Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [86]
The advent of copyright- and the overthrow of literary propertytherefore came about from a violent but fruitful clash between authorship and mechanical invention. The result can justly be called revolutionary for both fields. It was not a revolution in intellectual property, for that concept did not yet exist. But it was, if anything, even more important. Only once it had taken place could intellectual property come into being at all.
Whether... it should not seem worth while to erect a Mart of Literature in this Kingdom, under wiser Regulations and better Discipline than in any other Part of Europe? And whether this would not be an infallible Means of drawing Men and Money into the Kingdom?
GEORGE BERKELEY, TheQuerist
In the mid-eighteenth century, if you wanted to find a pirate you could certainly look to the streets of London or Edinburgh, where you might run into a William Rayner or an Alexander Donaldson. But if you wanted to find piracy pursued on a systematic, overt level-as the epitome of a moral enterprise, aligned with rationality, commerce, and enlightenment -then London's booksellers would shudder and tell you to go elsewhere. They would send you to Ireland. They liked to believe that Ireland was the true pirate kingdom of their age. They thought their Irish counterparts recognized no morality at all, but would grab whatever came their way, produce inferior knockoff copies, and sell them as fast as possible. Their image of Dublin was roughly what Escape from New York might have looked like if it had been scripted by Swift.
In truth, the Dublin trade was less anarchic than that. But that meant it was more profoundly threatening to London's grandees. It offered an apparentlyviable model for the future of print and public culture that cast into doubt everything the literary property oligarchs regarded as indispensable. Certainly, the Dubliners were thriving. Their reach extended across Europe and North America, and they claimed they could print volumes as attractive and as competitively priced as anyone's. And they had produced, they said, a golden age of Irish letters, headed by names like Sheridan, Edgeworth, and Burke. They seemed to think that their disdain for literary property, far from being something to play down, was the foundation of this commercial and cultural success. They claimed to provide the best writing at the lowest cost.That was the realproblem they posed.
Reprinting books that had first been published in London, the Dubliners sold them, often at less than half the original price, not only in Ireland but also in Britain and NorthAmerica.They recognized no obligation to pay for the privilege. This was nothing unusual by the standards of the time, although Londoners sometimes acted as though it were. All nations' systems of literary property were peculiar to themselves. Even the sending of reprinted books across borders-which made them into piraciesdid not make the Dubliners really stand out. After all, the Swiss and Dutch were doing this to France, and any number of German statelets were doing it to each other. What made Ireland unique -as viewed by itself and by outsiders -was that there was no authoritative system of literaryprop- erty within Dublin itself. i And this was not the Holy Roman Empire, where the sheer size of the region and its multiplicity of jurisdictions precluded any one property regime. It was one polity-really one city-covering a small area and with a limited population. Yet as the most prominent Dublin bookseller of all, George Faulkner, put it, "there is no Law, or even Custom, to secure any Property in Books in this Kingdom." Faulkner was not being quite honest: there were customary conventions in effect, and he knew all about them. Nonetheless, his trade had no formal rules of property,