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By Root 2041 0

he conceded, decades of attempts to outlaw reprinting by adducing some kind ofpropertyhad failed. They would always fail, Kant now claimed, because the author's property, if it existed at all, was inalienable -it was an inseparable extension of the creative self. In any case, a real property right would kill publishing itself, for the simple reason that no purchaser would ever accept liability for his or her copy becoming the basis for a reprint. Instead, Kant returned to his idea that a true author exercised a freedom to speak in his own person. He reasserted this principle, remarking that a book was not merely a passive container of meaning, but avehicle for a dynamic process of communication. The publisher was properly comparable to an "instrument" for this process - something like a speaking trumpet. It followed that what was wrong with unauthorized reprinting was nothing to do with property. What made it an offense was that it mixed authorship up with mediation. In effect, it was a form of ventriloquism: the pirate hijacked another person's voice. Worse, pirates therefore obligated authors, rather than vice versa -they made them answerable for meanings transmitted without their consent. (Under the reactionary Frederick William II, censorship was once again in the ascendant, and Kant himself fell afoul of the police at just this point.) It was this violation of the author's identity that made piracy potentially fatal to the very idea of a public sphere, and hence to enlightenment itself. The fact that reprinting dispersed learning more widely, cheaply, and accessibly was true but beside the point. Such knowledge would no longer be public, because authors would no longer beprivate.

Kant's argument was quite different, then, from Condorcet's, and pointed to very distinct policies. But the Idealist and Romantic contentions in which it participated were no less consequential: they inspired the adoption ofliterarypropertyprinciples in the next century. The point, however, is that these are but two of countless attempts made in the eighteenth century to understand and master the piratical Enlightenment. In 170o, as those attempts began, almost nobody spoke in any sustained way of authorial rights. By 175o, many did. By i8oo, such talk was ubiquitous. But where those rights led varied widely according to context. In prerevolutionary France, the Crown rejected properties as an encroachment on royal power, and titles remained gifts of "grace" until 1789 -at which point they were abolished altogether. In the German lands, they were at length adopted under the idealist convictions of Kantianism andNaturphi- losophie. In the English-speaking world an altogether more convoluted compromise evolved. How that happened, and what it meant, will be major topics of the rest of this book.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the invention of piracy in the seventeenth century is that it coincided with the culmination of the scientific revolution. This was perhaps not just a chance alignment. The struggles that gave rise to piracy, after all, had to do not just with print, but with the printed. As those involved consistently declared, they impinged upon knowledge itself. In vitally important and lasting ways, what knowledge is taken to be-such that it can be authored, owned, and stolen-emerged at that moment. Even the rise of Isaac Newton to a position of supremacy in the intellectual culture of his day depended on the establishment of practical and principled approaches to that issue.

We are no longer as comfortable as we once were in identifying a scientific revolution at all in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet there is no denying that radical changes did occur in that period to Western European knowledge about nature. What emerged was not "science" in our sense, but it was fundamentally different from anything conceivable in about 15oo, and our science did emerge in its wake. Since at least the mid-eighteenth century there has been a broad consensus on the momentousness of this transformation. There has been an equally