The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Mark
Rose
The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket
and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship
Representations
Volume 0, Issue 23
Summer, 1988, 51-85.
The coming into being of the notion of “author” constitutes the privileged moment of individualization
in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today when we
reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem
relatively weak, secondary, and superimposed scansions in comparison with the solid and
fundamental unit of the author and the
work.
- Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” [1
ON
Donaldson v. Becket was before the House of Lords for nearly three weeks until on 22 February the peers voted in favor of Donaldson and the principle that copyright should be limited in time. Throughout the proceedings public interest was intense. On the first day of argument, according to a letter from London in Donaldson’s newspaper the Edinburgh Advertiser, several hundred people had to be turned away for lack of space,
[2] and the Morning Chronicle reported that the51
“House below the bar was ... exceedingly crowded,” and
that “Mr. Edmund Burke, Dr. Goldsmith, David Garrick, Esq; and other literary
characters, were among the hearers.” [3] Samuel Johnson probably was not
present but he was, as one would expect, interested. On 7 February he wrote James Boswell
noting that the question of literary property was before the Lords, that their
friend Arthur Murphy had drawn up Donaldson’s case, and that he himself opposed
making copyright perpetual. [4] Meanwhile, the London newspapers
devoted multiple columns to the proceedings, reporting the arguments of the
lawyers and judges in great detail, and they printed dozens of letters to the
editor from lawyers, booksellers, and others commenting, often very colorfully,
on the case as it was developing. The general interest even spawned at
least one rather feeble joke. Having been reprimanded for stealing an
old woman’s gingerbread cakes baked in the form of letters, a cheeky schoolboy
was supposed to have defended himself by explaining that “the supreme Judicature
of
“No private cause has so much engrossed the attention of
the public, and none has been tried before the House of Lords, in the decision
of which so many individuals were interested. During the whole time of its duration in
the House of Lords, (three weeks including adjournments, and eight days debate)
a great number of peers were present, and paid the greatest attention.” So reported the Edinburgh Advertiser
after the decision was rendered, [6] and though Donaldson’s paper
can hardly be regarded as a neutral source there is no reason to doubt its
assertion about the perceived significance of the case at the
time.
Why was there such general interest in Donaldson v.
Becket? For one thing the case
represented the climax in a commercial and legal struggle between the
booksellers of the capital and those of the provinces that had been going on for
the better part of a century. In
1694 the Licensing Act, the statute that regulated the British press, had been
allowed to lapse because it was apparent that it was operating primarily as a
restraint on trade. Most affected
negatively were the small group of powerful
in any case what they really wanted was confirmation of
the customary perpetual copyright of the Stationers’ Company. Starting in 1735, therefore, after the
expiration of the twenty-one-year term for existing copyrights, the major
copyright holders turned to the courts, first to seek injunctions in particular
cases that they regarded as piracy, and later to establish in principle that
copyright was a common-law right and therefore continued in perpetuity despite
the specifications of the statute. The first case in which the common-law
issue was directly confronted was Tonson v. Collins (1760), which came
before the Court of King’s Bench under the formidable Lord Mansfield, the
founder of English commercial law. But when it emerged that Tonson and
Collins were acting in collusion in order to test the law on the matter the
court refused to proceed to judgment. A decade later, however, in the landmark
case of Millar v. Taylor (1769) the
Because the issue that climaxed in Donaldson v. Becket was so fundamental, the entire publishing industry was implicated, and being directly concerned with the outcome the press naturally focused special attention on the matter. “There hardly exists a person connected in the most distant manner with the press, who will not, in some degree, be affected by the event of this appeal,” wrote William Woodfall in the Morning Chronicle as he acknowledged his own warm interest in the outcome of Donaldson v. Becket
. [9] Moreover, the economic stakes were felt to be truly great. A paragraph that appeared in the Morning Chronicle and in a number of other places after the decision claimed that as a result of the Lords’ vote a vast amount of property by contemporary values had been annihilated:By the above decision of the important question
respecting copy-right in books, near 200,000 1. worth of what was honestly
purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property, is now
reduced to nothing. The booksellers
of
Whether the
The struggle over copyright also had an ideological
dimension, and this, too, contributed to the general interest, for the
contention brought into play deeply
53
held and often deeply conflicting sets of assumptions.
Some of these had to do with such
crucial liberal values as “property” and “freedom.” Others, more specifically literary, had
to do with the conception of the author’s role in society, a matter that was
rapidly changing in the years immediately preceding Donaldson v. Becket
as patronage was declining and authors were becoming independent
professionals able to support themselves by writing for the enormously increased
reading public. [11] For
some, brought up in the aristocratic tradition of polite letters, the conception
of the author as a professional who wrote for money was profoundly
distasteful.
Glory is the Reward of Science, and those who deserve
it, scorn all meaner Views: I speak not of the Scribblers for bread, who seize
the Press with their wretched Productions; fourteen Years is too long a
Privilege for their perishable Trash.
It was not for Gain, that Bacon,
So spoke Lord Camden, a former lord chancellor and a figure of great authority in the House of Lords, on the day the Donaldson appeal came to a vote. For others, however, the author’s dignity lay precisely in the position of proprietor that copyright created for him. As an article in the Monthly Review put it, the present was the “Golden Age of Authors,” for now instead of having to depend upon the patronage of the great, authors had it “in their power to repay themselves for their labours, without the humiliating idea of receiving a favour, where they had the right to claim a debt.” [13
“What is an author?” Foucault asks. The distinguishing characteristic of the
modern author, I would answer, is that he is a proprietor, that he is conceived
as the originator and therefore the owner of a special kind of commodity, the
“work.” And a crucial institutional
embodiment of the author-work relation is copyright, which not only makes
possible the profitable publishing of books but also, by endowing it with legal
reality, produces and affirms the very identity of the author as
author.
Copyright had traditionally been a publisher’s not an
author’s right. Under the
Stationers’ Company regulations only members of the guild could hold copyright.
Authors had no explicitly
recognized place in the scheme. This is not to say that English authors
had no recognized rights in their work, for it appears that from the beginning
the stationers acknowledged an obligation to obtain the author’s permission
before publishing and to pay him for his work if payment
54
were appropriate
. [14] But authors did not “own” their works. A writer of course owned his physical manuscript, and it was this that he might sell to a bookseller or a theatrical company, but the concept of owning a work did not fit the circumstances of a traditional status society that functioned largely through patronage. Before about the middle of the eighteenth century the author’s primary relations were typically with patrons rather than with booksellers. In a complex exchange of material and immaterial benefits, patrons honored and sustained worthy authors and themselves received honor and status in return. Indeed, even the early printing privileges, which are generally regarded as anticipations of modern copyright, can perhaps best be understood as versions of patronage. When the Venetian republic in 1515 granted Ariosto a lifetime privilege in his Orlando furioso, or a century later when King James granted Samuel Daniel a ten-year exclusive right to print his History of England, both the republic and the king were acting as patrons of worthy individuals. [15The earliest statement that I know which speaks of the
author in something like the modern mode as a proprietor comes from John Milton.
