<p>The paper examines the historically contingent and socio-politically embedded development of copyright in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and argues that its contemporary “identity” in the region cannot be adequately captured through the canonical Western paradigms of ownership, technological neutrality, and the utilitarian–romantic divide. Building on a historically grounded comparative account, the paper reconstructs the distinctive institutional origins of CEE copyright, where printing privileges were administered by sovereign and ecclesiastical authorities and operated not primarily as market instruments but as mechanisms of governance – closely connected to censorship, political control, and the regulation of public discourse. The analysis then situates the post-communist transition within this longer trajectory, emphasizing how accelerated legislative change, external pressures, and limited deliberative capacity contributed to persistent axiological and interpretive instability. In the absence of a sustained property–public domain discourse comparable to that in Western Europe, judicial reasoning in the region may rely more heavily on equity, proportionality, and intuitive assessments of fairness, producing outcomes that are difficult to systematize within EU-harmonized doctrinal categories. Finally, the paper highlights moments in which this underlying identity becomes publicly legible, including the mobilization surrounding ACTA protests and the challenged reception of the DSM Directive. By treating CEE not as a peripheral deviation but as an analytically productive vantage point, the article reframes the problem of harmonization as one of divergent historical memory and legal consciousness, with direct implications for future EU copyright reform under conditions of rapid technological change.</p>