Sure. The desire of authors and publishers to get their legitimate reward for their work goes back at least to the beginning of printing. If you go through enough renaissance period books, you will from time to time find brief notices warning rip off artists that the local Power That Was acknowledged the authorship of a given book and warned the reader that if anyone tried to rip off the book, they would answer to him. Not that this impressed people in other countries - if a book sold, they were happy to rip it off.

Re plays: One of the reasons we don't have all of Shakespeare's plays or those of his fellow playwrights is because the companies of actors were afraid other companies would rip off a copy of, say, Hamlet, and put it on themselves. So you limit the copies.

In 1710, England got the Statute of (Queen) Anne (1710) which set out a formal legal status for authors' right, but it was chiefly island bound.

Steam printing presses (ca 1830ish) made publishing a big business, which meant more attention was paid by those affected on both sides. There was for example, the case of Charles Dickens whose books sold madly in the US but who never got a dime out of it because, you know, American printers didn't see any reason to be ethical. (I tell a lie - exactly one Philadelphia printer did voluntarily give him a cut). Others had the same experience.

So in 1886 lawmakers around the globe got together on the question of copyright and drafted the Berne Convention, granting copyright privilege across national boundaries.

Rip offs continued, of course. In the 20th century, there have been rip off editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica printed in developing nations on cheap paper. Nineteen fifties record pressers were known to run the presses after hours for extra copies of music that were sold off the books.

So, yes, basically so long as there has been intellectual property that can be cheaply copied and sold without paying the artist, there have been people willing to do so and legal and impractical attempts to keep them from doing so.

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