Milton’s best known dictum on
copyright, one that was frequently cited in the eighteenth-century court cases,
appears in Aereopagitica (1644) where he speaks of “the just retaining of
each man his several copy (which God forbid should be gainsaid).” [16]
But the “copy” to which
it was a trespass also more than usual against human right, which commands that every author should have the property of his own work reserved to him after death, as well as living. Many princes have been rigorous in laying taxes on their subjects by the head, but of any king heretofore that made a levy upon their art and seized it as his own legitimate, I have not whom beside to instance. [17]
The issue here is of course not commercial gain; the king was not seeking to make money through his use of
55
for books to sustain a commercial system of cultural
production, and this market did not develop until the middle of the following
century. [18] The concept
of the author as the originator of a literary text rather than as the reproducer
of traditional truths also had to be more fully realized than it could be in
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property
. [22]The act of appropriation thus involved solely the
individual in relation to nature. Property was not a social convention but
a natural right that was prior to the social order. Indeed, the principal function of the
social order was to protect individual property rights. Extended into the realm of literary
production, the Lockean discourse with its concerns for origin and first
proprietors blended readily with the aesthetic discourse of
originality.
All of these cultural developments - the emergence of the mass market for books, the valorization of original genius, and the development of the Lockean discourse of possessive individualism - occurred in the same period as the long legal and commercial struggle over copyright. Indeed, it was in the course of that struggle under the particular pressures of the requirements of legal argumentation that the blending of the Lockean discourse and the aesthetic discourse of originality occurred and the modern representation of the author as proprietor was formed. Putting it baldly and exaggerating for the sake of clarity, it might be said that the
But in fact it was Parliament that first introduced the
author into the copyright struggle. The Stationers’ Company rule was that only
members of the com-
56
pany could hold copyright. Accordingly, the original draft of the bill that eventually became the Statute of Anne made no mention of authors. In committee, however, the booksellers’ bill was amended to allow authors as well as publishers to secure copyrights. Furthermore, the title of the act was also amended to emphasize both this and the second major change from traditional guild practices, namely the limitation of the term of protection. Thus as passed the statute was called “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”
[23] The reference to authors in the act is striking, and it is often said that the Statute of Anne established the author’s copyright. Nevertheless, as Lyman Ray Patterson suggests, Parliament’s purpose both in limiting the term of copyright and in introducing the author into its provisions was not so much to create an author’s copyright as to prevent the perpetuation of the London booksellers’ monopolistic control of all the most valuable old copyrights.Emphasis on the author in the Statute of Anne implying that the statutory copyright was an author’s copyright was more a matter of form than of substance. The monopolies at which the statute was aimed were too long established to be attacked without some basis for change. The most logical and natural basis for the changes was the author. Although the author had never held copyright, his interest was always promoted by the stationers as a means to their end. Their arguments had been, essentially, that without order in the trade provided by copyright, publishers would not publish books, and therefore would not pay authors for their manuscripts. The draftsmen of the Statute of Anne put these arguments to use, and the author was used primarily as a weapon against monopoly. [24]
Modeled on the ancient Stationers’ Company copyright,
the copyright provided in the act was still essentially a publisher’s right, but
in its language the act anticipated the future.
In pressing for the bill that was to become the statute,
the booksellers had spoken about benefits to authors, but the property rights
they had claimed had been their own. Thus an early broadside from the period
of agitation for the bill was called The Case of the Booksellers Right to
Their Copies. However, in the
1730s when the statutory copyrights began to expire, the
Authors have ever had a Property in their Works, founded upon the same fundamental Maxims by which Property was originally settled, and hath since been maintained. The Invention of Printing did not destroy this Property of Authors, nor alter it in any Respect, but by rendering it more easy to be invaded. [25]
Adapting the discourse of Lockean possessive
individualism to the literary property issue, the booksellers developed the
theory of the author’s common-law
57
right . Every man was entitled to the fruits of his
labor, they argued, and therefore it was self-evident that authors had an
absolute property in their own works. This property was transferred to the
bookseller when the copyright was purchased, and thereafter it continued
perpetually just like any other property right. The statute merely provided a further
basis of protection, a supplement to the underlying common-law
right.
Thus the booksellers became, at least in theory, shadowy secondary characters, mere assigns of the author, and in Tonson v. Collins, Millar v.
III – Trajectory of the
Debate
Law cases such as Donaldson v. Becket have not figured prominently in literary history, and yet the eighteenth-century struggle over copyright clearly was important in the development of the modern idea of the author as the creative originator of a work that bears the imprint of his or her unique personality. As Martha Woodmansee, who has studied the interaction between aesthetic and legal developments in Germany in the period just after the conclusion of the English struggle, has remarked, the problem of how the legal-economic and the aesthetic levels of discourse interact is one that literary historians - and, I would add, legal historians as well - have barely explored. “This is unfortunate,” Woodmansee comments, “because it is precisely in the interplay of the two levels that critical concepts and principles as fundamental as that of authorship achieved their modern form.”
[26]The English struggle over copyright, fought in polemical
pamphlets as well as in the actual legal cases, generated a body of texts in
which aesthetic and legal questions are often indistinguishable. [27] What constitutes a literary work?
How is a literary composition
different from any other form of invention such as a clock or an orrery? What is the relationship between
literature and ideas? These were
some of the questions that the eighteenth-century lawyers found themselves
dealing with as the process of argument and counter-argument took on a kind of
life and logic of its own. What I
want to do now, then, is to trace the trajectory of this debate, suggesting the
way in its sometimes very abstruse course the modern
system of the author and the “work” - the reified
aesthetic object, unitary, closed, and caught up in relations of ownership - was
institutionalized in the discourse of the law.
“Labour gives a man a natural right of property in that which he produces: literary compositions are the effect of labour; authors have therefore a natural right of property in their works.”
[28] Reduced to essentials this was the essence of theThe issues that the booksellers’ argument raised might
have been addressed, we would think, as a conflict between individual rights and
the broader needs of society at large. The author has a right to the fruits of
his labor, but society has a need to maintain the circulation of ideas. Somehow the conflict must be adjudicated
so that neither the individual nor society is required to surrender entirely to
the claims of the other. This was
how Samuel Johnson understood the matter. On the one hand the author’s claim to a
property in his composition was “a metaphysical right, a right, as it were, of
creation, which should from its nature be perpetual.” But no matter how strong this claim, the
“interests of learning” and the need to provide for wide dissemination of
knowledge were against perpetual copyright. [29] The compromise that Johnson
proposed was that copyright should be limited in time but that the term should
be substantially longer than that provided in the statute. The author’s lifetime plus thirty years
would be appropriate, he thought.
Johnson’s proposal anticipates modern copyright law in
59
was argued abstractly at a theoretical level to show,
according to general principles, either that there was or was not a common-law
right of literary property. Second,
there was an historical survey to demonstrate either that English law had or had
not always recognized this right. For our purposes it is the argument at
the theoretical level that is most interesting.
