Johns 2009

The Invention of Piracy

"Precisely when authorship took on a mantle of public authority, through the crafts of the printed book, its violation came to be seen as paramount transgression -- as an offense against the common good akin to the crime of the brigand, bandit, or pirate." (19)

medieval distinction between liberal and mechanical arts

• Renaissance broke down these barriers; craft guilds with intellectual pursuits

pirate: use arose in English Revolution; previously, Donne had referred to antiquarian plagiarists as "wit-pyrats" (1611) (23), but

Stationers' Company:

• SC could come look around printing houses for quality control
• printing literally done in house by regulation -- domestic moral authority; pirated printing was done outside the house, in "holes" or "corners"
• author and reader had no role (27)

Stationers' Register vs. Crown (privileges and patents)

• 1624: Monopolies Act by Parliament; Crown could only issue patents for activities under its authority (like gunpowder) or where no trade already existed in the realm
• thought to mark the origin of Anglo-American intellectual property; but "in context, its real target was this proliferation of Crown intervention in the realm's everyday commercial conduct" (28)

English Civil War

• regulation out the window
• Milton's Areopagitica, Gerrard Winstanley's pamphlets

restored Charles II "therefore viewed popular print with a queasy mixture of respect, unease, and fear" (30); "how to accommodate and exploit what was becoming a perpetual sphere of printed argument, in which the rules of knowledge were no longer those of university, court or palace" (30)

Richard Atkyns: claimed he was heir to lucrative patent on printing common law books, originally granted by Elizabeth I

• SC challenged; some law books were already on the register from the Restoration era
• Atkyns claimed book trade was responsible for Civil War; had to be taken over by gentlemen granted privileges from the crown
• wanted Charles II to take over the printing press as property of the Crown;
• rewrote a history of printing in England, such that it began as "an appendage of royal power" rather than private enterprise (33)
• says the body (the trade) forgot/cut off the head (the Crown) (33)
• likened printing patents to royal land grants -- Crown still owned land, but people oversaw it, kept people from poaching the deer (34)
• short-won victory; book trade was given patents through SC

piracy; history of use (35-6)

The Piratical Enlightenment

Press act (1662): "Restoration-alliance between SC policing and state licensing"; 1695, William and Mary's Parliament allow this law to lapse (42)

• suddenly anyone could pirate or print without being a member of SC

"This intractable confrontation between principles of monopoly and property -- between royal power and civil society -- ensured that the problem of print propriety remained simmering." (42)

1695-1710; no literary property; piracy became "everyday concept for London's writers and readers" (43)

pirates on the high seas, printer pirates who posed as commonswealthsmen, even Levellers (44); presented in public debates as "weakness, amorality, ambition and transgression" (45)

"A culture of piracy was one that could never be distinguished into two neat camps of the honorable and the dishonorable in the way that antagonists often professed to believe. Everyone involved was, to some extent, compromised. As a result, it was by no means straightforward to find a secure basis on which to asses the cacophony that was the printed realm. In practice, a panoply of strategies evolved to create, confirm, and contest the authenticity not only of books, but of medicines, machines, textiles, foodstuffs, and other creative goods. what an eighteenth-century citizen could be said to know, feel, or believe might depend on them. People found themselves living amid countless experiments in authenticity." (48)

public sphere shaped by piracy:

• extended distribution of books
• impact on kind, quality and price of books
• which helped make books more portable, and therefore disposable and cheap
• inadvertently and "paradoxically fostered an ethic of authenticity and completeness" (49)
  • "One of the ironies of an age of piracy is that it helped cement print's paradoxical association with both constancy and progressive change at once." (49)
  • "to the extent that these men [Rosseau, Hume, Voltaire, Newton, Sterne, et al.] achieved transcendence as authors, it was precisely because they engaged with the pirate realm at a mundane level and mastered its complexities." (49)