Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [75]
AUTHORSHIP AND INVENTION
Virtually every issue that has fascinated historians of the eighteenth century found a place in the literary property debates that now approached their climax. This rather cornucopian quality derived in part from the fact that attorneys were accustomed to deploying every argumentative resource they could lay their hands on. Protagonists invoked, for example, the politics of the nation-state, the history and credibility of documentary evidence, mercantilism versus free trade, the nature of a public sphere, the commercialization of genius, and physiologies of sensibility. But one element arose unexpectedly, returned repeatedly, and proved, in the end, pivotal: mechanism.38 The question on which the fate of literary property may well have turned was that of what distinction, if any, existed between authorship and invention. Was a book like a machine, and if so, in what way? Was an author akin to an inventor? Or were these things in some fundamental way ratlike - and if so, again, in exactly what way? More subtly, a new theory in astronomy or mathematics, or a table of logarithms, posed critical problems for notions of authorship generated out of poetics. A theory or mathematical table was a textual entity, to be sure, yet one for which independent discoverers might easily exist. It was entirely unclear on what moral basis one discoverer should hold a perpetual monopoly over another.
One reason for focusing on these questions here is that the positions protagonists took on them were, to modern eyes, entirely counterintuitive. Accustomed to living in a world with a strongly entrenched notion of intellectual property, we now associate the advocacy of creative rights with claims for a broad principle underlying them. But there was no such concept as intellectual property in the eighteenth century And at that time it was the opponents of literary prop erty who insisted that authorship and invention were fundamentally alike - that they were varieties of one underlying thing, or, at least, that efforts to prove otherwise made no sense. The proponents of such property, by contrast, sought to demonstrate that they were radically distinct. Their debate proved critical not only to the outcome of the contest itself, but to the subsequent history that that outcome made possible.
Mechanical invention was a child of the projecting age. Attended by the same problems of credit and speculation as stockjobbing and publication, projectors blossomed and crashed as fast as South Sea Bubble companies. We now tend to perceive the first signs of the Industrial Revolution in their schemes, but that perception requires a lot of hindsight. For contemporaries the problem was to discern the plausible-or even possible - from the fanciful or fraudulent. Something of a market arose in expertise dedicated to making such distinctions.39 In consequence, the meanings, nature, and relative authority of artisanal and theoretical knowledge had to be thrashed out. The most basic terms for the Anglo-Scottish exchange about authorship and property- terms like skill, knowledge, art, and invention -were therefore not constants in their own right, but remained in flux. Moreover, since around I70o a polite and commercial enterprise of experiment had blossomed, putting these terms into the hands of a public of readers and customers. Paying audiences flocked to coffeehouse lectures to see men like jean Theophilus Desaguliers and Benjamin Martin make visible Newtonian "active powers"-powers placed in Creation by God. This was mechanical philosophy too, because its content depended on the artful making, circulation, and use of machines: electrical machines, air pumps, orreries, and, increasingly, automata. One could scarcely adduce the genius of a Newton or a Boyle in this context without invoking the machine work that conveyed the insights of