A World Lit Only By Fire

The following musings were incited by William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire,

Copyright

From page 95:

"Until late in the 15th century... Volumes had been expensive, and unprofitable for writers, who, unprotected by copyright, lived on pensions or papal grants, in monastic orders, or by teaching."

Sounds a lot like now, except that the monastery has been replaced by the university.

The practice of copyrighting hasn't been around very long, and with the advent of the digitization of information, it's very convenient to violate.

I wonder if the idea of a "copyright" will eventually be seen as a brief and obscure practice of late capitalism. If so, the notion of earning a living by writing will be seen as equally weird. Hell, it's seen as weird now.

Literature

On the 15th century, from page 99:

 "...by the development of distinctive literary styles, emergin in force for the first time since the last works of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Marcus Aurelius had appeared in the second century... With a few lonely exceptions... medieval Europe's contributions to world literature had been negligible."

Manchester says that Western literature is 1,300 years shorter than it appears to be on a timeline. What qualifies as distinctive?