Very helpful. So it's reasonable to concede that in Europe, and only in Europe, the origin of copyright was in censorship and the protection of profits for publishers.

However, the US is an entirely different story. Turning the page on your preferred source:

[16]: de Sola Pool, Ithiel (1983). Technologies of freedom. Harvard University Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-674-87233-2.
https://archive.org/details/technologiesoffr00ithi/page/15

We see the following:

American legislators and courts rejected these three abuses which publishing had suffered in their country of origin: licensing of the press, special taxes on the press, and prosecution for criminal libel.

The unconstitutionality of licensing, which the American courts referred to as "previous" or "prior restraint," was decided as early as
1825. The tradition against special taxes on the press, which British protestors such as Richard Cobden called "taxes on knowledge," was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1936 And the prohibition against criminal libel suits became an American tradition in the 1735 trial of Peter Zenger, accused of libeling the governor of New York.

The colonial jury, disregarding the judge's instructions on the law, acquitted Zenger and thus made the law. Since 1964, libel suits brought by public officials or public figures against their critics, even when brought in their own capacity and not by the state, have been greatly restricted by the courts.

The colonists' rejection of the various British attempts to impose government authority over the press were incorporated into the American Constitution by the First Amendment. This amendment creates a domain- of speech, religion, and press in which the activities of private citizens shall be unregulated by government. "Con-gress," it says, "shall make no law ... abridging freedom of speech or of the press."

But the First Amendment is just one of three clauses in the Constitution that deal specifically with communications. Another is the copyright provision in Article 1, Section 8: "Congress shall have 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." In Britain the practice of copyright, though not the word, began at the founding of the Stationers' Company when, for enforcement, the company was given the right to search for and seize anything printed contrary to statute or proclamation. Eight years later the company, under this power, created a system of copyright for its members. In 1709 the first copyright act for authors was passed by Parliament. The new notion of intellectual property represented by copyright was rooted in the technology of print. The printing press was a bottleneck where copies could be examined and controlled. In the passage from the author's pen to the reader's hand, the press was the logical place to apply controls, be it to censor sacrilege or sedition or to protect the author's intellectual property.

For modes of reproduction where such an easy locus of control as the printing press did not exist, the concept of copyright was not ap-plied. It was not applied to conversation, or to speeches, or to the singing of songs whether in private or in public. Copyright was a specific adaption to a specific technology. The common law recognized this fact. The landmark case in the United States denied copyright protection to piano rolls because they were not "writings" in a tangible form readable by a human being.

This concept of copyright excluded from protection many new technologies of communi-cation. But the motion picture industry, the recording industry, and more recently the broadcasting industry have all persuaded Congress to give them the protection that the courts proved unwilling to give.

The third provision in the Constitution dealing with communications gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads. 23 This provision put the federal government into the common carrier business. Only one of today's carrier systems then ex-isted, the mails. A post office had been permanently established in Britain in 1656 and in the colonies in 1711.

Before that, the crown had farmed out grants and patents to private entrepreneurs to carry government correspondence. To make these franchises attractive, the franchisees were also allowed to carry letters for the general public for a fee, and others were forbidden to compete with the chosen carriers in doing so. This scheme for providing government with cheap communication was the origin of the postal monopoly. When governments started carrying the mails themselves, the monopoly principle was further reinforced.

After American independence, the fiscal tradition of the post as a source of revenue was retained, and so was the practice of monop-oly. In the 1820s the balance of public policy shifted from one of subordinating the post office to the treasury department as a producer of revenue, to promoting it to a full-fledged department of government, consecrated above all to extending the benefits of development to remote parts of the country at a rapid pace. Still another important as well as expensive social goal pursued through the post office in the nineteenth century was the diffusion of knowledge.

Newspapers, and later books and magazines, were given large subsidies in mail rates.
The constitutional injunctions to the federal government with regard to communications were thus in appearance somewhat contra-dictory, though in fact their goals were quite consistent. In one clause the government was told to keep its legislative hands off of speech and press, while in two others it was told to promote the conveyance of knowledge by means of copyright and postal service. But both the injunctions to restraint and the injunction to governmental activism had the common goal of facilitating autonomous communication by private individuals.