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as an example the most influential of these efforts in the medium term, Robert K. Merton's. Merton's sociology has typically been seen as motivated by the need to counter totalitarian claims to scientific support. It was, but Merton acknowledged that it also reflected the discord about communications and patenting. He preceded his famous account of the norms of science by an analysis of the relation between social order and inventive activity- an analysis stimulated by British economist Arnold Plant's attack on intellectual property, which we will encounter again below. From 1941, moreover, Merton worked with Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia's Office of Radio Research, agroup seen by the industry as allied to the critics of the communications monopoly. Lazarsfeld and Merton developed methods for studying radio as a social agent, which they subsequently took pains to discuss with Norbert Wiener's cybernetics group. Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), the book that made Merton's name, proceeded sequentially from the sociology of media to the sociology of science - something we miss today when we read only the latter sections. In fact, he had pursued the two fields simultaneously. Mertonian sociology of science thus appeared in the guise of an outcrop of communications work. His insistence on a norm of "communism" deserves to be seen in that light. Merton insisted that scientific research was subject to a form of common ownership of its products. He built from that a model in which scientific advancewas driven byreputational capital, not economic. And, he added, this enterprise was "incompatible with the definition of technology as `private property' in a capitalistic economy." Plagiary was true science's counterpart to piracy. The model would be hugely consequential as the basis for attempts to rejuvenate the scientific culture of the nation after Sputnik, becoming established in the process as the most influential general image of science.21

In the meantime, not all skeptics about intellectual property were progressives like Merton. At least as influential a critique came from the so-called liberal movement in economics that was determined to resurrect laissez-faire. Although it is usually now recalled in terms of the later development of neoliberalism, in fact intellectual property-and cultural property in general-was a nagging concern for this movement. If monopolies were always bad, as the economic liberals assumed they were, then on what basis could information monopolies be defended? Copyrights and patents were artificial-indeed, state-created-monopolies of this kind, so should they be defended at all?

In Britain, with the BBC vaunted as representing the future of culture itself, the import of those questions was especially pressing. It was nowhere more so than at the institutional home of 193os economic liberalism, the London School of Economics. Probably the prime mover there of this kind of argument was Arnold Plant (1898-1978), an engineer-turnedeconomist. Plant never published very much by the standards of professional economists, and most of his later career was spent as a Whitehall apparatchik. He has been far less renowned than colleagues of the time like Friedrich von Hayek and his own one-time assistant Ronald Coase. But he was extremely influential behind the scenes, not least by virtue of being personally associated with many of the economists who chafed at Keynesian orthodoxy after the war. In papers that he did publish on copyright and patents in the 1930s, and in later ones addressing public broadcasting, Plant laid out a template for their attack. He did so on the basis of what was, in fact, an extensive and intensive excavation of the archival and statistical evidence on the history of copyrights and patents. He even seems to have tried to discover the origin of the usage in the context of intellectual property of the word pirate. Almost none of that labor broke the surface in print. What was evident, however, was his rediscovery of the arguments of the Victorian campaign against intellectual property.22