Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [32]
The context in the German lands was different.16 Under the traditional system of fairs at Leipzig and Frankfurt, authorship had little economic value, and periodicals, not books, were enlightenment's central vehicles. Condorcet's vision of an authorless public realm was becoming fact in Germany when he articulated it in France. But in the 176os a bitter, prolonged, and profound debate was ignited about the commerce of print and its role in public culture. Its protagonists included not only the leading booksellers of the time, but its major authors too: Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and others. Reprinting was not its only issue. But it was the occasion and principal theme of the debate. So, for example, Jean Paul issued "Seven last words, or, postscripts against pirating," and plays on the topic were staged in Prague and Leipzig. But it was Immanuel Kant who provided the most idiosyncratic and influential contribution. His arguments, like Condorcet's in France, tied the problem of piracy to the very possibility of enlightenment.
Kant's famous answer to the question "What is Enlightenment?" appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in x785.17 The essay received enormous attention, then and later; it has been treated in recent years as an authoritative description of the public sphere itself. It portrayed that sphere as composed of avast population of readers of periodicals, whose duty was to practice thinking for themselves. The results of this activity were to be displayed through print to the same realm. Kant insisted on the illegitimacy of censorship to control this realm. He did, however, allow that the state could restrict citizens acting in their capacities as bureaucrats, military officers, clergymen, and so on. In that capacity a subject exercised only what he termed "private" reason. Only in withdrawal from one's professional post, therefore-perhaps in a secluded study-could one really exercise "public" reason. Public reasonwas therefore produced in (what we would call) private. In public, an author spoke "in his own person." The interaction of such public utterances was what Kant identified as enlightenment.
Shortly after "What is Enlightenment?" appeared, Kant tookup his pen again to propose a related thesis in the same journal. By stark contrast, this second paper is nowadays almost completely unknown; yet it was one of Kant's first pieces to be translated into English, in 1798, along with the Enlightenment essay. It took up and extended the claims of the preceding article, and seemed to deal with concerns fundamental to the plausibility of that article's argument. It also reminded readers that Kant himselfwas thoroughly proficient in the mundane practices of authorship, reading, and publishing-practices on which any kind of public sphere necessarily depended. The piece was entitled "On the wrongfulness of the unauthorized publication of books."18 We do not know the precise occasion of its composition, but it very possibly arose from the same group of "Friends of the Enlightenment" that inspired the more renowned essay. At any rate, it adopted the argument of that essay as its tacit premise.
The question Kant now addressed arose directly from his conclusion that public reasonwas a matter of each authorwriting "in his own person." What if the mediating agents of print appropriated that person-as, in a piratical world, they so often did? Kant observed that a bookseller who undertook to produce an edition must have an obligation to do so faithfully. This fidelity, he added, was facilitated by the provision of exclusive rights. Yet,