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By Root 1901 0

the idea is to mount a "war on piracy" analogous to the war on drugs. The precedent, it must be said, is inauspicious. Even the Bush administration, in its dying days, was leery, both of turning government lawyers into advocates for corporations and of entering into a new and cumbersome war that would surely be open ended. But President Bush signed the measure into law on October 13, 2008. Whatever its future consequences may be, it certainly extends a process that was already well under way.5

Exemplary as it is, the historical roots of this enterprise are deep and revealing. Ultimately, its origins lie in the customs for maintaining the orderly reputations of early modern trades that were outlined in chapter 2. In that founding era for literary and mechanical property, what patents and guild registrations had in common was that the holder of a given title had to act to make it real. There was little prospect of state action to uphold such claims. A strong presumption held that members of each specific trade community ought instead to collaborate to maintain them. Tracking down "pirates" of printed books, therefore, was a matter initially for the printers or booksellers concerned. The right to search their co- tradesmen's premises was a critically important privilege in making this practicable. Constables did not enjoy that right; it arose not from citizenship, but from membership of the given trade community. In London it was the responsibility of the Stationers' beadle to organize such searches, and they became routine events. Alleged piracies would be taken to Stationers' Hall, where the grandees of the trade would then decide upon restitution. In other words, the practical delineation and sustaining of literary property (as it later came to be called) was a private matter, both in the sense of being dealt with internally to a trade community, and in the sense that it remained invisible to authors and readers. What kept it honest, in theory at least, was the realization that an officer who authorized the search of a printer's home one year was quite likely to be investigated himself by the same printer during that person's own turn in office. A principle of social circulation-made basic to the political sphere by the civic republicanism of writers like James Harrington -meant that the boundary between acting on behalf of the public and serving a personal interest was often unclear.6 (The language of "interest," not coincidentally, is one we owe to this period.) It is even plausible that that boundary had to be unclear, because success depended on knowledge that came from local acquaintances. An officer had to remain a trusted neighbor to have access to such knowledge. In early modern cities, an interlocking, reticulated array of lay officials-beadles, churchwardens, constables, and so onpermeated and policed society at all levels and in almost all activities. They maintained order by virtue of being categorically indistinct from the people they oversaw. The system made "do as you would be done by" into the basis of order in the arts and trades.?

Patents at first glance stood apart from this because theywere a matter for courts of law. But in practice their enforcement too was largely a private affair. Pursuing patent infringers relied on the initiative of patentees, and success in the task depended on their access to insider knowledge. Getting a patent in the first place required tactical expertise, patience, constant attendance, and a lot of money; maintaining it required more. Indeed, proposals began to circulate from the late seventeenth century, if not earlier, to increase the private character of patent policing, precisely in order to make it fairer. The idea was to take these often highly technical disputes out of ill-informed judges' hands and entrust them to some expert body. The Royal Society in particular repeatedly angled to take on this role. It never did, but its register system pioneered what would become modern scientific norms surrounding discovery and priority. Plans for an autonomous expert tribunal