I’m reading about the practice in the Middle Ages whereby monks would work in what were called scriptoria, copying manuscripts by hand. The invention of the printing press, of course, changed all that. I just found a really cool passage in one of the articles about this which is attributed to Iranaeus. Apparently, he cooked up this quote which was an admonition to scribes to make sure that they copied his work accurately:

“You who will transcribe this book, I charge you, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His glorious Second Coming, in which He will come to judge the living and dead, compare what you have copied against the original and correct it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration and place it in the copy.”

I had to look up the word “adjuration” though, and it means an “earnest, solemn appeal.” But anyway, I think this is very cool. The first thing it reminded me of is some of the open source content licenses, like the GNU Free Documentation License that Wikipedia uses. It’s introduction includes the adjuration:

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Similarly, part of the Creative Commons Deed that I use to cover this site includes the text:

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

Admittedly, the spirit of these are a little different from what Irenaeus was after, but the similarity is still there, I think. Also, I found some people creating open-source characters a while back. One of them, Jenny Everywhere, is always supposed to use this paragraph when she is used by people:

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

Including that text is all you need to do if you want to draw upon the communal tradition of this character. I love stuff like this, although I wish it wasn’t commercially and legally necessary to make these kinds of weird declarations.