Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [292]
Private as it was, early modern policing led to characteristic forms of engagement with the public authorities. From an early date, those concerned to charge opponents with unsettling good order saw opportunities to extend the scope of that charge, and alleged that they posed a danger to church and state. When they did, transgressors could find themselves before the courts after all-not for piracy, but for unlicensed or seditious printing.8 At that point, however, other characteristics of early modern enforcement might well come into play. One such was a tendency to turn pirates into policemen. Pirate printers were given patents; one of the most notorious, Henry Hills, was even made master of the Stationers' Company. Another typical response was the recourse to informers. Some pirates, Hills among them, apparently hastened to sell their services to the government, and the conviction took hold early and proved tenacious that making order a reality depended on them. Turncoats and informers were needed because of that basic problem for early modern policing, the inviolability of households. The private enforcement of creative titles thus extended into the public realm, and employed notoriously corrosive agents when it did so.
Private enforcement remained customary to the end of the early modern era. Indeed, there is a sense in which its passing was the end of the early modern era. In the eighteenth century several developments cast the principle into doubt and then disrepute. Theories of interest in the idiom of classical republicanism generated skepticism about the principle itself; scandals like that of the Thief-Taker General Jonathan Wildhanged for colluding with the very criminals he had been charged with capturing-bolstered that skepticism. And when the vast, monopolist East India Company became a target for radicals opposed to monopolist policing in both trade and empire, the controversy they excited swept up domestic corporations too. The policing of literary property duly experienced its own crisis in the same period. Faced by Scottish and Irish reprinters, London's publishing booksellers responded much as the East India oligarchs did in their much wider sphere. They moved to recruit their own corps of "agents" to comb the region for piracies. Their aim was not to secure legal copyright, but to maintain a perpetual literary property grounded in trade custom-a very different, indeed fundamentally incompatible, principle.9 The effort could perhaps be seen as a bid to extend the old tradition of participant policing beyond London and make it a national reality at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. But in practice it backfired disastrously when the Edinburgh reprinter Alexander Donaldson assumed the mantle of pirate-in-chief and mounted a counterattack. Donaldson maintained that the campaign-which rested on an assumed right of private agents to enter homes - threatened the very existence of a public sphere. In the face of that presumption, he insisted that it was precisely the so-called pirates who were upholders of the public. Learning and enlightenment depended on them.10 In 1774 he won his case, in what remains the most definitive copyright verdict in AngloAmerican history.
The establishment of copyright was thus a matter of practices of enforcement and their implications for enlightenment, and only secondarily of statute law. Moreover, questions of policing continued to loom large after 1774, taking on international significance as the implicit tension between moral and political economies became increasingly overt in the Industrial Revolution. An Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism could flourish partly because there was no international regime of literary and industrial property to constrain it. The engineer Robert Fulton's peregrinations exemplified the possibilities: he moved from London to Paris,