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By Root 2089 0

such geniuses to Hanoverian audiences. The impresarios of public lecturing laid claim on this basis to an expertise that deserved to overturn long-standing artisanal customs, so the implications for crafts (including printing) were potentially immediate. To these showmen, the already old distinction between scholars and craftsmen not merely did not hold good any more, but loomed large as absurd, benighted, and medieval. Yet this - or one version of it-was the very distinction that defenders of literary property at this moment felt they had to embrace. They had to insist that mechanical invention was a craftlike, nonintellectual enterprise. Literary creation, by contrast, was the work of the mind.

The reasonwhy the booksellers felt this need was simple. The products of mechanical ingenuity- devices, mechanisms, processes, and models - did not warrant any kind of property other than the banal ownership of a physical object. The only way an inventor could get exclusivity was by applying on an ad hoc basis for a patent. A patent was a privilege, not a right, and its duration was limited by the Monopolies Act of 1624. As Donaldson remarked, patents were therefore "incompatible with the supposal of an antecedent right vested in the inventor or discoverer."40 This explains why it was the opponents of literary property like Donaldson who insisted on identifying a common quality to literary and mechanical invention. In principle, as Blackstone commented at the time, it might have been possible to draw the inference the other way from authorship to invention. But to do this would involve questioning the Monopolies Act- a law that had the status of Whig scripture. That alternative was therefore closed off on the grounds of political reality after 1688. So anyone seeking to uphold a natural right for authors had to demonstrate that literary invention was fundamentally unlike mechanical. The stakes in doing so were high indeed. If a literary work could be "essentially distinguished from a machine," then the enemies of literary property would see their strongest argument of principle demolished. But if, on the other side, some single principle of creativity underlyingwords and things could be enshrined in law and culture, then it would destroy the claim of a natural literary property right.41

Opponents of literary property therefore maintained that mechanical inventions were "as much the natural Property of the Inventors, as Books are of the Authors"-which is to say, no natural property at all.42 `A book is a combination of ideas," argued Donaldson's camp; "so is a machine." Both were the result of "invention," and all attempts at distinction were "unintelligible." Both might be kept secret, but as soon as they were published, they were naturally open to all.43 Yates citedJohn Harrisoninventor of the chronometer that solved the longitude problem-to confirm as much. "Every Reason that can be urged for the Invention of an Author maybe urged with equal Strength and Force, for the Inventor of a Machine," he insisted." Original Inventions stand upon the same Footing, in Point of Property, ... whether the Case be mechanical, orLiterary,; whether it be an Epic Poem, or an Orrery." Harrison had certainly invested at least as much inspiration, mental labor, and money in building his clocks as Thomson ever had in writing The Seasons. And, Yates contended, "the Immorality of pirating another Man's Invention is full as great, as that of purloining his Ideas." Yet the fact was that Harrison had had no natural right. For Yates, the point was powerful but subtle. An author might certainly have a moral claim upon the benevolence of the public. But he had no legal right to demand that benevolence on pain of prosecution.44 Likewise, Thurlow insisted that "Sir Isaac Newton had no greater Property in his Principia, than Lord Orrery had in his Machine. If the Labour of the Head gives the Right, the Property is just the same."45 In Edinburgh, at least one of the Court of Session judges declared this question decisive for him. Both books and machines involved