly as embedded in machinery. The patent was born.