Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [107]
In Britain and Ireland, piracywas controversial. In the American colonies, it was revolutionary. America's small but rapidly growing population of printers, newspapermen, and booksellers was led by immigrants who had learned their craft at the feet of the leading Irish and Scottish reprinters. By the time the War of Independence broke out, some were ready to make piracy a tool of insurrection. For them the very act of reprinting London's books was an act of defiance. It was also an act of definition: their smaller, cheaper, more portable formats defined a public realm befitting a dispersed republic rather than a centralized aristocracy. Incitement to join the revolutionary cause, word of the rising itself, and news of its fortunes all circulated across the colonies by their labors.
Effective as it was, this practice created longer-term problems. With independence won, the new nation would have to build its public culture on the foundations that the revolutionaries had established. It was then that the more profound and implicit questions of a pirate revolution demanded answers. Were the foundations of the new nation's public culture ethical? How could the need to create new knowledge be reconciled with the need to appropriate old? What were the proper shape and constitution of communications to be in a new republic? Those questions had to be addressed in the 1790s and early i8oos, at a time when the nature and future of the United States were still insecure. After the War of 1812, answers began to emerge. By the 182os, Jacksonian America had a secure and vibrant public sphere-but to European eyes an utterly piratical one.
REPRINTING AND REVOLUTION
According to Benjamin Franklin, the advent of a competitive press in the colonies could be dated quite precisely. Its progenitor was a refugee from the first pirate generation in Britain. Samuel Keimer had been a believer in the so-called French Prophets-charismatic Protestant refugees from the Cevennes who made a great impact in London. But he had turned apostate when ordered to pirate aTory printer's work, and after a spell in prison had left London for Philadelphia. There he hired the young Franklin as a pressman and reprinted English newspapers, issued unauthorized transcripts of assembly proceedings, and created "spurious" versions of the local printer Andrew Bradford's almanacs. The earliest colonial disputes over literary property, in Franklin's view, therefore coincided with the establishment of a viable press. Franklin himself deserted the erratic Keimer, who briefly competed for his erstwhile journeyman's readers (his reprint of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopedia stalled at the letter A) before giving up and moving to Barbados.' Franklin, we know, would enjoy altogether more success.
Keimerwas unusually brazen, but his activities set the tone for colonial printing houses. No copyright law constrained them, and little byway of trade civilities. For the most part printers had to work out the rules as they went along. One reason for this was the sheer distance between cities, each ofwhich effectively formed a discrete market. Another was the small size and economic fragility of each house. Bookmen had to be jacks-ofall-trades, selling paper, medicines, and drygoods more than books; Benedict Arnold sold both books and drugs. The mainstays of the colonial printer's craft were not books at all, in fact- theywere cheaper to import than print-but job work and newspapers. Three-quarters of all printers between 170 o and 1765 were responsible for at least one paper. Newspaper printers eagerly awaited vessels carrying the latest intelligence, and freely reproduced what stories and essays they could lay their hands on. Isaiah Thomas's Massachusetts