Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [11]
That concept owes its creation to a moment when major transformations in the social place of knowledge, in politics, and in economic practice converged. They met at just the point when the new craft of printing was giving rise to the first powerful claims on behalf of a literate public to judge issues of common interest. Precisely when authorship took on a mantle of public authority, through the crafts of the printed book, its violation came to be seen as a paramount transgression-as an offense against the common good akin to the crime of the brigand, bandit, or pirate.
The problem that the concept of piracy was designed to address originated in part in the changing culture of knowledge in the Renaissance, and in particular in the challenge to the liberal arts mounted by craft expertise. The Latin Middle Ages had inherited from Rome a categorical distinction between liberal and mechanical arts, such that only the former encompassed the skills appropriate to a free citizen. Artists and craftsmen now challenged this distinction. They saw opportunities to advance themselves in the new civic ferment of the towns by stressing their unique abilities. They announced that they alone could contribute to military success (by building siege engines, for example), economic prosperity (by overseeing mines), courtly splendor (by creating new and remarkable art), and the health of the citizenry (by supplying medical cures). A good alchemist, if one could be identified, might solve the budgetary problems of aprince at a stroke. Guilds, originally associated in antiquitywith esoteric "mysteries," now became the guardians of mysteries of a rather different kind: customs, duties, and prerogatives appropriate to each craft. They issued rules to their members decreeing proper conduct and upheld communal courtesies. And they embraced an increasingly proprietary attitude to craft knowledge and skill. The best-known example was that of the glassmakers of Venice, who developed an elaborate series of conventions and bylaws covering everything from the kinds of wood to be used in furnaces to arrangements for electing officials. The Venetian state cooperated by banning glassworkers from emigrating, and it was long rumored that anyone breaking the rule risked death.3
From the thirteenth century, withVenice in the lead, this kind of cooperation between state and craft communities began to take more formal shape. One way was by the issuing ofprivileges orpatents. These were not generallygiven for inventive originality as such, but, quite calculatedly, for initiatives of all kinds that promised to benefit the local commonwealth. By the fifteenth century, most European regimes were granting them for new devices or enterprises, and for trades merely new to the locality4 An inventor had no right to a patent, moreover. It was a gift, arising from the voluntary beneficence of the ruler, and its recipient was a beneficiary of state prerogative. Patents continued to be issued, and at increasing rates, for all kinds of things, often having nothing to do with new inventions or trades, simply as a convenient way to reward courtiers or to garner payments. There was thus no patents system as such. But accumulation carried its own weight, and in 1447 Venice passed the first general statute providing for patents covering inventions. It allowed that inventors or introducers of devices new to the Venetian territory would be protected against imitators for ten years; at the same time it formally compelled all inventors to reveal their inventions to the state, which was exempt from the patent restriction and could freely appropriate them.5 Some quid pro quo of this kind was typical: early modern regimes offered patents as a temptation to skilled artisans to immigrate with processes that were locally new, on condition that they teach their skills to locals. The deal was the ancestor of the rather different bargain of protection for revelation that patents would be reckoned to seal between inventor and public in modern times. Its purpose was to facilitate