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By Root 1986 0

the more flagrant. Londonwas attempting to stifle a nation's industry and public culture at once, by imposing its own notion of"private Property" So Scottish readers were exhorted to seek out local reprints rather than buy English editions.16 This was an enormously potent line of attack, and insofar as it latched onto the revolution principle of antimonopoly its appeal extended beyond Scotland. The jurist Edward Thurlow thus agreed that "what was called Literary Property" was aligned with "a scandalous monopoly of ignorant booksellers" who "grew opulent by oppression." The very term "monopoly" was, Warburton and Blackstone agreed, "odious." 17 Merely to mention it was to excite a communal memory of Stuart absolutism and court corruption. Moreover, there was also a real and timely political resonance to this kind of contention. The mid-eighteenth century saw a revival of political controversy over "monopoly," particularly in the form of the East India Company's control of trade with India. London radical Whigs complained against the oligarchic use of state-provided privileges such as the Company's, which outlawed competition and, they claimed, therefore intruded on subjects' abilities to use their intelligence and free will. While the Scottish and English pirate booksellers did not, as far as I know, explicitly link their cause to that of these anti-imperialist radicals, the commonalities were there to be seen.18

Needless to say, the London bookselling oligarchs rejected all this. A true monopoly, they insisted, must remove a right to practice a trade that had once been widely shared, but a literary work was something created at a certain point by an author, so this condition could never have been met. "It cannot be said, that an Author's Work was ever common, as the Earth originallywas."19 And they maintained that some regime of literary propriety must exist if everyone, including the Scots, were not to suffer. William Strahan- the leading printer in London, Master of the Stationers' Company and investor in some two hundred copies, but himself an expatriate Scot-remarked that if the Scots were to win, they themselves would soon discover the need for some equivalent. Francis Hargrave agreed that the pirates would suffer if "pirating" became universal.20 And some evidence existed to back up such claims. Edinburgh's reprinters were certainly accused of turning on their erstwhile allies in Glasgow by importing "contraband" books from Holland and selling them as if they came from London.21

As already noted, the Londoners could cope with local pirates by seeking injunctions. But an injunction was a stopgap, meant only to freeze a potential offense until a real trial could occur. It did not represent a formal verdict, and had no impact on doctrine-however much the Londoners liked to imply that a cascade of them did. What they really needed to deal with the Scottish reprinters was a definitive legal endorsement of the principle of a common-law property right, and one that extended it north of the border. In the mid-1730s they therefore approached Parliament for another statute. Westminster turned them down, agreeing only to ban the importing of reprints. But in attempting to legislate for open-ended property, the booksellers had unwittingly opened a Pandora's box. For it was at this point that the real conflict over what was now dubbed "literary property" or, increasingly, "copyright," began 22 For the next three decades the topic remained constantly before the eyes of readers. In pamphlets, newspaper reports, personal exchanges, and coffeehouse conversations, as well as in a long series of court cases, every conceivable argument for and against such property found a place. The antagonists to a perpetual property right expressly declared that the very existence of public reason depended on the outcome.23 Collectively, these debates furnished the most sustained examination yet of the principles and practices on which a commercial culture of creative works should operate.

With parliamentary action ruled out, the Londoners had to