Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [82]
What one historian has called "as perfect a private monopoly as economic history can show" had come to an end.67 What difference did it make? The answer was not quite as clear as the London copy owners feared. They initially portrayed their defeat as a catastrophe. Overnight, they told the newspapers, some £200,000 worth of what they had "yesterday thought property" had been obliterated, and they were therefore "in a manner ruined."68 They mounted a desperate rearguard action to salvage something out of the ruins, still insisting that literary and mechanical authorship were radically different and petitioning Parliament for relief. The bid provoked another round of vigorous debate, with Donaldson stepping forward again to oppose it. It failed. After that, the bookselling elite decided that it would simply have to live with a world in which literary property had vanished.
The sky did not fall. No metropolitan bookseller went under as a result of the verdict, and literary property itself in some ways proved remarkably resilient. The foundation of such "property" had in any case been customary and practical rather than legal, and all the decision really did was to erase the juridical plausibility of anatural right. London's publishers remained free to maintain their combinations, about which complaints continued to be heard for decades-indeed, centuries-to come. Their first move, in fact, was to moot a huge conger with a stock of £ro,ooo dedicated to holding the old copies "inviolate."
Yet Donaldson v. Becket did have an effect. Rivals sprang up to challenge the London clique, keen to print and reprint in new forms and for new readerships. Thomas Carnan focused on children's literature; William Lane's Minerva Press dominated fiction.69 The trade enjoyed rapid ex pansion, with fortunes to be made in hitherto unrecognized areas. Those prepared to experiment and take risks could benefit hugely. Many who did were newcomers to London, like the Scot John Bell, whose io9-volume series of The Poets of Great Britain - sold as "the only complete uniform edition of the British Poets"-could only exist thanks to the end of perpetual property. Such enterprises created what was almost a new kind of book business.70 In a sense, what was happening was that the book trade was taking on the character of an industry. A major marker was the advent of a new social kind, the publisher. The first firm to take that step was Rivington's. Longman had followed suit by the 181os, and John Murray did likewise, pioneering the system for paying authors that would prevail throughout the Victorian era. Meanwhile, the burgeoning industrial towns became foci of literary productivity in their own right. And in Scotland, Constable created the first modern best-sellers in Waverley and Rob Roy.71
For printers' journeymen, however, the rise of copyright was ominous indeed. How antagonistic the journeymen could be to the oligarchs of literary property had already been revealed in 1762, when a compositor named Jacob Ilive had led a doomed revolt in the Stationers' Company. The grandson of Elinor James-herself a prolific printer, pamphleteer, and petitioner, who had sought to defend the printers' chapels against both copy owners and reprinters in the 169os -Ilive was something of a Miltonic figure in Georgian Grub Street. He became a virtuoso of pirate strategies, associating with their supreme exponent, William Rayner, and being sued byAlexander Pope as one of the "Pyraters" of the Dunciad. Ilive developed over time an elaborate deist cosmology unique to him, according to which humans were fallen angels, interred in bodies and seeking to use reason to reascend through a hierarchy of worlds toward