The coördinate jurisdiction of imperial and local authority continued into the seventeenth century, and besides a special protection of official publications, including church texts and school books, there developed a differentiation between privileged books and protected authors. The imperial city of Frankfort in 1660 passed an ordinance for the protection of "_bücher_" and "_autores_" and an imperial patent of 1685 made the curious distinction between "privileged" and "unprivileged" works, which Pütter, reputed the German apostle of the modern theory of property in literary productions, writing in 1764, explains as meaning respectively "non-individual" and "individual" (_eigenthümlich_) works, the former those issued under printers' privileges, the latter the works of contemporary authors, copyrightable in our modern sense. At the close of the seventeenth century, the book-fair at Leipzig began to assume dominating importance, and the privileges from the Commission of the Elector of Saxony became more authoritative, perhaps, than the imperial privileges issued from Frankfort.
Venice, among whose chief glories were to be the master printers Aldus, was the first and foremost of the Italian states to encourage the new art. The first privilege granted by her Senate, in 1469, indeed ante-dated the first in Germany by thirty-two years, the first in France by thirty-four years, and the first in England by forty-nine years. This was to John of Speyer, a German printer, for a monopoly for printing in Venice for five years, with prohibition of importation of works printed elsewhere, which he did not live to enjoy. The first known author's copyright was granted September 1, 1486, to Antonio Sabellico, historian to the Republic, of the sole right to publish or authorize the publication of his "Decade of Venetian affairs," not limited in time, with a penalty of five hundred ducats for infringement. In 1491 the Senate gave to the publicist Peter of Ravenna and the publisher of his choice the sole right, without mention of term, to print and sell his "Phoenix," usually cited as the first instance of copyright. In 1493 one Barbaro was granted a privilege for ten years in the work of his deceased brother, and in the same year an editor's copyright was granted to Joannes Nigro for his edition of "Haliabas," his application being accompanied by a certificate from learned doctors of Padua of its value for the community, and a publisher's copyright to Benaliis on Giustiniani's "Origin of the city of Venice," both apparently without term. In 1494 a privilege to Codeca contained the condition of fair price, and another privilege required publication within a year or at the rate of a folio a day. In 1496 Aldus himself was given the privilege for twenty years of printing any Greek texts, and in 1501, another for ten years of printing in cursive or italic characters, an invention of his own modeled on the handwriting of Boccaccio, a _quasi_ patent right; and rights for other languages were granted to other printers.