Framed in terms of the author’s right to be regarded as
the proprietor of the work he created, the
Given the ideological power of the argument for the
author’s right, one of the opponents’ most effective tactics was to shift the
direction of the debate. The
physical manuscript that an author had written with his own hands was
undoubtedly his property, but how could an author be said to have a property
right in the words he had written? An object of property must be something
capable of distinct and separate possession.
But the property here claimed is all ideal; a set of
ideas which have no bounds or marks whatever, nothing that is capable of a
visible possession, nothing that can sustain any one of the qualities or
incidents of property. Their whole
existence is in the mind alone; incapable of any other modes of acquisition or
enjoyment, than by mental possession or apprehension; safe and invulnerable,
from their own immateriality: no trespass can reach them; no tort affect them;
no fraud or violence diminish or damage them. Yet these are
the
phantoms which the author would grasp and confine to himself: and these are what the defendant is charged with having robbed the plaintiff of
. [31]The same ideas might very well occur independently to different people. Would that mean that each would be a separate proprietor of the same idea? Could
The crux of this argument was the premise that a
literary composition was essentially a collection of ideas. This was not implausible at a time when
the category of “literature” had not yet been specialized toward imaginative
writing and Bacon,
If a literary composition was essentially a collection
of ideas, why should copyrights be treated differently from patents? The basis of patent law had long since
been established by the Jacobean Statute of Monopolies, which strictly limited
patent grants, providing a fourteen-year-term for new inventions and a
twenty-one-year term for patents already in existence. Indeed, the fourteen- and twenty-one-year
terms established by the Statute of Anne were evidently modeled on those
provided for patents. As one of the
jurists in Donaldson v. Becket put it, the “Exactitude... of the
Resemblance between a Book and any other mechanical Invention” is
plain:
There is the same Identity of intellectual Substance; the same spiritual Unity. In a mechanic Invention the Corporeation of Parts, the Junction of Powers, tend to produce some one End. A literary Composition is an Assemblage of Ideas so judiciously arranged as to enforce some one Truth, lay open some one Discovery, or exhibit some one Species of mental Improvement. A mechanic Invention, and a literary Composition, exactly agree in Point of Similarity; the one therefore is no more entitled to be the Object of Common Law Property than the other. [33]
Thus the proponents of the author’s common-law right
were put in the position of demonstrating that a literary invention was in some
way essentially different from a mechanical invention. Had the organic analogy of the romantics
been available this would have been easy to do, for the romantic organic
metaphors were developed precisely in order to distinguish imaginative from
merely mechanical operations. Interestingly, it was just as the
question of the author’s common-law right was being tried in the courts that
Edward Young published his Conjectures on Original Composition in which
the organic metaphor figured prominently:
61
An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made: Imitations are often a sort of Manufacture wrought up by those Mechanics, Art, and Labour, out of pre-existent materials not their own. [34
Young’s treatise was very influential in
Lacking the possibility of arguing along lines such as
Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition might have suggested, the
proponents of the common-law right made the distinction in terms of the
opposition between mind and matter. The basic argument was sketched by
William Warburton in a much cited pamphlet in which he defended the author’s
right. [36] Moveable
property, Warburton maintained, was divided into two categories, things natural
and things artificial, and the latter category might be further divided into
things produced by mental activity and things produced by manual activity. The property in a manually produced
utensil such as a knife extended no further than the single material object.
The property in a mental production
such as a literary composition, however, was essentially a property in the
doctrine itself rather than in the ink and paper on which the doctrine was
inscribed, and therefore this kind of property was not limited to any one
material object such as the author’s manuscript. Mechanical inventions fell in between the
two categories of mental and manual products, partaking of the characteristics
of both. Thus insofar as a machine
was a kind of utensil it was appropriate that the maker’s property should
terminate in the individual material object. Nevertheless, because the operation of
the mind was so intimately concerned in inventions, it was appropriate to extend
to the inventors a patent for a limited term of years. The rationale for patent protection,
then, was that this special category of limited rights was designed to
accommodate the mixed nature of mechanical inventions as opposed to the purely
intellectual nature of literary composition.
It is perhaps worth noting that Warburton’s argument
assumes that each exemplar of a machine, each new clock or orrery, will be
painstakingly wrought by hand. Plainly such an argument would not have
been put forward in an age of general mass production. What is most interesting, however, is the
extreme ingenuity to which Warburton was driven by the problem. Given the contemporary frame of
reference, the empirical conception of composition and the breadth of the
category of literature, the parallel with patent law was, as one writer put it,
“the strongest hold, wherein the opponents of literary property have entrenched
themselves.” [37]
The proponents of perpetual copyright focused on the
author’s labor. Those who argued
against it focused on the results of the labor, the work. Thus the two sides established their
positions by approaching the issue from opposite direc-
62
tions. Yet,
however approached, the question centered on the same pair of concepts, the
“author” and the “work,” a person and a thing. The complex social process of literary
production consisting of relations between writers and patrons, writers and
booksellers, booksellers and readers was rendered peripheral. Abstracting the author and the work from
the social fabric in this way contributed to a tendency already implicit in
printing technology to reify the literary composition, to treat the text as a
thing. From the classical period
through the Renaissance, the dominant conception of literature was rhetorical.
A text was conceived less as an
object than as an intentional act, a way of doing something, of accomplishing
some end such as “teaching and delighting.” Likewise, both the old copyright of the
Stationers’ Company and the limited copyright provided in the Statute of Anne
were not so much property rights in the sense of rights of possession of an
object as personal rights to do something, namely to multiply copies of a
particular title. Now, however, in
the course of the literary property struggle, a profound transformation would be
wrought in which copyright would come to be thought of not just as a regulatory
system but as an absolute right of dominion over a property in principle little
different from a parcel of land.
An identifiable figure in this transformation was
William Blackstone, who consistently supported the author’s common-law right
both as a lawyer and as a judge. The opponents of perpetual copyright
spoke of literary property as being wholly “ideal” and maintained that therefore
no distinction could be made between copyrights and patents. Blackstone, arguing against this position
in Tonson v. Collins, followed Warburton in claiming that the difference
between a literary and a mechanical invention lay in the partly material nature
of the latter. A literary
composition was wholly a mental production; the paper and ink with which a
composition was written were no part of its essence. But whereas both the opponents of
perpetual copyright and Warburton characterized the essence of literature as
ideas or “sentiments,” Blackstone saw “style” as also
essential:
Style and sentiment are the essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its identity. The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance. Every duplicate therefore of a work, whether ten or ten thousand, if it conveys the same style and sentiment, is the same identical work, which was produced by the author’s invention and labour
. [38]And a few years after working out this position in
court, Blackstone restated it in authoritative form in his
Commentaries:
The identity of a literary composition consists intirely in the sentiment and the language; the same conceptions, cloathed in the same words, must necessarily be the same composition: and whatever method be taken of conveying that composition to the ear or the eye of another, by recital, by writing, or by printing, in any number of copies or at any period of time, it is always the identical work of the author which is so conveyed; and no other man can have a right to convey or transfer it without his consent, either tacitly or expressly given. [39]
63
Duncan Kennedy has recently analyzed the way
Blackstone’s Commentaries transform what should properly be thought of as
social relations into property relations through a process of abstraction and
reification. [40] Blackstone’s characteristic strategy was
to divorce a personal right such as an “advowson” (the right of choosing a
parson for a church - a remnant of the feudal system of tenure that was in
principle bound up with a whole system of reciprocal rights and duties) from its
corporeal basis and then to treat the abstracted right as a kind of thing. Thus a person could be said to own an
advowson. In this process a right
of a person could assume the appearance of an absolute property right. This was exactly how Blackstone treated
literary property. “The same
conceptions, cloathed in the same words” - in Blackstone’s thought the literary
text has become an incorporeal entity that can be conveyed from owner to owner
according to the same principles as a house or a cow.
