Technically it is true, because when we talk about the Cow and Calf as copyright, we are approximating a modern thing back into a different historical set of ideas. Modern copyright, the idea that an author has the right to determine whpo makes copies, now that's not found in Medieval Europe all that widely. In common law you do find guys suing other guys over things like this, but its rare. The ancient Romans had stoushes about people claiming ot author each other's books, too.
No, with the Cow and Calf, what I'm trying to model, and I'm doing this in a simplified form, is the web of protections that owners of books made for themselves with regard to the copying of books once this became a money-making industry, rather than a religious duty (although there are legal challenges about people wandering off with illict copies of books from religious establishments earlier than this.)
So, to be clear, the Cow and Calf Oath is not historical, in the sense of being an existing thing: it's what I think the Order would come up with, based on historical thing.
In real Medieval Europe, you have this tension in universities and cathedral schools between wanting people to have texts, and wanting to defray the cost of providing texts, and wanting to get money to spend on other things. In each place they strike different balances, so in some univerities, teachers are legally required as a part of their contract of employment to make any and all of their personal books available for loan to students to permit those students to make copies. That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. In other places, only stationers have the right to copy the university's books, and they are fined if their copies are bad. These stationers work for the university and pass on profits to the university. Now, to get the huge number of books required the Uni of Paris invented a system, called the piece or "pecia" system, which is detailled in Covenants. An obvious question is, "if you are going to get outsiders to copy the books and make expensive, licit copies for the University, what stops them making cheaper, illict copies? What stops students from one year just selling their copies to students the next year?" There are, again, a variety of answers, and the main one seems to be that you get them to agree not to, and hope God sorts them out.
Bascially, when books become a tradable commodity, then quite quickly, laws spring up to protect not the authors (copyright), but the people who already own copies of the books. The CaCO isn't copyright: it's a licensing right, bascially.
Now, as way of modelling this tension, we simplify it down to the CaCO. Some groups, like Tremere, think it's a good idea, and some groups, like Bonisagus, think its a bad idea.
Just to be clear, I say that it is common in the Order in Hibernia, and known and used patchily within the Order elsewhere. I never say it is used by mundanes. The mundanes have not had a commercial book industry for as long as the magi, and so their laws are, generally, local contractual responses to the problem that the CaCO attempts to resolve for magi.
As a defense for the idea, I put in the Cow and Calf Oath for the following reasons:
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Books, to be a treasure, have to persist as valuable. If your covenant has the CaCO, and you get a great book, you can trade it over and over again, rather than once. This encourages stories.
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It gives right to copy as a separate treasure from right to use.
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It's an obvious idea and it protects plkayer characters who specialise in authoring from having their work ripped off. Well, it at least makes it clear that ripping them off is wrong.
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I like having political contentions in the Order that allow you to dislike and fight people at a level below "And now I declare War and one of us dies". The CaCO works for me at this level: it allows you to do Criminal Things witrhout having death as the only possible penalty for discovery.
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You don't have to use it, even if you are in Hibernia, because God enforces it, or not, as he sees fit.