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By Root 2060 0

he now claimed, did not reside in its materiality, nor precisely in that "doctrine" that others had vaunted. It lay, rather, in "Style and Sentiment." Paper and type were accidental to this - they were merely "Vehicles to convey that Style and Sentiment to a Distance." Any duplicate that achieved the same transfer was therefore "the same identical Work," irrespective of artisanal variations.59 This was the origin of the otherwise intractable distinction-which became central to copyright-between idea and expression. Expression, that is, originated in the bid to find a distinction between book and machine. It was that element of a book that required initial authorship but could be copied without mind.

The crucial point therefore lay not in the act of authorship at all, but in the act of copying. A copy of a machine was, as Aston said, always "a different Work." That was why the machine's originator could not claim natural property in it. To copy the Microcosm a craftsman would have to reproduce in his mind the ideas of the original maker. As Smythe told the Lords in Donaldson v. Becket, a pirate of an orrery would essentially have to be an astronomer, and the copy must therefore be "in a degree an original work." Copying machines consequently had a positive social value. It required investments of expertise, training, and education, and it served progress, because improvements were always integrated into the new device. Some even claimed that progress in general-that is, writ large, the whole stadial history of civilization-depended on this truth.

Ironically, to prove this point Karnes instanced "the art of making salt water fresh" as a recent invention that was open. "Was it ever deemed to be a transgression against property, to use that art without consent of the inventor?" But if replicating machines involved "labour of the head," replicating books was mere "labour of the hand."They could be copied by some pirate printer without any attention whatsoever to meaning. Reprinting was mindless, produced no progress, and was therefore valueless. A reprinted bookwas "the very same Substance," replicated by a "mere mechanical Act."That was why it was accounted "theft." Blackstone, for one, said that anyone should be free to "copy and imitate" machines "at Pleasure," in a state of "natural liberty" that ought to be qualified, if at all, only by temporary patents. But replicating books would cripple enlightenment.60 So pivotal was this point that the Londoners submitted to the House of Lords a special statement describing how books were printed, in order to demonstrate that "printing of Books is of a peculiar Nature, and the Manufacture of them totally diff Brent from that of mechanical Instruments." By now they were arguing not that the originating of inventions was inferior to the originating of books, but that the copying of inventions was superior.61

Donaldson's side therefore had to take a stand on the nature of copying. They did so in 1774, telling the Lords that "Public Utility requires that the Productions of the Mind should be diffused as wide as possible." The connotations of monopoly-high prices, shoddy work, the suppression of improvements-applied to enlightenment. They meant that natural freedom must apply to books as well as machines. "Not only the Mauuerc, but even Science changes in the Progress ofTime," they pointed out; with perpetual property in effect, the bookseller who owned Newton's Priu- cipia could impede later improvements. `All our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and Lintots of the age," Camden warned, "till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are." Sir John Dalrymple agreed, and added disapprovingly that the booksellers "opprobriously termed men who laudably enlarged the circle of literature, by giving new editions of works of merit, pirates." Karnes even elevated the right of copying to the level of Creation. Mankind had been created as an imitative being as well as a social one, he announced, precisely to make progress possible. A monopoly