One way the
The analogy between a literary composition and a landed
estate, implicit in Blackstone’s use of the category of “occupancy,” is explicit
elsewhere when Blackstone argues against the proposition that a book when
published is given to the public like land thrown onto a highway. On the contrary, he says, “In such a
case, it is more like making a way through a man’s own private grounds, which he
may stop at pleasure; he may give out a number of keys, by publishing a number
of copies; but no man who receives a key, has thereby a right to forge others,
and sell them to other people.” [42] In fact act the
In this various world, different men are born to different fortunes: one inherits a portion of land; he cultivates it with care, it produces him corn and fruits and wool: another possesses a fruitful mind, teeming with ideas of every kind; he bestows his labour in cultivating that; the produce is reason, sentiment, philosophy. It seems but equitable, that a fair exchange should be made of these goods; and that one man should live by the labour of his brain, as well as another by the sweat of his brow
. [44Just so Edward Young spoke of the “mind of a man of Genius” as “a fertile and pleasant field” and of original compositions as its “fairest flowers.” [45] And just as a lord might take his title from the name of his estate, so, according to Young, an original author’s “works will stand distinguished; his the sole Property of them; which Property alone can confer the noble title of an Author.”
[46]When the
To summarize the logic of the literary property debate,
then, we might say that there were three principal exchanges between the
parties. First, the proponents of
perpetual copyright asserted the author’s natural right to a property in his
creation. Second, the opponents of
perpetual copyright replied that ideas could not be treated as property and that
copyright could only be regarded as a limited personal right of the same order
as a patent. Third, the proponents
responded that the property claimed was neither the physical book nor the ideas
communicated by it but something else entirely, something consisting of style
and sentiment combined. What we
here observe, I would suggest, is a twin birth, the simultaneous emergence in
the discourse of the law of the proprietary author and the literary work. The two concepts are bound to each other.
To assert one is to imply the
other, and together, like the twin suns of a binary star locked in orbit about
each other, they define the center of the modern literary
system.
65
What bearing did these theoretical arguments have on the
actual resolution of the question of perpetual copyright in the courts? Why did the Court of King’s Bench decide
in favor of perpetual copyright in Millar v. Taylor, and on what grounds
did the House of Lords reverse this judgment in Donaldson v.
Becket?
In Millar v. Taylor the matter seems to have been
determined principally by the way that the London booksellers’ claim that the
author had a common-law right to a property in his work spoke to the classical
liberal assumptions of the judges and the way that those assumptions also
colored the judges’ reading of the precedents. Lord Mansfield’s understanding, for
example, was that about the author’s common-law right before publication there
was no question. This right was
based on general principles of fitness:
It is just, that an author should reap the pecuniary profits of his own ingenuity and labour. It is just, that another should not use his name, without his consent. It is fit that he should judge when to publish, or whether he ever will publish. It is fit he should not only choose the time, but the manner of publication; how many; what volume; what print. It is fit, he should choose to whose care he will trust the accuracy and correctness of the impression; in whose honesty he will confide, not to foist in additions: with other reasonings of the same effect
. [48]As Mansfield saw it, the issue in question was simply whether it was also “agreeable to natural principles, moral justness and fitness” that the author’s right should continue after publication as well as before, and on this matter he found that the “general consent of this kingdom, for ages, is on the affirmative side.” [49
Justices Edward Willes and Richard Aston concurred with
The invasion of this sort of property is as much against every man’s sense of it, as it is against natural reason and moral rectitude. It is against the conviction of every man’s own breast, who attempts it. He knows it, not to be his own; he knows, he injures another: and he does not do it for the sake of the public, but malâ fide et animo lucrandi. [51]
Joseph Yates, however, dissented, maintaining that the
proposition that ideas might be treated as property was “quite wild.”
[52]
Yates apologized for the
“singularity” of his opinion but explained that, “be it ever so erroneous, it is
my sincere opinion.” [53] Thus by a vote of three to one the
court determined that authors had a common-law right of literary
property.
The
pathetic to any plea that smacked of a bid for monopoly in the book trade
. [54] In the law courts where jurists such asThe procedure for hearing an important appeal at this
time was for the twelve common-law judges of the realm, the judges of the courts
of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and the Exchequer, to be summoned to the House of
Lords to hear the arguments of counsel and to advise the house as to their
opinions on matters of law, after which the peers would debate the issue and
vote. Three questions were put to
the judges in Donaldson v. Becket. First, did the author have a
common-law right to control the first publication of his work? Second, did the author’s right, if it
existed, survive publication? Third, if the right survived publication,
was it taken away by the statute? These questions formulated the matters of
law in a nicely graduated series that would allow each judge to state his
opinion on the author’s right with precision. To these questions Lord Camden, a former
lord chancellor and an opponent of perpetual copyright, added two more. Did the author or his assigns have the
sole right to a composition in perpetuity? Was this right in any way restrained or
taken away by the statute? Insofar
as they repeat the substance of the second and third of the original questions,
Camden’s additions may be regarded as redundant, but Camden was trying to remind
the judges that the case was not just one of authors’ rights but of booksellers’
and that in practice the issue was copyright in
perpetuity.
The opinions of the judges, delivered one by one over
the course of three days, were very divided. On the first question the judges divided
eight to three in support of the author’s right. On the second the vote was seven to four,
again in support of the author. There is, however, a puzzle connected
with the vote on the third question. According to both the Journal of the
House of Lords and the standard legal and historical references, the vote on
this question was six to five against the author’s right - that is, the majority
of the judges were of the opinion that the statute took away the author’s
common-law right. But contemporary
newspaper and other accounts give good reason to believe that the clerk of the
House of Lords made an honest error in recording the opinion of one of the
judges. Most likely the tally was
six to five in favor of the perpetual right. [55] We note that only eleven judges
voted: Lord Mansfield remained silent. Perhaps, as Sir James Burrow suggested a
few years later,
67
tally would surely have been a substantial seven to five
in favor of the perpetual
right.
Evidently, then, in voting as they finally did against
the perpetual right, the Lords were reversing the collective opinion of the
judges. On what basis did they do
so? The questions put to the judges
asked for their opinions on matters of law. The question as it was finally put to the
Lords, however, was limited and practical: should the Chancery decree
restraining Donaldson from publishing Thomson’s poems be reversed? There was thus no opportunity for the
Lords to express themselves as a body on such theoretical matters as whether a
literary composition consisted of ideas or whether there was an essential
difference between literary and mechanical invention. Nor is there any reason to believe that
the Lords as a body were particularly interested in expressing themselves on
such matters. What the Lords appear
to have been concerned with was simply the prospect of a perpetual
monopoly.
