Loewenstein 2002

An Introduction to Bibliographical Politics

Statute of Anne: first English copyright law; however, case law interpreting it transforms it into a clarification of the nature of common law (13); concerned with manufacturers, not authors, of books

1557, London Stationers' Company has crown-sanctioned monopoly over all printing, sustained through series of Licensing Acts in c17

1694, monopoly allowed to lapse; Commons ignored petitions from printers/publishers (had anti-monopolist stance); publishers began casting their appeal as being on behalf of authors

1710, bill says "the Author of any Book or Books and his Assignee or Assigns, shall have the sole Liberty of printing and reprinting such Book or Books for the Term of 14 yrs" from the date of 1st publication ; success in claims of infringement depended on registration; after 14 years, right returns to author for another 14 if he/she is still alive (14)

real property vs. literary property, values shifting (16)

Donaldson v. Becket; Statute of Anne "was found to be the preeminent source of authorial protection: even if it were granted that an author had property rights at cmomon law in his or her published work, the Statute of Anne was found to have taken away those common law rights once and for all" (17); "the idea of 'natural' property was checked by an idea of property as artificial, as the product of deliberate social will" (17)

• what are ideas? and who can own them? we still don't have an answer to this
• "the proceedings yielded a communal concession that property -- all property -- is a social institution, not one of the visibilia of the created universe" (21)

law of intellectual property not necessarily an index of cultural experience of intellectual property (21); "at any given cultural moment the institutions regulating intellectual property may conflict; they suggest, that is, that rival reifications of the cultural status of intellectual property may coexist" (21)

"my purpose is to reproduced not the image of literary property but the imagery of literary property, the political economy of the book as it is traced in law, in commerce, in the behavior of writers and booksellers, and in the rhetoric of books themselves" (22)

"trying to find out what book culture has to do with the book trade" (22); "the book trade is both a significant instance and a significant agent in the transition from feudalism to capitalism" (22) -- modern commodity of capitalist consumers

"more often than not, criticism has (perhaps inevitably) continued to favor the study of literature as a product, and not a producer, of history. The instrumentality of literature stlil remains more asserted than described" (23)

return to New Bibliography -- not "the vestigial bardolatry that permeated their enterprise," but the spirit of their criticism