How is that the original concept of copyright? That article begins by saying this:
> Prior to the statute's enactment in 1710, copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works.
the original concept of copyright was to throw a bone to middle/upper class printers so that the proliferation of printing presses could be arbitrarily limited as the ability for anyone to print anything threatened the crone, the state and the upper class by printing revolutionary ideas.
"Licensing of the Press" allowed to control who could print, by lawful threat of violence, and that enabled censorship of ideas. Copyright sweetened that deal to those who owned printing presses: enforcement of scarcity enabled a business model where good content could be kept expensive and money is funneled to the publisher who owns the exclusive right to make copies. For this they agreed to do censorship.
The argument that copyright is a right of the content creators, who were mostly dependent on patrons, and that those creators could only be paid fairly by the publishers if their product was exclusive, was peddled back then and swayed some of the intelligentsia to support the concept, but this was not the core ideal. At the beginning copyright was about entrenching a small circle of collaborators, who got the right to copy, and violently removing the means of production of those printing revolutionary thoughts.
> Prior to the statute's enactment in 1710, copying restrictions were authorized by the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. These restrictions were enforced by the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers given the exclusive power to print—and the responsibility to censor—literary works.