Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [83]
Ilive planned to act on his radical convictions. He wanted to reform society root and branch, ridding it of mystery mongers in favor of what he called "bodies or fraternities of artificers living and supporting one another in community"-that is, in printers' terms, chapels. Ilive believed these to be the core of an orderly and moral society To give them their proper role-the role they had had before the Norman Conquest-he envisaged the "entire abolition" of the oligarchs' governance. He decided that printing itself-the very foundation of a reasoning public-must come first. So he launched a campaign to restructure the core of the craft, the Company of Stationers. Building on an abortive effort by an earlier band of radicals, he issued an unauthorized impression of the Company's founding documents, which revealed the Court ofAssistants to be a later interpolation of Stuart times. This `plain and rational" account should, he thought, lead to a return to "original Simplicity." Piracy had cast light where there had been darkness. He now summoned the journeymen to elect their own master and wardens. The rendezvous took place on May 31, 1762, at the Dog Tavern on Garlic Hill.72 Ilive leaped up onto a table and delivered an impassioned speech proposing that the printers act to "rescue their liberties" from the publishers. They elected one Christopher Norris master there and then, with John Lenthall and John Wilcox wardens-three men who remain obscure but were certainly no copy owners. Ilive believed that these officers would simply walk into their places at the Hall.
Unfortunately for him, the real company was not so compliant. Its officers refused the rebels entry, observing urbanely that Ilive must be "somewhat disordered in his mind." The "rebellious election" proved futile, and a disappointed Ilive himself died shortly after. In the end, far from establishing the chapel as the lynchpin of a revived public culture, his uprising achieved precisely the opposite. It marked the last time that journeymen were ever acknowledged as a voting estate in the industry on which England's public culture depended. For the first time, a fundamental and explicit divide was introduced in the book trade. In effect, property, not craft mastery, was confirmed as the structuring principle by which the trade would be shaped. That future apparently belonged not to the chapel, nor to the pirate sphere, but to copyright- to capital. And the chapels' defeat was not peculiar to the world of print. Similar trends were occurring in many trades. As they did, so journeymen and craftsmen began to see common interests outside their own vocations. A new kind of social classification was in the offing. It mapped allegiances longitudinally, across trades, rather than latitudinally, within them. As copyright and publishing became the defining centerpieces of public culture, a novel way of seeing the politics of craft took root. Its defining element, shorn of the cosmological attributes of Ilive's chapel theodicy, was to be the concept of class.73
The contentions about copying and progress that took shape in the literary property furor also coincided with major changes in the practice of patenting, on which the inventive work of industrialization-and therefore class formation-would come to depend. Explicit articulations of some "property" in inventions seem to have appeared only in about 1712 or so-remarkably coincident with the original copyright law-and there was little if any case law before the 176os. The subsequent consolidation came at almost the same time as Donaldson's challenge, and at some of the same legal hands.