Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [114]
Carey began reprinting books in earnest at this time. William Guthrie's Geography was one target- an old British workhorse already reprinted in Dublin. Carey made extensive changes to the text, completely replacing the section on America and adding his own introduction to condemn the original's bias in favor of Britain.31 Goldsmith's Animated Nature too he reprinted, adding plates from a London edition of Buffon. Political, documentary, and economic works came too. But he also reproduced fiction, especially the Minerva Press's line of sentimental, morally inflected novels bywomen authors •32 Carey acknowledged no copyright in any of these, of course, because there was in fact none to acknowledge. But he went too far when he ventured to reprint natural philosophy from the American Philosophical Society, in a bid to circulate it too in an accessible form. For Carey, the Society was guilty of "aping the quarto volumes of the Royal Society," and should shift to cheap octavos of the kind that he, Coxe, and Hamilton were advocating for international reprints. What was "public" in the 166os was nothing of the sort in the 179os, and a different politics of readership demanded a new kind of publishing. The aged Franklin stepped in to put a stop to this, telling Carey that he risked fatally undermining learned journals in general. But Carey remained sure he was right, and returned to the fray three decades later, bywhich time theAPS would have issued only seven volumes of its journal in fifty-five years. It would have been faster and safer in the interim for authors to submit papers to Calcutta, he would point out.33
In truth, what Coxe and Carey were proposing was deeply controversial, and the federal government never did invest in the appropriation of manufactures from Europe. But private associations -beginningwith the societies of the 179os-repeatedly sent agents to Europe with orders to scout out the latest engineering designs or to seek potential emigrants with the skills to aid in canal or, later, railroad building. Coxe and Hamilton collaborated in one of the earliest and most ambitious of these ventures, aimed at creating a model manufacturing town around machines and skills adopted from Britain. An agent went to the United Kingdom to collect industrial secrets on the quiet, while Coxe recruited agroup of emigre Britons already in America who claimed to possess knowledge of key machines. One George Parkinson, for example, was given a U .S. patent to replicate the mill machinery of Richard Arkwright. But Hamilton and Coxe made the fatal error of entrusting the directorship of their scheme to William Duer, a financial speculator then maneuvering secretly for a controlling interest in the Bank of New York. Duer inflated the new nation's first financial bubble. When it burst in March 1792, he was left facing $3 million of debt, and the project for a manufacturing town collapsed with his bankruptcy. A strange mixture of the visionary and the furtive, the whole project became for Hamilton's enemies a symbol of speculative recklessness and amorality, and a cautionary tale against the very idea of industrial appropriation.34
Shortly after this, an altogether grander crisis transformed the politics of appropriation. Britain had begun impounding U .S. cargo vessels bound for Jacobin France. Over two hundred vessels were seized, their crews pressed into serving in Britain's cause. At the same time, the British also connived at the depredations of pirates from North Africa who attacked American shipping. The resulting crisis made partisans of all stripes reconsider their