The three becomes the Third, however, in the guise of the 'public' at large. In the case of the Abbot's Psalter, this public included all potential users of Columba's copy over whom the Abbot would have had no control if the copy was not delivered up to him.

And out of the Third comes the One as the Fourth - the State, or the King, in the case of the Abbot's Psalter. The State is the One in that it is responsible - by royal birth, force of arms or election - for the well being of all citizens including Creators, Proprietors and Users. One ancient responsibility of the State is censorship of subversive or heretical creeds, ideas and the works that transmits such mental contagion to the public.

Censorship, of course, arose long before copyright. Thus the Golden Calf led to the Mosaic injunction in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: 'Thou shalt not bow down to graven images!' Plato's Republic banned poets from doing anything save singing the praise of the Gods and Great Men in fear that pleasure and pain, not reason and law, would become rulers of the State (Plato, Book X, 1952: 433-434). And, there is the first Emperor of China's Great Book Burning of 213 B.C.E. (Wilhelm, 1950: xlvii) and his alleged assertion: Before Me, No History! Copying was not a significant problem for ancient or medieval monarchs and dictators who could, and regularly did, reduce a limited number of hand-made copies of proscribed works and/or their Creators to ashes. I like that: "Before me, no history." A little solipsism erases the past - it seems our current copyright laws suffer a bit from the same disease.