• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2187 0

promptly calls forth appropriate devices. The seeds of invention exist, as it were, in the air, ready to germinate whenever suitable conditions arise; and no legislative interference is needed to ensure their growth in proper season." Whereas for Englightenment figures like Kant an organic account of creativity had upheld a strong notion of authorship, for Armstrong a discrete kind of organicism implied the very opposite. (Evidently, Brewster acidly replied, for the great arms magnate inventions were "the result of something floating in the air, a kind of epidemic.") Propelled by the controversial reception that such addresses encountered, the Association promptly created a succession of committees of its own devoted to the patents question, with contributors including Grove, MacFie, and Armstrong, as well as Henry Bessemer, Lyon Playfair, andWilliam Siemens from the pro-patent camp.31

The antipatent campaign also made the most of the press. The Economist was a reliable ally, and all the major quarterlies published papers detailing their positions. Furthermore, MacFie circulated many of the speeches, papers, letters, and debates that he and his allies authored, in the form of fat printed volumes.32 These books were deliberate experiments in their own right in the manipulation of authorship. They comprised slanted compilations of material drawn from all over the country and beyond. For example, MacFie included extensive extracts from Henry C. Carey's American arguments against international copyright. And he even helped himself to a translation of Kant's argument against counterfeiting, which here was pressed into service in the opposite cause of eliminating authorial property33 Each of these volumes was sold at five shillings, a price low enough that "all classes of the community" might be able to buy them for circulation among their neighbors and through their associations. A hundred copies were set aside to be distributed gratis to public libraries. Moreover, MacFie positively exhorted readers to extract and reprint whatever they needed of their contents, as long as they acknowledged the original sources -that is, the sources from which he himself had taken them. "The Compiler feels that he has dealt very freely with what he has found in various quarters," he conceded, "and craves that the same liberty shall be taken with what he here presents."34 Like Mathew Carey's, this was a new kind of polemical publishing-avowedly "open source," to put it anachronistically-that had few precedents outside the demimonde of radical politics.

The abolitionist campaign found converts very rapidly. Perhaps most striking of the early ones was the very sponsor of the 1851 bill in the upper house, Lord Granville. Granville now announced in Parliament that he had been persuaded by the critics: there was no "absolute innate right of property in ideas," and Britain no longer needed to pursue a "bargain" between inventor and public to stimulate making and revealing inventions. The whole patent system was, he concluded, "unadvisable for the public, disadvantageous to inventors, and wrong in principle."35 More conversions followed when the administration changed and what had been a Whig measure became a Tory one. By 1862 a Royal Commission could produce a remarkably ambivalent report, culminating in a much-quoted remark that the flaws of the system were intrinsic to the very nature of patenting. Its chairman, Lord Stanley, moved to an abolitionist position too. Then, at the most damaging of moments, a scandal hit the Patents Office when a clerk was accused of embezzling fees; the outcry reached high enough to force the resignation of the lord chancellor himself. At much this point the Times also executed a sharp volte-face and declared against patenting. It was this conversion, more than any other single event, that convinced many that the entire system faced imminent destruction. The real choice, it suddenly seemed, lay between radical reform and outright abolition. And many, including now the Tunes, not only preferred abolition but thought