Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [73]
PIRACY, PROGRESS, AND THE PUBLIC
At that point the campaign for perpetual property became even more calamitous. Company searches had been controversial even before 1688. Now they met with real opposition as violating revolution principles. The provinces were not mere extensions of London, Scotland was no colony, and this kind of high-handed treatment provoked resentment in both. One of the Edinburgh booksellers ensnared in the campaign was Alexander Donaldson. Incensed by what he saw as an attempt to maintain a monopoly by intimidation, Donaldson turned into the most convinced and resolute foe the metropolitan copy owners ever faced.
Donaldson had been born in the year when Millar defended Scottish piracy31 He had learned his trade as an apprentice to the king's printer in Scotland, and had long collaborated with Millar to issue some of the most significant philosophy and natural philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. In Edinburgh he became renowned for the hospitality he extended to local authors, notably Boswell. But Donaldson now developed an implacable abhorrence of the metropolitan trade. What they saw as an essential civility, he repudiated as tyranny. He responded to the 1759 campaign by mounting the first extended campaign ever to claim that perpetual literary property was contradictory to enlightenment and the public sphere. Donaldson pioneered many of the claims made on behalf of a free trade in creative authorship that have circulated ever since.
Central to Donaldson's counteroffensive was an act ofpirating. He had got hold of Whiston's threatening letters, and now gave them pride of place in his own devastating little treatise, modestly entitled Some thoughts on the state ofliteraryproperty. The point, he proclaimed, was that "theworld" should see "how oppressive, in these lands of liberty, their monopolising schemes have been." The Londoners, defeated in court, had resorted to "combination and conspiracy," using"terrour" to get their way. Booksellers across the kingdom were being forced to submit to their "usurped seclusive right." Donaldson himself had been dragged through interminable prosecutions for "what they call pirated editions," he complained, yet never to any effect, because the Londoners had never dared to push a case to a resolution. A real trial, he affirmed, would lay bear "the mysteries of bookselling" and reveal the vacuity of claims for perpetual monopoly.32
Where Tonson and Millar appealed to political economy and law, Donaldson made a point of appealing to the public. Apparently, he told readers, allwho reprinted books were now to be denounced as `pirates and invaders." If so, Donaldson insisted, it was precisely these so-c alledpirates who were the true bulwarks of the public and of learning. They upheld access to ideas and arguments, in the face of a clique scheming to become monopolists of all printed knowledge. The London trade, he charged, sought to create "the most tyrannical and barefaced combination that ever was set on foot in any country."As Dreghorn had declared, their monopoly threatened to "retard, and, indeed, stop altogether the progress of learning." And it could not be allowed to endure if Britain were to remain "a free country." The very character of Donaldson's tract-a cheap pamphlet, able to be read and argued over in a coffeehouse-exemplified the point it was designed to make.33
It is worth stressing that this preeminent "pirate" did not deny that authors deserved to be rewarded. On the contrary, Donaldson recognized that they spent "time and labour" on creating works "beneficial to mankind in general," and acknowledged that the advancement of learning depended on their getting their deserts. But he did deny that their recompense had to come from an "original