The debate on the floor was opened by Lord Camden, who
delivered a long and passionate speech that evidently had a considerable effect
on the final vote. [57]
The obvious person to reply to
It was his duty to have given an opinion on one side or
another, and the neglecting to do so, was a manifest breach of his duty. Judges are paid by the public, and
should render
68
those services attendant on their office; and I should be glad to see a law passed to oblige them to a strict performance of their duty
. [61]So spoke one of the booksellers’ advocates shortly after
the conclusion of the case.
Lord Camden was followed in the debate by Lord
Chancellor Apsley, who had issued the original decree restraining Donaldson and
who now delivered the coup de grace to the
On what basis was the decree reversed? Did the Lords determine that there was no
common-law right of literary property, or did they decide that there was such a
right but that it was taken away by the statute? In legal history it is usually said that
the Lords determined that the statute ended the common-law right. This interpretation derives from the
influence of Sir James Burrow’s and Josiah Brown’s reports of Donaldson v.
Becket, which make it appear that the Lords in their vote were simply
confirming the majority opinion of the common-law judges that the statute took
away the common-law right. [63] But in fact the Lords addressed
only the practical issue of the perpetuity, and they did so in a way that there
is good reason to believe ran directly counter to the judges’
opinion.
One of the immediate consequences of the end of
perpetual copyright was the legitimation of reprint enterprises such as
Donaldson’s. In the years following
the decision, readily affordable editions of classic writers such as John Bell’s
famous edition of “The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to
Churchill” in 109 Volumes poured into the marketplace, contributing
significantly to the further development of the reading public. 64 Were there other, less tangible,
products of the struggle?
The
69
tation of the literary work as an object of property was
discredited. Nor, I suspect,
could these contentions have been discredited at this point in history:
too many and too powerful economic and social and ideological forces were at
work. So long as society was and is
organized around the principles of possessive individualism, the notion that the
author has the same kind of property right in his work as any other laborer must
and will recur. [65]
In 1819 Robert Southey, agitating for revision of the
copyright law, expressed his contempt for Lord Camden’s arguments against the
common-law right in Donaldson v. Becket. Southey quoted the passage from
Is it possible that this declamation should impose on any man? The question is simply this: upon what principle, with what justice, or under what pretext of public good, are men of letters deprived of a perpetual property in the produce of their own labours, when all other persons enjoy it as their indefeasible right - a right beyond the power of any earthly authority to take away? [66]
And in 1838 William Wordsworth wrote to his friend
Sergeant Talfourd, M.P., who had introduced a bill in Parliament to provide
authors with a copyright term of sixty years, saying that while he supported
Talfourd’s bill he in fact believed the author had a right “for a much longer
period than that defined in your Bill - for ever.” Wordsworth went on to allude to the
eighteenth-century copyright struggle.
Such right… was acknowledged by the common law of
One point to note about these two statements is the
persistence of the claim to a perpetual right. Another is that the claim was being put
forward not by the booksellers but by authors. The booksellers had promulgated the
representation of authorship that writers such as Southey and Wordsworth now
adopted as their own.
As it happened, both Millar v. Taylor and
Donaldson v. Becket were fought over the same property, Thomson’s
Seasons. This may have been
purely accidental; nevertheless, The Seasons, first published in
collected form in 1730, was an excellent choice for litigation designed to
establish the author’s common-law right. For one thing, Thomson’s poem was not
considered a national treasure such as the work of Shakespeare or Milton. Nevertheless, it was one of the most
frequently reprinted poems of the century and thus plainly a valuable
property.
70
Moreover, Thomson had a reputation for originality. No one would consider sneering at him as, for instance, Lord Hailes did at the Rev. Thomas Stackhouse in the Scottish case of Hinton v. Donaldson when he said that in claiming that Stackhouse’s History of the Holy Bible was protected by the common-law right the London booksellers were improperly conferring the name of “original author” onto a mere “tasteless compiler.”
[68]The Seasons is
a descriptive and reflective poem in which a changing landscape of mountains,
meadows, forests, rivers, plains, and valleys is portrayed and made the occasion
for Thomson’s moral and philosophical meditations. As Jacob More wrote in a critical study
of the poem published three years after the Donaldson decision, Thomson’s
general purpose in the poem was to lead his readers to “a filial confidence in
the Author of Nature.” To this end,
according to More, Thomson “paints every part of the year, and every genial form
that wakes, to the plastic energy of poetical enthusiasm, in colours peculiarly
adapted to his purpose.” More goes
on to praise Thomson’s originality and to describe his process of poetic
creation:
He does not satisfy himself, however, with simply arraying the conceptions of others in a dress of his own. This contemptible species of plagiarism, was not more beneath his genius than repugnant to his taste. He had immediate recourse to nature for all his materials, and she intrusted with confidence her secrets to his care. For however in other respects he should offend against the established dogmas of criticism, his poetry every where discovers the strongest traits of originality… And what of all others is perhaps the most decisive mark of a poetical mind, the objects he describes, though frequently common and familiar, strike us some how in a new light. [69]
What we should note here is that the process of
Thomson’s poetic creation, as More describes it, is strikingly similar to the
process of the original creation of private property as Locke had described it:
the individual removed materials out of the state of nature and mixed his labor
with them, thereby joining them to something that was his own and producing an
item of property. Likewise,
according to More, Thomson’s method was to go directly to nature for his
materials and then to impose upon them his ideas, sentiments, and poetic forms,
and the result was that familiar objects were cast in a new light. In a sense, then, The Seasons was
the perfect Lockean poem, the paradigm of the new mode of proprietary
authorship, for in it the British landscape was appropriated by the poet and
stamped with the mark of his reflective personality.
“I confess, I do not know, nor can I comprehend any
property more emphatically a man’s own, nay, more incapable of being mistaken,
than his literary works,” wrote Justice Aston in Millar v.
71
the heart of the modern literary system are inherently unstable, for both are dependent on the problematic concept of personality. Let me illustrate this by turning for a moment to a passage from an important pamphlet published in connection with Donaldson v. Becket, Francis Hargrave’s Argument in Defence of Literary Property
. [71Like Blackstone, Hargrave founded literary property on
“occupancy,” the principle by which one might establish possession of something
previously unclaimed. But if
anything, Hargrave said, the author’s title was stronger than simple occupancy
would suggest:
By composing and writing a literary work, the author necessarily is the first possessor of it; and it being the produce of his own labor, and in fact a creation of his own, he has, if possible, a stronger title, than the usual kind of occupancy gives; because in the latter the subject has its existence antecedently to, and independently of, the person from whom the act of occupancy proceeds. [72
Yet no matter how strong the author’s right might be in
theory, Hargrave had still to address the counter-argument that the property
claimed was merely “a set of ideas which have no bounds or marks whatever.”
