Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [164]
The Scientific Review's rhetoric against abolitionists was correspondingly uncompromising. The magazine denounced Armstrong in person as "traitorous," while MacFie was "the arch-enemy." Another man convinced by the abolitionist case was labeled a "pervert" (a term carrying the same overtones then as now). And the magazine increasingly cast the whole struggle -which it defined as one over intellectual property in generalin the strongest political terms. Brewster declared that violating this "property" would be akin to the monarch violating Magna Carta. It would therefore legitimize "extreme resistance" -a very charged phrase, on which he did not dilate. Elsewhere, he added that MacFie's proposed alternative of a bounty scheme was akin to a proposal to reform the system of political representation by returning to the pre-1832 reign of rotten boroughs.43
Brewster's journal buttressed such assertions by developing an alternative political economy of invention that turned the arguments of the abolitionists on their heads. According to this scheme, the patentee was the real free trader. The real monopolists, therefore, were the "great capitalist manufacturers" like Armstrong and MacFie. Like all monopolists, these magnates feared new competition-competition that might well come from the brains of inventors. Indeed, according to the Review, what inventors did- their essential nature -was to "break down the monopoly of capital." That was the core of their progressive function in civilization. The magazine defined that function in class terms. The magazine stood, it declared, for the "workman inventor" in particular. Such a figure needed secure property if he were to fulfill his antimonopolist function. "If the security of brain-craft property should be taken away by the abolition of patents," the journalwarned, "thisworkwould cease, and stagnation would be the rule." And then, it added, "we should have a tendency to become Chinese." It was therefore the inventors who were "the true advocates of free trade." By contrast, the line of MacFie, Grove, and Armstrong was antagonistic to all property. It amounted to "the wildest socialism," if not the philosophy of Bill Sykes. The sympathy they so frequently expressed for worker-inventors was "crocodilian." A Dr. Thomas Richardson supplied one of the strongest evocations. "If the truth be told," Richardson averred, "this opposition of capital against the patent laws is closely allied to the battle which now agitates most communities, under the more familiar title of Capital versus Labour, and might be properly termed the claims of Brains versus Capital." He quoted an iron manufacturer to the effect that "`brains are more abundant in the world than capital, and ought, therefore, to be had cheap."' As ever, Sir William Armstrong was his exemplary case. When it came to Armstrong, indeed, the charge carried new force in the 186os, because his giant enterprise was seeing its first major industrial strife, as a relative glut of engineers encouraged his personal decision to dismiss some 2,700 striking experts. (It suggests something about Armstrong's style that the foreign labor he hired to replace the strikers soonwent over to their side.) In the end, the journal announced, the abolitionists' case came down to the stark message conveyed byArmstrong's management at Elswick: "Labour, whether mental or physical, is to be the slave of Capital." That was a doctrine that could lead only to "rabid communism and uncompromising revolution."44
ARMS AND THE WORKMAN
Who were these alleged "pirates" against whom patents protected the worker-inventor? It was here that defenders of patenting pulled out a trump card. They identified the pirate king as Sir William Armstrong himself.
Pro-patent campaigners had long singled out Armstrong as the eminence grise behind the