Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [87]
It seemed that just a few miles of ocean separated the order of London from a place where piracy was the only propriety, and anarchy the only rule.
This posed an evident problem. According to leading authorities across Europe, some form of literary property, however defined, was the bedrock on which public reason had to rest. Print's role in progress depended on fidelity and security of authorship, and those could not be guaranteed without a regime of some kind.There could certainly be dispute about the proper form of such ownership, about where its boundaries lay, and about who should possess it; but little scope existed to deny the need for some such principle. Yet it was precisely this that Ireland scandalously lacked. And it seemed to relish lacking it. If literary property and rules of authorship were so central to enlightenment, why did the Irish model not collapse into chaos and ignorance? Why on the contrary, did it seem to thrive as never before?
That is a question that merits being asked in the present tense too. The question Dublin's trade posed for eighteenth-centuryphilosophes is one that interests us anew today. Our own knowledge industries are united with economists and legal authorities in proclaiming that a formal system of intellectual ownership is a sine qua non. Many historians and critics too have argued that the inauguration of such a system in the eighteenth century represented a progressive transition into modernity. Eighteenthcentury Ireland no more supports that position now than it did then. Quite simply, it puts to the test all conventional views conjoining print, property, and progress.
THE CULTURE AND CONDUCT OF REPRINTING
Ireland was a rural, relatively poor society, the bulk of whose population was formally excluded from elite educational institutions. The printed culture of the country was thus largely-and in terms of book manufacturing entirely- the preserve of the towns, and overwhelmingly of the capital, Dublin. The reprint industry in particular was almost entirely a Dublin industry, emanating from the bookshops clustered at the eastern edge of the old medieval city3There grew a craft community small bywest- ern European standards (at its peak in the 1780s it numbered around fifty booksellers and thirty printers), and late on the scene, but dynamic and vital. The distinctions that split London's industry between copy owners and craftsmen were slow to take root here. Beyond a small central group, its economic mainstays were not books at all, but jobwork and newspapers -not to mention quill pens, dry goods, and, of course, patent medicines.4 Archbishop King maintained that would-be authors of books should expect to pay for their own printing and distribute the copies free. Archbishop Synge agreed, telling a friend in 1 721 that "there are very few books indeed of which an impression will go off in this kingdom." And as late as 1 758 the leading Dublin bookseller George Faulkner observed that his city remained "the poorest place in the world for subscriptions to books," noting that citizens preferred to spend their money on wine and entertaining instead. "More bottles are bought in one week than books in one year," he noted rather enviously.5
Yet a literate market was fast emerging, within Dublin and beyond the city too. One visitor to Ulster could already describe finding a population of "ruralphilosophes" there, and the second half of the century would see newspapers founded in a number of towns. A major obstacle