Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [16]
Until the mid-seventeenth century this system worked well enough. It was flexible, subtle, confidential, and for the most part consensual. The problem was that the community itself was fracturing. The companyand the trade at large-became oligarchic, as booksellers increasingly became a group apart from and above printers. Retailing and, especially, speculation on publishing projects-projects protected by the registerbecame the loci ofwealth, and threatened to relegate "mechanick" skill to the role of a tool. This made reprinting and its countermeasures into fraught political topics. Insinuations grew that the company's leaders had attained their positions by systematically exploiting the system to reprint the books of vulnerable newcomers while securing their own monopoly titles. In one of the most remarkable portraits of the bookseller in this period, one "Meriton Latroon" published a veritable pirate's progress that traced a naive and initially principled newcomer's rise to the top by adopting his seniors' practice of reprinting and appropriation. Its real author, a reprinter of drama named Francis Kirkman, knew very well indeed whereof he spoke.12 Yet although figures like Kirkman decried its manipulation, and master printers complained of their subjugation, there was as yet no appetite for abandoning the register regime wholesale.
Elsewhere in society, however, such an appetite did grow. The register regime served the booksellers well, but it largely ignored authors and readers. It was deaf to their voices and hidden from their gaze. From quite early in the century authors recorded their own impatience with it. It was therefore fortunate for them that an alternative existed. This alternative rested on the only power strong enough to confront trade custom: the Crown. Royal prerogative could supervene the register by means of a socalled patent, or privilege. The practice of acquiring a privilege giving a monopoly on a certain work actually predated the creation of the Stationers' Company, and it carried on alongside the register. Indeed, it expanded. By the later sixteenth century patents were being used to assign not just individual titles but whole classes of book to lucky recipients. For example, one patentee held the right to all schoolbooks, and another to all works printed on only one side of a sheet of paper. These could be extremely lucrative. The company itself held patents too. Its "English Stock" was essentially an early joint-stock company whose capital lay in privileged books. The original intent was to help bind the trade together by sharing work among poorer printers, thus forestalling seditious work or reprinting. But the Stock grew into a hugely profitable enterprise, and one the management ofwhich many Stationers by the 1640s felt had been hijacked by the oligarchy.
It was perhaps inevitable that the systems of register and patent should come into conflict. The clash could have happened in several European cities, for these practices were common to many; and later generations would see similar contests in France, the German nations, and elsewhere. But it happened first in England. And there, in the wake of civil war and regicide, it immediately became politically explosive. The point was that the issuing of apatent was a moment when the monarch intervened in the life of the nation, slicing through statutory and common law to realize some specific desire. Patents had long been controversial, because before the civilwarJames I and Charles I had used them to reward courtiers and raise funds by creating monopolies. In 1624 Parliament had passed the so-called Monopolies Ac t to curtail them. It allowed the issuing of patents only on activities acknowledged to pertain to the Crown (like