Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
Agreed, earliest stuff is definetly exclusive royal grant of printing overall to a particular person/guild/company. But some author protection is baked into the first international treaties about copyright, and those treaties are old.
The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to “promote the progress of … useful arts”. Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law
