Don Quixote Fights The Intellectual Property Pirates: How Cervantes Responded To Knockoffs In The Days Before Copyright Law

The first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha may not have been the first novel, but it was the first blockbuster. So some anonymous copycat tried to cash in with a bogus sequel. Cervantes, rightly thinking he had moral rights to the character he created responded with a sequel of his own – and he went meta, depicting the Don doing battle with his fake counterpart and visiting a print shop to find the counterfeit version of his story on the presses.