In the King James version of the Christian Bible, Revelation 22:18-19 reads:

18. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the book of this prophecy, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.

19. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

I call this "God's copyright" with only a trace of facetiousness. The King James Bible was printed, but for fifteen hundred years the above words had survived in manuscript, a form in which, as Bolter points out, margenalia had a natural tendency to seep into core text. This was all very well for a secular poem or a minor hagiography, but for a text that was the Word of God, a text which was to be the foundation stone of a global culture, seepage wouldn't do. But in the absence of the infinitely repeatable statement provided by the printing press, the only way to make a text hold still would have been to place a curse on it that might make copyists think twice about embellishing.

This suggests that the instability of text celebrated by postmodernist thought may not necessarily be a glorious return to a past world unencumbered by intellectual property and the lawyers that protect it. Rather, it is a return to a highly uncertain age during which people tried to stabilize texts but, in the absence of print technology, failed.

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