Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [34]
The affiliation between the printing revolution and the revolution in science was real enough. But it was artificial. Scholars, mathematicians, experimental philosophers, booksellers, and others worked hard to make print into a vehicle for knowledge. Virtually all acknowledged the huge potential of the craft, but many cautioned that for it to realize that potential it must be carefully monitored and used. Success was not guaranteed, and there were those-not all of them curmudgeons- prepared to claim that the printed page was actually getting less reliable in the age of newsbook vendors and pamphleteers. Two hundred years after Gutenberg, and despite repeated attempts, nobody had managed to establish a lastingly successful scholarly press anywhere in Europe. Authoring knowledge remained a matter of engaging constructively with the world of the printing house and bookshop, in a bid to unite the commitments of their denizens to the interests of learning. The phenomena that society was just starting to call piratical loomed large in scholars' eyes as they labored to produce, distribute, and put to use printed works. In struggling to limit, manage, and exploit those phenomena, they forged a bond between print and knowledge. They also initiated the central elements of what would become the scientific enterprise.
In one sense, to broach this subject is to revive one of the most hackneyed themes of early modern learning: the relation between words and things. The contemporaries of Newton often proclaimed their revolution in terms of a fundamental recasting of that relation, or even as a discarding of the former in favor of the latter. Abraham Cowley's paean to Francis Bacon is a stark instance:
From Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought, (Though we our Thoughts from them perversly drew) To Things, the Minds right Object, he it brought.'
Yet in fact natural philosophers could never neglect words quite as conclusively as they liked to claim in their looser polemical moments. Things cannot speak for themselves. And even the most neoteric of new philosophies articulated a view of the textual inheritance of antiquity, if only to distinguish itself from its predecessors.' In practice, every experiment was a nexus between the reading of some texts and the writing and printing of others. What the rhetoric about words and things really did was to focus attention on the proper uses of both.
That included proper techniques for reading. There are indeed conventions of reading, in science as in other fields of human endeavor, and they can differ from place to place and time to time. Those of the modern sciences derive ultimately from this period-the period of the first experimental philosophers -when they emerged in tandem with the techniques of experiment itself. Experimenting with print as well as with nature, the experimentalists created the distant origins of peer review, journals, and archives-the whole gallimaufry that is often taken as distinctive of science, and that is now in question once again in the age of open access and digital distribution. Above all, they gave rise to the central position that scientific authorship and its violation would hold in the enterprise.
THE INVENTION OF SCIENTIFIC READING
Experimental philosophy was a way of inquiring into nature that was pioneered in England in the mid-seventeenth century. Its major home, the Royal Society of London, was founded in 166o and survived to become the world's oldest scientific society. The Society made a point from its earliest days of experimenting with print. It adopted innovative alliances