Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [72]
At length London was jarred into action. With Scotland almost out of bounds and Parliament still unsympathetic, the copy owners resorted to their own accustomed devices. They entered into a private scheme to eradicate piracy once and for all. At closed meetings, some sixty-odd booksellers signed on to this scheme-an impressive turnout, enhanced no doubt by the fact that those who refused were threatened with blacklisting from trade sales. The plan itself derived from the seventeenth century precedent of Company searches. The Londoners intended to extend this practice into the provinces, creating a national (or at least English) network of informers and enforcers. And they would then use that network to trigger the legalverdict they needed. They inaugurated a common fund to pay for the campaign, immediately raising the substantial sum of $3,150. Tonson and Millar contributed the most, at £5oo and £300 respectively-large sums indicative of the stakes for these two prominent copy owners. The management of the offensive was then entrusted to a committee, including Millar, Tonson, and John and James Rivington.
The campaign proper began in April 1759. John Whiston, a bookseller in Fleet Street, wrote sternly to every provincial retailer in the nation to warn of its launch; he followed this six months later by another letter, still more threatening. The Londoners were resolved on "totally preventing the sale of Scotch and Irish books, which were first printed in England," Whiston declared. He quietly ignored the statutory terms, of course; the whole point was to prevent the reprinting of works outside that limit. In effect, Millar and his corps were trying to stop the "piracy" of almost every book that had ever been published in London. They offered to accept any Scottish or Irish editions that provincial booksellers might have on hand, exchanging them for the same value in their own versions -which would mean fewer actual books, of course, since the reprints were much cheaper. But this offer held good only if all unbound copies were freely surrendered along with a full account of bound ones, and an undertaking never again to deal in "pirated editions." "Don't you fail to send all you have," Whiston emphasized. After May i, he warned, "agents" would be dispatched across the length and breadth of the land to search for offending volumes. Anyone found harboring them would be prosecuted mercilessly Booksellers should take care, Whiston concluded darkly, "for fear you are informed against."29
The threats were soon followed by action. Or so it seemed. Jacob Tonson sued a Salisbury bookseller named Benjamin Collins for selling a Scottish reprint of the Spectator. The prosecution displayed a determination to produce a definitive statement. To secure its credibility, the finest counsel were retained for both sides. William Blackstone, probably the foremost lawyer of the century, represented Tonson. Thurlow, a scarcely less renowned orator, defended Collins. And in a very unusual move, all twelve senior common-law judges - from King's Bench, Common Pleas, and the Exchequer-agreed to hear the case. But all was not what it appeared to be. Collins was in fact a correspondent of the Londoners, and one of the few provincial booksellers to be heavily invested in copies. He had been recruited as a willing collaborator. The idea was to contrive a case as advantageous as possible for the oligarchs, out of which would come their required legal ruling. This