Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [130]
Thus the deposit was inscribed into press regulation and propriety long before the Enlightenment, and its history had been checkered. Nevertheless, by the late eighteenth century the principle of deposit had become part and parcel of the broader representation of print as the motor of enlightenment. Enlightened nations, it was said, should furnish national libraries aspiring for universal coverage. Those libraries must be efficiently organized and publicly accessible, in order to facilitate the open conversation on which progress was acknowledged to depend. The provision of books for such libraries was, then, a matter of fundamental importance, as was their subsequent classification.8 As Basil Montagu, a Cambridge law don, put it explicitly, the practice promised to create "an universal library"-"a library approaching to such perfection in its arrangement, that a student may instantly find all the treatises upon that subject, either of general literature or of any particular science, to which he is directing his attention."A universal library would have signal benefits for "the progress of medical science" alone, Montagu pointed out, and the same would be true of other sciences.9 But the British universities were not state bodies, and lacked resources. Only deposit could feasibly turn them into arks of universal learning. In the 1790s the actual practice of deposit therefore began to cause rumblings of resentment, falling as short as it did of this utopian ideal. So the universities finally considered asserting their claims in earnest.
In 1798 the court of King's Bench unintentionally brought the incipient issue to a crisis. It suddenly and unexpectedly ruled that a bookseller could claim a property right in a title even if it were not registered at Stationers' Hall.i0 At a stroke, this removed the one incentive that had existed for registering books, and hence for depositing them. The libraries' already slim pickings looked to be falling to zero. Worse still, when copyright was extended to Ireland in 18oi two more libraries were added to the list of beneficiaries. With Pitt's Act for the Suppression of Seditious Societies (1799) also demanding that a copybe retained for policing, a total of twelve copies had now to be reserved from every registered title. This was now a tax-small for normal editions, but real enough-which there was no reason to pay. Unsurprisingly, the number of titles deposited fell sharply. In 1803, a year for which the online Short Title Catalogue lists well over four thousand publications, Cambridge received just twenty-two." Ifuni- versal libraries were really an essential tool of enlightenment, this could only be a serious crisis for civilization.
A struggle to revive the deposit therefore began. It was initiallly spearheaded by the law professor and barrister Edward Christian. Finding to his chagrin that Cambridge held none of the most recent law books because they had never been delivered, Christian devoted two years of his life to researching the issue, and then published the results as A vindication of the rights of the Universities. In truth, he aimed higher than at mere vindication. Christian argued that the libraries had a far more extensive right than had ever been appreciated: he reckoned that they could legally claim a copy of every book published, irrespective of registration. He called for this right finally to be enforced. Obviously, the prospect was going to be alarming to London's publishers. Moving fast, however, the MP John Charles Villiers organized a series of meetings between Christian and the booksellers at his London house, hoping to broach an agreement. His idea was to offer the booksellers an extended copyright term in return for the deposit. He came very close to success. The publishers conceded that a "universal