Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [221]
The company realized it was in a pickle. Strong action against spurious "experimenters" and outright "pirates" might save it in the short term, observed its chief engineer, but such action would require policing so aggressive as to be politically disastrous. It would therefore doom the organization anyway.37 Before more than a few months of broadcasting had passed, the experimenter and the broadcaster were at loggerheads. Either the ideal of the amateur scientist must be jettisoned, or the broadcasting compromise would die. This was the legacy that the initial patent feud had left behind - a kind of social, political, and epistemological booby trap lodged at the heart of the broadcasting system. One postmaster general confessed to struggling for "days, and almost nights" with it, and called it the most difficult problem of his career.38
It is worth pausing to ask why. What made the identity of the experimenter so prized? In large part, the answer has to do with the anxieties of the 192os, when technocracy was the utopian politics of the day and an entire generation that might have secured a scientific future for the nation had been lost to war. It was now that the League of Nations proposed an international law allowing for the patenting of scientific facts, precisely to encourage a new generation to become scientists.39 But there were also deeper historical currents at work. The question of the experimenter had roots extending back to the seventeenth century, and had been revived by the Victorian debates about industry and invention. By the early twentieth century, at risk of oversimplifying, three broad types existed for the authoritative knower: the older ideal of agentlemanly, generalist amateur, distinguished by disinterest and purity of motive; the scientist proper, distinguished by expertise and professional qualifications; and the lay experimenter or inventor, distinguished by experience and originality but impossible to identify by anyrule.40 Radio crystallized these distinctions. Here was a technology that was at once a popular hobby, a tool of utopian change, and a branch of technical knowledge -one built on the dauntingly difficult physics of Maxwell, Hertz, and Heaviside. Its founding figures were often not academics or industrialists, and scientists had initially dismissed Marconi's own claims as either exaggerated or commonplace. In this light, broadcasting was bringing about a public reckoning between the social identities of the scientist, the researcher, and the lay inventor.
When Chamberlain imposed his moratorium on experimenters' licenses, it was supposed to remain in place until a definition of an experimenter was settled upon. The Post Office declared its resolve to restrict such licenses to what it called "personswithunquestionable qualifications." But what exactly it meant to be qualified as an experimenter was, of course, entirely unclear.41 The question was already urgent, and was getting more so by the day: the BBC thought that two hundred thousand more "infringers" would take out experimenters' licenses if they could, making for a total far in excess of the original hopes for broadcast licenses. One possible answer lay in examinations. The Institution of Electrical Engineers was the best-known instance of a body that used formal exams to create a profession. But one reason why the identity ofthe experimenter was such a problem was precisely that such systems had, to an extent, failed. Measuring mastery of a stable body of existing technological knowledge was one thing; measuring the potential to master and transform a fast-advancing field was quite another. The Radio Society of Great Britain maintained no