Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [31]
Condorcet wrote as an antagonist to the Paris book guild, and in opposition to Denis Diderot, who had been charged by the guild with defending its interest in literary property His was a contribution to a long debate in France over privileges, censorship, and "counterfeiting" (contrefafon). His Fragments concerning freedom of the press argued that property rights in literaryworks should not exist at all, because the public's interest in knowledge trumped the author's. Its argument was fundamentally epistemological. Condorcet insisted that knowledge itself originated in sense perceptions, and that since people's sensory apparatuses were essentially alike, its elements were naturally common to all. "Originality" could exist, he conceded, but it resided only in matters of style, not of knowledge. Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton all achieved what they did with no literary property system to encourage them, and the same held true of the works that defined "the progress of Enlightenment" itselfabove all Diderot's own Encyclopedia. That made the principle of literary property not merely superfluous and unnatural, but actively harmful. To constrain the circulation of ideas on this principle would be to make artifice, not truth, the structuring principle of cultural commerce. Free trade must be enforced in literature. `k book that can circulate freely and that does not sell at a third above its price," he affirmed, would "almost never be counterfeited." Instead, Condorcet proposed creating a realm of printed reason around periodicals, not books. Knowledge should be organized by category, not by author. Readers would return their own contributions to these sources, thus creating a perpetual virtuous circulation. On this view an enlightening realm of print would resemble a vast instantiation of the tree of knowledge prefacing Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie, with each twig being the name of a journal. In the meantime, counterfeiting was simply enlightenment itself, breaking out every- where.14
Carla Hesse has told the story of what happened in the wake of this argument.15 Briefly, after 1789 the revolutionaries wanted to see enlightenment spread from Paris by its own natural force. They therefore abolished literary property. For the first time, the people themselves would have access to the finest learning and the best literature-to the fruits of genius. What ensuedwas an experiment in whether print without literary propertywould help or hinder enlightenment. Before long the very officer responsible for policing the book trade was being accused of piracy, while the most radical revolutionary journal, Revolutions de Paris, had declared Mirabeau's letters, as "the works of a man of genius," to be "public prop- erty"This was a revolutionary utopianism of the commons. If the French Revolution itself was the revenge of the hacks, as Robert Darnton says, then this revolution of the book was the revenge of the pirates. But as utopias do, it turned rotten.The craft ofprinting did expand rapidly- the number of printers quadrupled-but what it produced changed radically too. The folio and the quarto were dead. Reprints became first legitimate, then dominant. Even proclamations were pirated. The old world of a few large houses issuing authoritative editions could not survive. Those that endured were smaller, faster, newer. They employed whatever secondhand tools they could lay their hands on, worked at breakneck speed withwhat- ever journeymen they could get, and ensured a rapid turnover by issuing newspapers and tracts with an immediate sale. What books were still published were largely compilations of old, prerevolutionary material. In other words, a literary counterpart to Gresham's Law took hold, and the triumph of thepressesgrises led to disaster. A series of abortive attempts to