Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [104]
Faced with growing dissension in its ranks, the guild finally found its voice. It denounced the administration for opposing "the Protection of our Manufactures, the freedom of the Press, & the Liberty of the Subject." Since the Irish parliament seemed intent on furthering "a foreign interest," the guild resolved, popular action might be necessary to defend "native manufactures." It formed its own committees to work for tariff protection, and honored Grattan with its freedom. In 1795 the guild condemned British interference as "a National Calamity" and called for "the determined and constitutional voice of a united Country." It was not long before the United Irishmen were meeting in Stationers' Hall.62 And in 1798, as the rebellion broke out that promised to end British rule altogether, the guild finally sat down to draw up a set of rules to govern the book trade. It was about a century too late.
Fomented by the press, the United Irismen's rising was violent, popular, but catastrophic. The French support it had needed never really materialized, apart from a futile gesture by Wolfe Tone, and with the British army no longer tied down in America it was more than sufficient to suppress the isolated rebels. All concerns among booksellers and printers about the constitution of their craft were soon eclipsed. The scheme for a set of rules not only came to nothing, but was physically expunged from the record, with a scrawled comment that any such proposal was "highly irregular." A new order was about to be imposed by the British.63 Copyright was coming to Ireland.
London had launched three counterattacks against Ireland's reprinters already. The first was in the 1730s, when Parliament passed its law against imports. The second was in 1759, with the ill-starred "conspiracy" to eradicate piracies from the British market. The third effort came in 1784-85, when the furor was part of the general quarrel over Anglo-Irish trade. The initiative was spurred by a declaration in the Daily Universal Register that "the piracies so daily practised by the Irish booksellers, call aloud for redress." Almost every worthwhile book published in London was now seized upon, contracted, and republished in cheaper form, "to the great detriment of men of genius and science." Even Edinburgh's booksellers were upset. And William Pitt took notice. An advocate of laissez-faire, Pitt urged the Dublin parliament to adopt English copyright as part of his scheme for a free trade area across the British Isles. But the Dublin press took to the lists once more to decry the plan as an attack on Irish manufactures. Reprints became all the more a form of resistance. Feelings ran high: when the bishop of Killaloe tried to defend copyright in the Irish parliament, he was denounced as a traitor.64 Within Dublin, it was crystal clear, copyright had no constituency whatsoever. Pitt's plan was quietly shelved. But the reprieve was temporary. Ireland's printers were heavily implicated in the 1798 rising, and they paid the price.65 After the rebellion London resolved on the drastic step of full political union. The kingdom of Ireland, and with it Dublin's status as a capital, came to an end. A city that had been a nation's center of power, patronage, and fashionable consumption was suddenly reduced to the status of a provincial town. This alone would have been enough to imperil its book trade. But