Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [65]
It was Grew's generation that saw the first patents issued on compounded, chemical medicaments. Why then, and not earlier or later? The answer rests on the issues appealed to in the Grew-Moult exchange and thrown open with the defeat of the College of Physicians. The old tripartite system had been premised on continuity, not originality It accorded no special importance to the creation of new medicines and techniques. Discovery and invention occurred, of course, but they were not part of the regular professional identity of a physician or apothecary. As a result, apothecaries, physicians, and operators alike adopted ad hoc measures, and in their internecine struggles articulated rival concepts of authorial propriety and theft. Grew's decision to resort to a patent began as merely one among these tactics. But afterward Grew's patent became something more. The physicians' defeat turned what had been a tactic into a strategy-and then into a structural element fated to form the core of medical culture.
The eighteenth-century medical marketplace lauded the creation and marketing of novelty from all comers and all corners. It emphasized the distribution of professed knowledge to an ever-wider range of readers. It was inhospitable to old authorities who justified their eminence by appeal to Latin learning, or to Galen and Hippocrates. Yet there was at the same time something very Grub Street about it too. In place of those fusty old collegians it fostered awild free-for-all, with figures like Hans Sloane finding their names attached to nostrums alongside every patent-medicine peddler. The world bemoaned as one of "medical anarchy," in which medicines were faked, counterfeited, and pirated without limit, was also the world in which medical patenting became routine. It was inextricable from the world hailed as enlightened, because it was at its heart the same world.
Copyright was an invention of eighteenth-century Britain. It was unknown anywhere before 170o, and for much of the ensuing century no other nation had anything like it. Even in Britain, it took until the 1770s for the concept to congeal into roughly its modern form-that of a temporally limited "right" defined by statute and limited to the expression of ideas rather than ideas themselves. Each of those elements was initially hard to articulate and comprehend. All of them remained controversial. Some still do. It is worth asking, then, how such a strange concept came into being at all, and why it was found appealing in the first place.
The answers to those questions lie in how a new political and economic context made the everyday practices of printing and bookselling intensely controversial. In both its nature and its very existence, copyright reflected the fact that it emerged in the generations after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The exit of the Catholic king James II and his replacement by William and Marywere profoundly traumatic events, which set in motion major changes in the governance and political economy of the British Isles. Invocations of"liberty and property" were commonplace in the long and bitter debate that took place over the revolution's legitimacy. They became, in contemporary terms, "revolution principles." To insist that publishing rested on a system of property, as the major London booksellers learned to do, was therefore astute, since it identified one of those essential principles as being at stake.' But in that light "literary property" had a besetting problem too- a problem that few articulated at the outset, but that would become ever harder to ignore as the debate reached its climax: insofar as it was property, it stood at odds with liberty. That is, it set the two principal revolution principles at loggerheads. London's grandee booksellers might see only virtue in entrenching a principle of property, absolute and perpetual, as the axiom of publishing. For their challengers, it was