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By Root 2018 0

group grumbled that the system was oligarchic and monopolist. Indeed, some charged that in restricting works that would otherwise be open, the congers themselves were piratical. John Dunton, an enterprising and opinionated Whig printer, thus conceded that the major virtue of a conger was in defending against "pirates," but in the next breath denounced the Castle group as a "Pyrat-Conger," marveling that its members could live with their consciences. Another antagonist suggested that the name conger had been coined to signify a beast fond of devouring "small fry."The secretive character of the congers was another focus of criticism (one that we shall see Jacob Ilive rehearsing in his later attack on copy owners).8 These critiques remained largely ineffectual at first, but theywould never quite go away.

In 1707-9 it was a group of conger members who succeeded in persuading Parliament to pass a replacement for the old Press Act. Bids for some kind of legal recognition had hitherto been mixed with calls for a revival of press regulation, perhaps by licensing. An alternative was to enjoin that authors must "own" their works in the sense of printing their names on the title pages. The new group did not entirely divest itself of those old arguments, but it focused much more heavily on the issue of property per se. It made the adroit decision to seek protection not for mere "copies"that is, for a trade custom-but for "properties."Joseph Addison endorsed the idea of suppressing "the scandalous Practices of the Pyrate Printers and their Hawkers," and issued a furious diatribe in the Tatler against them. Daniel Defoe provided its rationale. Defoe proclaimed not only a "Right of Property," but a right of property created by authors. This was the booksellers' old retort to Atkyns, revived now in a very different context. A law for regulation and property alike, Defoe said, would be "so agreeable to a Revolution-Principle, so considerable an Article in Defence of Property, that no Whig can be against it-without ceasing to be what we call a Whiff that is, a Man careful of preserving Property." Even a printer like John How, who charged that the elite booksellers were the greatest pirates of all-and threatened to "publish the whole History of Piracy, wherein the World shall see how the Greatest Men of the Trade have rais'd their Estates"-called for a law so that the trade might have a level field.

In January 1710 the grandees proposed their bill. Envisaging a strict property right in printed works, grounded in the labor of the author and owned, almost always, by a London bookseller, it promised to enshrine the congers' customs into law. But the concept did not survive Westminster. Some critical parliamentarian-it is unclear who-was cautious enough about monopolies to suggest limiting the term of a copy. The idea had been floated before, notably by John Locke, but the booksellers were horrified by it. They rushed out three broadsides overnight, declaring that it would not only undermine "a Right which has been Enjoyed by Common Law above i5o Years," but destroy a "Property the same with that of Houses." Parliament held its ground. Not only did it retain this critically important change, but it also added a further provision that after the first term of fourteen years the right would revert to the author for another fourteen. It then amended the preamble introducing the measure. Where the draft had spoken of the law "securing" a property based in authors' "learning and labour," now the bill described itself as "vesting" a right in proprietors. The distinction between securing and vesting was subtle, especially as the old term remained in the bill itself. But it might well mean that what the booksellers proclaimed as a natural right was something else entirely: an artificial protection, created by Parliament and granted for a limited duration. It might imply, in short, that this was a parliamentary counterpart to a royal patent. And it was in this form that the bill was finally carried. As An act for the encouragement of learning it came