Hargrave attempted to avoid the
error of confusing a personal right to do something with an absolute property
right: “What the author claims,” he maintained, “is merely to have the sole
right of printing his own works. As
to the ideas conveyed, every author, when he publishes, necessarily gives the
full use of them to the world at large.” [73] But if the author’s works do not
consist of ideas, what do they consist of? What is the subject of property? Hargrave’s answer is in the vein of
Blackstone’s proposition that “the same conceptions, cloathed in the same words,
must necessarily be the same composition,” but it is particularly
suggestive:
The subject of the property is a written composition;
and that one written composition may be distinguished from another, is a
truth too evident to be much argued upon. Every man has a mode of combining and
expressing his ideas peculiar to himself. The same doctrines, the same opinions,
never come from two persons, or even from the same person at different times,
cloathed wholly in the same language. A strong resemblance of stile, of
sentiment, of plan and disposition, will be frequently found; but there is such
an infinite variety in the modes of thinking and writing, as well in the extent
and connection of ideas, as in the use and arrangement of words, that a literary
work really original, like the human face, will always have some
singularities, some lines, some features, to characterize it, and to fix and
establish its identity; and to assert the contrary with respect to either, would
be justly deemed equally opposite to reason and universal experience. Besides, though it should be allowable
to suppose, that there may be cases, in which, on a comparison of two
literary productions, no such distinction could be made between them, as in a
competition for originality to decide whether both were really original, or
which was the original and which the copy; still the observation of the
possibility of distinguishing would hold in all other instances, and the
Argument in its application to them would still have the same force.
[74]
72
The axiom with which Hargrave begins, the proposition
“that one written composition may be distinguished from another,” is in fact far
from self-evident, for it begs the entire question of literary identity. How may one composition be distinguished
from another? Does a composition
have an essence that remains the same even if some of the language is changed?
Are successive drafts of a
composition, nevertheless, the “same” composition? Hargrave elaborates on the axiom that
compositions may be distinguished by explaining that “every man has a mode of
combining and expressing his ideas peculiar to himself” and that there exists an
infinite variety of ways of thinking and writing. But this new proposition, the notion of
every man having a distinctive style, is not really an explanation of the axiom
so much as a parallel statement that shifts the focus from the composition to
the writer. A blurring of
categories has occurred, a slide from a statement about a property to one about
a proprietor, and this conflation becomes explicit in the remarkable comparison
of the literary work to a human face: “a literary work really original,
like the human face, will always have some singularities, some lines, some
features, to characterize it, and to fix and establish its
identity.”
Why this resort to metaphor? What kind of gap, what kind of leap, does
the metaphor of the face signal? Perhaps we should note that the metaphor
seems to be latent even early in the passage when Hargrave speaks of the “strong
resemblance of stile, of sentiment, of plan and disposition” that will
frequently be found between two compositions. Like two human faces, in other words, two
compositions may resemble each other in various ways, but they will always have
some distinguishing characteristics, some marks of individuality. The effect of the metaphor is to collapse
the category of the work into that of the author and his personality. Hargrave’s purpose has been to define
the distinctiveness of the literary work, to show that its identity can be fixed
and established. But he has
demonstrated one kind of distinctiveness only at the expense of another. He has shown the individuality of the
work to be identical to that of the author, and in the process the category of
the work has dissolved. Interestingly, this action traces in
reverse the Lockean notion of the creation of property in which property
originates when an individual’s “person” - already understood as a kind of
possession - is impressed upon the world through labor:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property
. [75Seeking to establish the distinctiveness of the literary
work, what Hargrave has actually done is to retell the standard narrative of the
creation of private property. And
in this narrative the origins of the property are not located but deferred,
transferred backward from the material possession to the individual’s
“person.”
73
There is a further instability to be observed in the
passage. We should note that
Hargrave makes categorical statements about every man having “a mode of
combining and expressing his ideas peculiar to himself” and about there being an
“infinite variety” of such modes of thinking and writing. Nevertheless, he does not state
categorically that every literary composition has a distinct identity, but
qualifies his statement, asserting only that “a literary work really
original… will always have some singularities, some lines, some features, to
characterize it.” The key notion
here is “original,” but in what sense is it used? Does Hargrave mean merely a composition
that has not been copied? Or does
he mean one that is novel, that exhibits a certain freshness of character? This second sense was emerging just at
the time Hargrave was writing. If
the sense of original is simply a work that has not been copied, then
every composition actually produced by the writer will be distinct. If the sense is “novel and fresh,”
however, then many compositions will not be original. Significantly, the ambiguity on this
point recurs in the long and obscure sentence that concludes the
passage:
Besides, though it should be allowable to suppose, that
there may be cases, in which, on a comparison of two literary
productions, no such distinction could be made between them, as in a competition
for originality to decide whether both were really original, or which was the
original and which the copy; still the observation of the possibility of
distinguishing would hold in all other instances, and the Argument in its
application to them would still have the same force.
Is Hargrave saying that in certain cases literary
productions themselves are unindividuated, or is he saying simply that it is
sometimes impossible to determine which is the original?
Hargrave’s obscurity, his inability to speak clearly on
the matter of whether every literary production is necessarily individuated,
reflects his indecision about whether every writer is truly an “author.” Stripped to essentials, the argument is
that since all men are distinct, all literary compositions must be distinct.
But as a man of the late eighteenth
century, Hargrave is evidently not comfortable with a position that fails to
distinguish between an “original genius” and a mere hack writer. Hence he hedges, asserting only that “a
literary work really original” will always be distinguishable. Once qualified in this way, Hargrave’s
proposition is transformed, for it now appears that only some men - those who
have been blessed with at least modest powers of original genius - can produce
distinct literary works. The two
forms of the proposition are not compatible: one asserts that all literary
compositions are individuated, the other that only some are individuated. Are we to infer that only some men have
“personality”?
I could go on to explore the further area of slippage
when Hargrave, after asserting that every man has an individual style,
nevertheless allows that the same doctrines, the same opinions, never come “even
from the same person at different
74
times, cloathed wholly in the same language.” But I think that enough has been said to suggest the instability of Hargrave’s discourse. To his contemporaries, however, the arguments that Hargrave presented for the distinctiveness of the literary work based on the distinctiveness of the author’s personality would have seemed, at least to those who shared his point of view on the literary property question, simple, direct, and solid. Indeed, in a survey of current discussions of the literary property question published in the Monthly Review shortly after the Donaldson decision, Hargrave’s Argument received high praise for its “great clearness of thought and expression.”
[76]Hargrave’s Argument suggests the curious way in
which both in legal and in literary discourse the literary work was coming to be
seen as something simultaneously objective and subjective. No longer simply a mirror held up to
nature, a work was now above all the objectification of a personality. The commodity that changed hands when a
bookseller purchased a manuscript or when a reader purchased a book was thus
personality no less than ink and paper. The emergence of this new commodity
should surely be connected with such other emphatic marks of Foucault’s
“privileged moment of individualization” as the increasing tendency in the
eighteenth century to read authors’ works in the contexts of their biographies -
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets is the most prominent example - and the rise
of the novel, the literary form explicitly devoted to the display of character.
