Intellectual property piracy has a long history. Today, companies in the United States lose billions of dollars every year due to intellectual property theft. However, this could simply be bad karma returning. In the late eighteenth century, Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790. The act implicitly permitted the theft of foreign works, and that implication was exploited as American authors profited from foreign works by passing off the written knowledge of others as if it were it was them. However, to find the birth of intellectual rights, one must go back in time to 17th century London, to a historic place known as Stationer's Hall. If an author was thinking of publishing their works, they would make an entry in a 650-page log. This would provide evidence that the author was the original producer of the published works. The registrars attached the utmost importance to their tasks. Dating back to the 16th century, the book has survived catastrophes such as the Great Fires of London. Formal meetings were held between major booksellers and publishers to establish the authority in which they invested in the register. Unfortunately this authority given to the register's founders did not go unchallenged, medieval politics would soon intervene. In the Middle Ages no one was supposed to challenge the king's authority. Although the power to protect the intellectual thought of writers was not opposed to any law enacted by the king at the time, it nevertheless placed a kind of power in the hands of a small faction not named by the king, making it appear that the founders of the register felt sufficiently authorized to enact their own laws. The ensuing political battle would...half the document...protected by the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), with the aim of establishing and regulating "minimum standards of fair use educational.”The 1976 revision of the United States Copyright Act would be the last major revision to date. Currently courts rely on precedent to resolve most disputes. Today there are many more new acts and laws covering new technologies that were unforeseeable in 1976 and small extensions to the term of real estate Today, the register that started it all, the Stationers Hall Registry, can be found at the UK National Archives considered one of the main reasons that started the English Civil War. The fact that a civil case could have been started by a simple register gives credence to how important intellectual property rights are to society..