Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [30]
Knowledge therefore spread through chain reactions of reappropria- tions, generally unauthorized and often denounced. Or rather, to use more eighteenth-century analogies, the process resembled not an orrery (a model of central illumination) but the kind of firework that amazed observers by producing staggered bursts across the sky. An initial edition from one location would find its way to a place of reprinting, which would generate a thousand new copies; one of those would then spark another explosion of copies from another reprint center; and so on. Enlightenment traveled atop a cascade of reprints. No piracy, we might say, no Enlightenment. 13
For the most part, however, this kind of reprinting was not technically "piracy" at all, although it was often denounced as such. That is, it was not illicit. The reason was that it was a cross-border phenomenon. Printers in Swiss cantons reproduced the editions of the Paris book guild; those in the Low Countries reprinted French, German, and English titles; and booksellers in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin commissioned reprints of London works. In Vienna, most impressively of all, the imperial court munificently supported the huge reprinting empire ofThomas Edler von Trattner. There was no legal reason-and little moral cause-to forbid such activities. Moreover, mercantilist economic doctrines implied that domestic reprinting was to be preferred to the importing of books from abroad. In consequence, it was perfectly likely for a given volume to be either legitimate or piratical depending on where a reader happened to encounter it. Piracywas an attribute of territory. And it followed that the most interesting sites of reprinting were places the territorial autonomy of which-in the century after the Treaty of Westphalia had created the modern nation-state system-remained ambiguous. Scotland was one: it was only subsumed into a"United Kingdom" in 1707, and retained alargely discrete legal system. Ireland was another: a subordinate kingdom with its own parliament. And the German states had an almost metaphysical status vis a vis the Holy Roman Empire. In these places not only did reprinting boom, but controversy blossomed with it. Each produced its own ideology, and even epistemology, of reprinting. All promoted notions of a cosmopolitan "public" served by their reprinting and neglected by centralized, national book trades. Each charted a trajectory of enlightenment.
PIRACY AND PUBLIC REASON
For the reprinters themselves, the problem was that there was not just one case to be made for their practice, but two-and theywere mutually exclusive. On the one hand, mercantilist principles emphasized the virtue of replacing imported manufactures with home production. On this score, pirates were vanguards of national economic prowess. But on the other, advocates of laissez-faire began to argue that literary property-that mysterious and novel concept-was just another restraint imposed on a market that ought to be as free as possible. It was, they declared, at once absolutist, monopolistic, iniquitous to the public good, and philosophically absurd. On this account, pirates were exemplars of free trade indeed, of freedom in general. Needless to say, while the first kind of argument tended to hold good in metropolitan centers like Vienna, the second sprang from upstart founts of enlightenment like Edinburgh, Dublin, and Philadelphia. (Alexander Donaldson's ringing evocation, as we shall see in chapter 6, found an audience in all three places.) Both stood opposed to metropolitan assertions of authorial property.
Arguments on the other side were equally various. To indicate something of their scope, consider the examples of the Marquis de Condorcet in France and Immanuel Kant in Germany. Each responded creatively