Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [182]
Two manifestos issued at this time set the terms for that contest. Saunders's, attributed to an anonymous `American,"was thought to have been written by Washington Irving and Grenville Sackett.27 It denounced the typical American publisher as a "Literary Pirate" who not merely appropriated works but "dismembered" them. Yet the tract also upbraided British copyright as inadequate. It maintained that literary property should be perpetual, and condemned Donaldson vs. Becket as "an unheard of stretch of legislative tyranny and injustice." The linkage of deposit to copyright (Brydges's complaint), it added, had further raised "piracy" over property. The point was to take existing arguments for American reprinting and trump them. In terms reminiscent of Mathew Carey, it aligned authorship with improving means for "the conveyance of intelligence," such as canals, harbors, and railroads, all of which produced "moral and intellectual improvement" for the populace.28 The United States, it affirmed, was pioneering a new kind of society But a "depraved" moral sentiment could play no part in that. "Robbery has in no code of modern, political science been made the basis of national aggrandizement," the tract warned, "and those nations of antiquitywho resorted to such means soon found that the tenure of their property was rather precarious." Moreover, in a pirating domain readers were forced to imbibe aristocratic "stimulants," and not the "Spartan broth" suited to their hardier constitution. Only with universal rights could authors uphold an interest in plain and virtuous truth. That is, only international copyright could sustain a distinctly Kantian ideal of public reason, on which a nation might build its future.
The initial public champion for the other side was one Philip Nicklin. But Nicklin was a front man. He had been Carey's agent up to 1829, and he dedicated his riposte to Henry Carey His should therefore be read as the answer of the long-dominant American reprinter to Saunders's challenge. Appropriately enough, it was largely composed of reprints: the British petition, Clay's bill, a speech byTalfourd, even an article on copyright from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Along the way, Nicklin pointed out what he claimed were blatant contradictions. For example, the authors complained that their reputations suffered by reprinting; yet imposing copyright would reduce readership. Complaints of "mutilation" were equally far-fetched, he thought, because "sharp competition" upheld ac- curacy29 Nicklin professed to concur on the need for copyright to be perpetual, and he too endorsed Brydges's campaign against the deposit. But he would subject literary property to a compulsory licensing system similar to that advocated by the British antipatent campaigners. This he thought essential in order to open books to the "energy" of real free trade. Getting rid of monopoly was the only way to make "pirates and piracies" disappear. And this "abolition of literary piracy" was surely the "consummation" wished by all. A true harmony of interests - that iconic phrase - would then bind societies together.30
Both sides therefore began by presenting this as a struggle for the soul of the republic, with, on the face of it, agood deal of common ground. Yet within a fewyears thiswould metastasize into a conflict over fundamentals: protection versus free trade, manufacturing versus commerce, democracy versus oligarchy, Philadelphia versus New York. It would address central questions of modern culture as that culture came into being. What was knowledge, and how were its development, transmission, and storage best secured? This radicalization emerged because the question