Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [139]
Brydges mounted his campaign by pointing out that at the last moment in its parliamentary progress the bill for Christian's universal library had been subtly altered. The universities' right now extended not only to all new works, but also to reprints. This threatened to cripple the entire antiquarian enterprise, of which the verbatim reprinting of old materials was an essential part. Moreover, not only did the universities now deny publishers the right to waive piracy protection; they also extended the deposit tax to cover titles for which there had never been piracy protection in the first place.52 It thus made a nonsense of the supposed link between protection and deposit. This extension was, to his mind, allimportant, since it threatened to "extinguish" antiquarian publishing altogether. The purported compensation for acknowledging the libraries' claim was the extension of copyright terms to twenty-eight years, but to him the very connection between copyright term and deposit now stood revealed as spurious. The one was a matter for the author and the public, and in any case extended from a preexisting and natural "property in the fruits of their own intellects"; the other was a subject for authors and libraries.53 After all, as he and several other critics pointed out, libraries like the Bodleian were notpublic institutions in any but the most legalistic sense: they remained closed to "the publick at large," and in many cases even to students at the universities themselves. But at the same time he warned that one aspect of the casewas an implicit threat that the libraries might become public, developing into circulating libraries and therefore removing from the market not just nine or ten readers at a time, but ninety or a hundred.54This would simply destroy the market for scholarlyworks. Creating the Enlightenment's universal libraries would in practice kill off the very books that such libraries existed to collect. After all, even if the deposit actually did serve apublic interest, that did not mean that it should not be paid for. Without payment, he declared, the universities' demand amounted to "the plea, not of the beggar .... but of the robber!"55
By this point the debate had broadened to include several major London publishing houses, as well as lawyers, authors, poets, and the reading public. Disagreement reigned even on as apparently objective an issue as the actual cost of the tax to publishers. The universities maintained that the real burden was zero. They argued that at most it could be the cost of the paper on which the deposited copies were printed, but this could always be made up either by raising the prices of the remaining copies or by printing eleven more. For Brydges and the publishers, the calculation was equally simple but very different. They argued that the tax stood at a hefty 22 percent of the total price if the print run were fifty copies, ii percent if it were one hundred, and so on. In these terms, what was an insignificant imposition for popular works produced in vast numbers became a major deterrent against the publishing of specialized works in small runs. That is, it militated against what Brydges's camp assumed was the most worthwhile literature in favor of the most popular-which made its integration with copyright rather fitting. As evidence, they produced extensive and detailed lists of books demanded by all eleven libraries, totaling a "tax" of £2,722 yearly solely on works retailing at £i or more. Dibdin's antiquarian BibliographicalDecameron represented a particularly good example: its deposit had cost the publisher over £ioo, for which he received no benefit in return, "since it is awork of a nature which renders any