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But Plant began his assault on copyright in 1934 with another forgotten figure: Henry Carey. He reread the Philadelphia protectionist's attacks on international copyright, and noticed that Carey-who had explicitly endorsed the unauthorized reprinting of his own works-was one of very few writers to acknowledge his own interest as an author. Plant admired this candor. Authors were interested parties, he agreed. Readers would therefore be wise to treat the overwhelming public consensus on the benefits of copyright with a dose of cui bono skepticism. Continuing to excavate the lost tradition of resistance to intellectual property, Plant arrived at the conclusion that copyright was simply a monopoly. It elevated prices, provided an entirely indiscriminate and unjustifiable encouragement for ventures that did not deserve pursuit, and was in many cases unnecessary (the frequent republication of classics in many different formats provided abundant proof of this). Perhaps, he mused, it should be abolished.13 Nor did he shrink from advancing the thought experiment of a publishing realm lacking any copyright. After all, for many genresacademic monographs, say, and poetry-it was simply irrelevant. And in the sixteenth century the book trade had thrived without any copyright law. A culture of reprinting- of "piracy"-had existed that Plant likened to that of knock offs in the modern world of high fashion. Milan's fashion houses did not fold simply because high-street chains imitated their designs, and high-street chains in turn did not fold when street vendors imitated their imitations. What developed instead was a hierarchy of discrete markets. Something similar had obtained in transatlantic publishing in Carey's day. The need to be first in a market, coupled with a "tacit understanding" that a book issued by one publisher "should not be pirated by another," had been sufficient to keep it all going. If a respectable rival transgressed, then the big publishers would produce "fighting editions" in retaliation; but penny-dreadful versions circulated in their own world. Plant likened these to the "fighting buses" that London operators in the 1930s used against pirates on the capital's streets.

Plant claimed to find in scientific research a modern version of that Renaissance marketplace. It implied that patents should go the same way as copyright. Invention could clearly proceed apace without them, and where they existed, they blocked discoveries from being made. In biology, for instance, plant breeding flourished independently of intellectual property (an example that today seems distinctly ironic); so did medical research (ditto). Besides, patents, where theywere granted, created afalse authorship that could be fatally alluring to workers. Dredging up testimony from the MacFie campaign, Plant cited Brunel to prove this point. Discoveries and inventions were in fact collective achievements, and a vibrant world of science and technology could easily be created under tacit norms rather than overt monopolies. For many research scientists it would even be preferable. They simply wanted their creations dispersed as widely as possible, and intellectual property actively hindered that dispersal.

Abolition being an unrealistic proposal, Plant returned to the nineteenth-century debates once more and proposed the alternative of compulsory licensing. The principle had often been condemned, he conceded. But it had been tried in Italy in the i86os, and Britain too had adopted it in limited form in 1911. Plant approved. The system avoided the perils of authorial monopoly while still providing for authors' livelihoods. He proposed that the period of monopoly in patents and copyrights alike be reduced drastically, to about five years, and the compulsory royalty period correspondingly extended. But the British economy was by now not isolable, and such a proposal ran afoul of its international commitments. The Berne Convention enshrined a commitment to French legal notions of a moral right of the author, to which compulsory licensing was anathema. International