Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [127]
Does printing entail progress? As the eighteenth century drew to a close, that question began to be asked again with renewed urgency. The assumption that enlightenment and print were natural allies, never universal in the first place, began to fall apart. Faced by the radicalism of theJacobins, the idea of the public sphere suddenly seemed not only a polite fiction but an implausible one. The diversity of readerships became fearsomely apparent as political pressures arising from events in France lent prominence to alternative audiences. Corresponding societies and radical publishers fomented opinions with no place in genteel conversation, and in London Pitt's government reacted by taking unprecedented powers to police the press. At the same time, understandings of creative authorship and its relation to commerce were once more in flux. Romanticism challenged them in terms of the concept of genius. If an author imbued a work with some inimitable emanation of individuality, as theories of genius suggested, then the proprieties of public knowledge needed to be rethought once again. In Germany, genius became the principle behind authorial property laws early in the nineteenth century' Yet in Britain the conjunction between genius and copyright remained somewhat artificial and post hoc. After all, with its relatively short duration, a copyright was not much of a recognition for this unique human property. As a result, it was quite possible to argue that prevailing copyright principles were incompatible with genius itself.
Throughout the modern era, we have tended to assume that the ruling in Donaldson v. Becket set the terms for literary property once and for all. This is simply untrue. Quite soon after the verdict, opposition to it and its implications was beginning to appear. Such opposition has since taken different forms - some advocating for perpetual property, as Wordsworth did in the nineteenth century, others for a "free trade" in ideas-but it has never been definitively defeated. In the first decades of the nineteenth century it mounted its first considerable effort. A campaign arose to abrogate the law of copyright on the grounds that it was antithetical to genius, scholarship, and genuine property Its leading protagonist was himself a Romantic par excellence: a poet and novelist who revered nature, hailed the virtues of melancholy solitude, analyzed the character and processes of creative genius at great length, and retraced the steps of Byron, Shelley, and Keats in their travels across Europe. As well as fighting his battles in Parliament as an MP, he created his own printing house to contribute directly to reshaping the contemporary culture of print. He was also, perhaps -it is impossible to be sure - a forger, embezzler, and self-deluding impostor of extraordinary proportions. His name was Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges.
Brydges was in some ways an eccentric character, and his campaign can in retrospect look quixotic. Moreover, the passionate commitment to antiquarianism that led him to fight for it is a devotion distinctly alien to modern sensibilities. But his concerns were by no means unique at the time, and his cause found powerful support from a number of constituencies, not least the leading London publishers of the age. Moreover, Brydges was an antiquarian at the moment when antiquarianism enjoyed its greatest authority as a form of knowledge. Claiming to be an extension of Baconian approaches to the study of local and national customs, it had become a flourishing enterprise in the mid-eighteenth century, and in Romantic guise attracted devotees from across the nation in the revolutionary era. No one political meaning attached to the activity- for every Walter Scott, publishing his Tory-leaning researches with Ballantyne in Edinburgh, there was a radical like the publisher William Hone. Hone used his own antiquarian work to argue in court in the i8ios, at the peak of Brydges's