Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [18]
In the 166os, the restored monarchy of Charles II therefore viewed popular print with a queasy mixture of respect, unease, and fear. The Crown was happy to make use of print when it could, but it remained very suspicious of the book trade, and was prone to blame pamphleteering and newsmongering for the great rebellion. Revanchist cavaliers like Sir Roger LEstrange and Sir John Birkenhead asserted that the exchange of paper bullets in the 164os had escalated into fusillades of real ones -yet they did so, tellingly, in their own popular newsbooks and pamphlets. The question facing England's rulers was in truth that of all European monarchs: how to accommodate and exploit what was becoming a perpetual sphere of printed argument, in which the rules of knowledge were no longer those of university, court, or palace.19
It was in this sphere that the clash between register and patent occurred. It did so at the hands of an impoverished old Cavalier named Richard Atkyns. Atkyns sought to revive one of the most profitable patents of all: a privilege granted by Elizabeth I a century earlier on all books of the common law. This patent had been renewed several times, descending through various inheritors until the civil war had rendered it moot. When the monarchy returned, Atkyns came forward claiming to be the rightful heir to the privilege, and demanded that it be revived. But in the 1640s, with royal power in abeyance, some of the most lucrative legal works had come to be entered in the register at Stationers' Hall.20 The company had subsequently taken control of these, and now decided to oppose Atkyns's bid in the name of the register system and the trade community as a whole. The resulting struggle rapidly escalated, drawing in the entire regime of the printed book in England. All aspects of contemporary print proved to be at stake: its regulation, its personnel, its social structure and economics, its place in the commonwealth, its past and its future.21
The law patent was worth fighting for. The Restoration authorities had resolved to consign the previous decade to "oblivion," such that legal memory would begin again as though Charles I had only just died.22 New volumes of law were therefore badly needed to replace those that had been printed during the intervening eleven years. Whoever got to produce the new volumes would have to make substantial investments, but the risks would be low and the rewards great. But he would also have to be trustworthy, and there lay a problem. Booksellers and printers were notoriously capable not just of sloppiness but of active intervention in the works they produced-something that in its innocent form was merely one of the duties of a responsible craftsman. In this case the issue was especially delicate, for accurate reproduction might now be tantamount to sedition. A printer named Samuel Speed found this out to his detriment, when he was hauled before the authorities for including statutes passed under Cromwell in one of the new law books.23 Atkyns's fortunes would come to rest on his claim to meet this need for responsible supervision. And that claim was founded on his assertion of what kind ofperson he was.
Atkyns was no printer. He had never touched a press, and showed no inclination