[Wild_Dolphins]

>Shakespeare would worry that his plays would be plagiarized by someone in the audience... writing down the entire thing from memory.

This would have been VERY difficult as Shakespeare wrote plays in iambic-pentameter, a form of decasyllabic verse; which could be considered a kind of very-loose 'checksum'.

The audience member who was pirating-Shakespeare plays would have to recall the dialog-from-the-play absolutely perfectly to render it in the original iambic-pentameter. Possible, but super tricky.

Shakespeare has built-in copy-protection. Renaissance style.

[WillAdams]

Actually, iambic-pentameter functions as a checksum, making it easier to arrive at the correct text.