alt Hacker News>Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.
I of course do not know all the individual EU country's rules, but my understanding was that the EU's view was what it was because derived at least from the previous understanding of its member nations. So the earlier French laws before ratification and implementation of the EU directive on author's rights in Law # 92-597 (1 July 1992) were also focused on the understanding of creators having creator's rights and that protecting these was the purpose of Copyright law, and that this pattern generally held throughout EU lands (at least any lands currently in the EU, I suppose pre-Brexit this was not the case)
You probably have some other examples but in my experience the European laws have for a long time held that copyright exists to protect the rights of creators and not of the public.
> So the earlier French laws before ratification and implementation of the EU directive on author's rights in Law # 92-597 (1 July 1992) were also focused on the understanding of creators having creator's rights
French law, similar to e.g. Norwegian and German law, separated moral and proprietary rights.
Moral rights are not particularly relevant to this discussion, as they relate specifically to rights to e.g. be recognised as the author, and to protect the integrity of a work. They do not relate to actual copying and publication.
What we call copyright in English is largely proprietary/exploitation rights.
The historical foundation of the latter is firmly one of first granting righths on a case by case basis, often to printers rather than cretors, and then with the Statue of Anne that explicitly stated the goal of "encouragement of learning" right in the title of the act. This motivation was later e.g. made explicit in the US constitution.
Since you mention France, the National Assembly after the French Revolution took the stance that works by default were public property, and that copyright was an exception, in the same vein as per the Statute of Anne and US Constitution ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts").
Depository laws etc., which are near universal, are also firmly rooted in this view that copyright is a right grants that is provided on a quid pro quo basis: The work needs to be secured for the public for the future irrespective of continued commercial availability.