Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [25]
A cadre of oligarchs in the trade now campaigned, if not for revival of the Press Act itself, then at least for a substitute statute to restore the register system. It argued that the natural right of authors -that right that the booksellers had articulated against Atkyns -was being destroyed. How could this accord with a revolution the very axioms of which were property and liberty? But the bid was repeatedly thwarted. And in truth it always confronted a difficult problem of principle. Literary property was a monopoly or it was nothing; but antimonopolism was as fundamental a tenet of Whig politics as faith in property itself. In what was now remembered as a long struggle against Stuart arbitrary government, the fight against royal prerogative in commerce occupied a hallowed place.' This intractable confrontation between principles of monopoly and property-between royal power and civil society-ensured that the problem of print propriety remained simmering. Only in 1709-1o did it finally come to a head, and even then the result was notably equivocal. What ensued was a notoriously confused and unsettled piece of legislation. In retrospect it has become known as the first ever copyright act.
It was in these years of no property-between 1695 and 17io -that piracy really became an everyday concept for London's writers and readers. Suddenly it was being referred to everywhere, in poetry, newspapers, novels, ballads, correspondence, and essays. Just as piracy as a legal category ceased to exist, so piracy as a cultural category blossomed. A major reason for this, of course, was that attentionwas riveted on struggles with real, seagoing pirates, most notably in the Caribbean. The first Royal Navy expedition had been dispatched to Jamaica in 1688. Since then raw piracy had boomed, fueled by an influx of ex smallholders unable to compete with slave plantations. In the 171os, with a temporary peace signed in Europe, the Navy was again sent into action. On the other side of the world, meanwhile, the East India Company struggled against its own "pirates." Like those of the Caribbean, these were often once-tolerated competitors now outlawed under the expansionist and monopolist schemes of the company. 3 On land, the Stationers' Company like the East India Company, faced a pirate war- and these pirates, too, had until recently known royal favor. The leading "pirate" of the postrevolutionary years was Henry Hills, son of the man who had been James II's royal printer.
The countless legends of buccaneering that came to London from the naval campaigns fueled the war of print piracy Stories about Edward Teach ("Blackbeard"), Captain Kidd, Mary Bonny, William Dampier, and Bartholomew Roberts filled the London press, where they were themselves pirated. But there they also merged with the kinds of ideas about pirate "companies" on which Atkyns and Streater had drawn. The most influential of all the pirate narratives, Captain Charles Johnson's General history of the Pyrates, thus avowedly cast aside "romantic" tales of derring- do in favor of treating pirate crews as commonwealths in the making. The point, its author (thought by some to be Daniel Defoe) said, was to record their "Policies, Discipline and Government."And as he portrayed them, the pirates did indeed constitute themselves