Pamela, Clarissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy - the very titles of the
eighteenth-century novels suggested that what was changing hands in the purchase
of reading matter was the record of a personality. Moreover, readers increasingly approached
literary texts as theologians had long approached the book of nature, seeking to
find the marks of the divine author’s personality in his works. M. H. Abrams quotes Carlyle to the effect
that the key question for criticism is the discovery of the “peculiar nature of
the poet from his poetry,” and Abrams remarks on the novelty of this approach,
which emerged at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth
centuries:
There could be no more striking antithesis to the
practice of critics (with the partial exception of Longinus) from the dawn of
speculation about art through the greater part of the eighteenth century. So long as the poet was regarded
primarily as an agent who holds a mirror up to nature, or as the maker of a work
of art according to universal standards of excellence, there was limited
theoretical room for the intrusion of personal traits into his
product.
But now a new theory of poetry was forming, one in which the poem was regarded as “primarily the expression of feeling and a state of mind.” [77]
Many of the elements of romantic literary theory,
specifically the mystification of original poetic creation and the concept of
the creative process as organic rather than mechanical, were anticipated in
Young’s Conjectures on Original Com-
75
position, a
work that, as I mentioned earlier, had its greatest impact in
A discussion of the development of German romantic theory in the final years of the eighteenth century and then of the importation of romantic theory into
VI – Contemporary
Implications
The Courts of
So wrote one controversialist in 1762 as he predicted
the dire consequences that would follow the establishment of authorial
copyright. Seven years later,
Joseph Yates, writing in Millar v. Taylor, predicted that if literary
compositions were admitted into the law as genuine objects of property endless
litigations might arise, including
Disputes… among authors themselves - ”whether the works of one author were or were not the same with those of another author; or whether there were only colourable differences:” - (a question that would be liable to great uncertainties and doubts). [82
The creation of a metaphysical entity, the “work,” would
lead in other words to metaphysical disputes.
What damages should be awarded for the pilfering of an
anecdote or the purloining of a plot? How many elements in two stories need to
be similar before we conclude that there are only, as Yates put it in
eighteenth-century terminology, “colourable differences” between them? These are the kinds of questions that our
own law courts deal with every day. We are the heirs of the institution of
literary property that emerged in the eighteenth century and of the problems and
paradoxes that treating literary texts as private property involves. In a famous opinion in which he
distinguished “originality” from “novelty” as the test of copyrightability,
Judge Learned Hand somewhat impishly remarked in 1936: “If by some magic a man
who had never known it were to compose anew Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, he
would be an ‘author,’ and, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that
poem, though they might of course copy Keats’s.” [83] One thinks of Jorge Luis Borges’s
fable “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a modern writer is
presented whose great accomplishment has been to compose - not to copy but to
write anew from his own experience - several chapters of Don Quixote. Every word in Pierre Menard’s
Quixote is identical to Cervantes’, and yet the text, Borge insists, is
different.
Many jurists have been aware of the awkwardness of
treating literary texts as private property. [84] Nevertheless, the institution of
literary property is so deeply rooted in our society that many jurists and even
some legal historians regard it as a transcendant moral idea that has been
available in all times and places. One such writer, speaking explicitly of
“the ancient and eternal idea of intellectual property,” argues that classical
Greek and Roman practices anticipate modern institutions; [85] and
others have claimed that early rabbinical precepts about
the
77
importance of “reporting a thing in the name of him who
said it” show an awareness of the ethical principle underlying
copyright. [86] But neither the Roman concern with authorial dignitas
nor the Jewish concern with the relative authority of rabbinical sayings has
much to do with copyright in the sense of literary property, that is, with a
notion of marketable rights in texts that are conceived as
commodities.
Before the structuralist and poststructuralist
transformation of the intellectual scene, literary scholarship with its concern
for the integrity of the individual work as an aesthetic artifact and its
respect for the author’s proprietary rights in his meaning was committed to the
same mode of thinking as the legal system. Thus traditional textual study was
concerned with establishing authoritative texts, with determining what an author
really wrote (as if there were always a single theoretically determinable
literary object), and traditional source study was controlled by a judicial and
economic metaphor in which the critic was seen as determining the extent of one
author’s “indebtedness” to another. Now, however, a gap has appeared between
the dominant mode of legal thinking and that of literary thinking. “Originality,” the necessary and enabling
concept that underlies the notion of the proprietary author, is at best a
problematic term in current thought, which stresses rather the various ways in
which, as it is often put, language speaks through man. Where does one text end and another
begin? What current literary
thought emphasizes is that texts permeate and enable each other, and from this
point of view the notion of distinct boundaries between texts, a notion crucial
to the operation of the modern system of literary property, becomes difficult to
sustain.
The gap between poststructuralist thought and the
institution of copyright brings into view the historicity of the seemingly
“solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work.” Much work remains to be done in the
construction of what Foucault would have called a “genealogy” of literary
property. One important moment in
the production of the modern cultural system, however, was evidently the
landmark case of Donaldson v. Becket and the English debate over the
nature of copyright that it climaxed.
For substantial and much appreciated assistance of
various kinds in the production of this study I would like to thank Robert A.
Burt, Richard Helgerson, Peter Haidu, Alvin Kernan, Shannon Miller, Robert Post,
Bert 0. States, and Everett Zimmerman.
1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual
Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979),
141.
2.
78
earlier, the Edinburgh Advertiser was published at
the time of the appeal by his son, James.
3. Morning Chronicle,
4. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (
5. “Preface,” The Cases of the Appellants and Respondents in the Cause of Literary Property Before the House of Lords (
6.
7. The
8. A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (New York, 1929), 54-113, provides a convenient but in some respects dated account of the copyright struggle. See also Gwyn Walters, “Booksellers in 1759 and 1774: The Battle for Literary Property,” Library 29 (1974): 287 -311. Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, Tenn., 1968) is excellent in its treatment of the legal issues. Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403-1959 (
9. Morning Chronicle,
10. Ibid.,
11. Alvin Kernan discusses this change and many other
matters that impinge upon my subject in Printing Technology, Letters, and
Samuel Johnson (Princeton, N.J., 1987).
12. Cases of the Appellants and Respondents,
54.
13. Monthly Review 51(1774):
81.
14. According to Alfred W. Pollard, in the Elizabethan period the printing of works without permission or payment rarely involved living writers, or if it did the author was usually a person whose rank would have forbidden accepting payment; Shakespeare’s Fight With the Pirates (Cambridge, 1937), 32-33. On the author’s rights before the eighteenth century see also Leo Kirschbaum, “Author’s Copyright in
15. On the Venetian privilegii and other developments relevant to what might be called the prehistory of copyright see Horatio F. Brown, The Venetian Printing Press, 1469-1800 (London, 1891), 50-108. Bruce W. Bugbee, Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law (Washington, D.C., 1967), 12-56, surveys early developments on the Continent as well as in
79
the same author’s “The Early Growth and Influence of
Intellectual Property,” Journal of the Patent Office Society 34
(1952): 106-40.
16. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose,
ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, Ind., 1957), 749.
17. Ibid., 794. I am indebted to Richard Helgerson for
pointing out this passage to me.
18. See Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (
19. David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, 1983) discusses the emergence of originality as the source for authority.
20. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Poems, ed. John Butt (
21. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (
22. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (
23. See Harry Ransom, The First Copyright Statute
(Austin, Tex., 1956), 94-97.
24. Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective,
147.
25. The Case of Authors and Proprietors of Books (
26. Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright:
Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.
27. This body of texts consists of several dozen tracts
and pamphlets together with the reports on the leading cases in which the
common-law right issue directly figured, especially Tonson v. Collins
(English Reports, 96:169-74, 180-92), Millar v. Taylor (English Reports,
98:201-57), Donaldson v. Becket (see note 5 above), and the Scottish
case of Hinton v. Donaldson, reported by James Boswell as The Decision
of the Court of Session upon the Question of Literary Property (Edinburgh,
1774), in which the common-law claim was held invalid in Scottish common law.
In addition there are various
parliamentary records and newspaper and magazine pieces. No complete bibliography of these
materials exists, but Thorvald Solberg provides a still useful “Bibliography of
Literary Property” as an appendix to R. R. Bowker, Copyright: Its Law and Its
Literature (New York, 1886). Collins, Authorship in the Days of
Johnson, mentions many of the significant pamphlets in his chapter on the
copyright struggle.
80
28. William Enfield, Observations on Literary Property (
29. Boswell, Life, 2:259. See also Johnson’s letter to the
bookseller William Strahan dated 7 March 1774 in which Johnson develops his
ideas on copyright and suggests the term of life plus thirty years;
Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1907), 2:442-46. Edward A. Bloom
conveniently gathers Johnson’s statements on the subject in “Samuel Johnson on
Copyright,” Journal of English and
German Philology 47 (1948): 165-72.
30. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (
31. Justice Joseph Yates, in Millar v.
32. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New
York, 1953), esp. 159-67.
33. Baron James Eyre, as reported in Cases of the
Appellants and Respondents, 34.
34. Young, Conjectures, 12.
35. See Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 20
1-3.
36. William Warburton, A Letter from an Author to a Member of Parliament Concerning Literary Property (
37. Anon., A Vindication of the Exclusive Rights of Authors (
38. Tonson v. Collins, English Reports,
96:189.
39. Blackstone, Commentaries,
2:406.
40. Kennedy, “Structure of Blackstone’s Commentaries,”
334-50.
41. Blackstone, Commentaries,
2:401.
42. Tonson v. Collins, English Reports,
96:188.
43. See for example the broadside The Case of the Booksellers Right to Their Copies (
44.
45. Young, Conjectures, 9.
46. Ibid., 54.
47. Millar v.
48. Ibid., 98:252.
49. Ibid., 98:253.
50. Ibid., 98:218.
51. Ibid., 98:222.
52. Ibid., 98:230.
53. Ibid., 98:248.
54. In the 1730s the House of Lords defeated several attempts by the
55. I am indebted to Paul Goldstein for referring me to John Whicher, “The Ghost of Donaldson v. Beckett,” Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the
81
be wrong, Whicher remains puzzled by how Burrow and Brown
came to report Justice George Nares as voting against the author’s common-law
right on the third question whereas the two earlier pamphlet accounts report
Nares as voting in favor of the author’s right. Neither Burrow nor Brown gives the
substance of Nares’s reasoning on the question, but both pamphlet accounts do,
and his arguments as they report them clearly support the author’s right. Cobbett, who evidently used the pamphlets
in compiling his narrative, reports Nares’s reasoning in favor of the author’s
right but then records him as voting against it, an extraordinary
contradiction.
The difficulty in the report of Nares’s vote begins before Burrow and Brown with the clerk of the House of Lords who recorded both in his manuscript Minute Book and the official Journal that Nares voted against the common-law right on the third question. The clerk did not record either Nares’s or any of the other judges’ reasoning. Burrow’s 1776 report of the judges’ votes is a transcription of the Journal. Contemporary newspaper accounts, with one interesting exception, report Nares as voting in favor of the common-law right. Particularly important is William Woodfall’s - “Memory” Woodfall as he was called in testimony to his prodigious reportorial feats - account in the Morning Chronicle on
56. Millar v.
57. One indication of the special significance of
82
over two issues, 24 and 25 February, 1774. In A Modest Plea for the Property of Copyright (
58. Cases of the Appellants and Respondents,
54.
59. See Fifoot, Lord Mansfield, 45-46; and Henry
S. Eeles, Lord Chancellor Camden and His Family (London, 1934),
113-14.
60. Morning Chronicle,
61.
62.
63. See Whicher, “Ghost of Donaldson v. Beckett,”
130. Since completing this
essay Howard B. Abrams, “The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law:
Exploding the Myth of Common-Law Copyright,” Wayne Law Review 29 (1983):
1119-91, has been brought to my attention. Abrams’s purpose is to demonstrate that
“there is no historical justification whatsoever for the claim that copyright
was recognized as a common-law right of an author” (1128). The crux of his argument is that the
notion that common-law copyright did exist but was then preempted by statutory
law is based on a failure to understand that in Donaldson v. Becket it
was not the common-law judges but the Lords who decided the case. Abrams argues that the speeches of the
Lords in the House, particularly the speeches of Lord Camden and Lord Chancellor
Apsley, both of whom deny that common-law copyright ever existed, articulate the
grounds for the Lords’ decision. The Lords’ holding in Donaldson v.
Becket “was clearly that the common law had not and did not recognize the
existence of copyright” (1164). Abrams’s article is interesting and
valuable, but I find it difficult to accept that the legal grounds for the
Lords’ decision were quite so clear. The speeches of the participants in the
debate after the judges had rendered their opinions do not quite have the status
of formal judicial opinions. Moreover, how are we to ascertain what
understanding of the knotty common-law question was in each Lord’s mind as he
voted? Indeed, we don’t even know
for certain how many peers voted or whether there was a formal division of the
house, as Cobbett reports, rather than a simple voice vote. Above all, we must remember that the
issue voted on in the House of Lords was not the common-law question as such but
simply whether or not to reverse the Chancery decree.
64. See Altick, English Common Reader, 54-57; also
W. Forbes Gray, “Alexander Donaldson and His Fight for Cheap Books ,“
Juridical Review 38(1926): 180-202.
65. Whicher, “Ghost of Donaldson v. Beckett,” argues that the author’s common-law right has reappeared in
66. Robert Southey, in “Inquiry into the Copyright Act,”
Quarterly Review 21(1819): 211-12.
83
67. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (
68. Boswell, Decision, 7.
69. Jacob More, Strictures Critical and Sentimental on Thomson’s Seasons (
70. Millar v.
71. Francis Hargrave was counsel for the
72. Ibid., 35-36. Less than a year earlier Samuel Johnson
was making a similar claim about the author’s right in dinner conversation with
Boswell and others: “There seems, (said he,) to be in authours a stronger right
of property than that by occupancy; a metaphysical right, a right, as it were,
of creation”; Boswell, Life, 2:259. Both Johnson and Hargrave probably had
Blackstone’s discussion of literary property in the Commentaries in mind,
and therefore no direct influence need be supposed, but perhaps Hargrave had
heard of Johnson’s remarks.
73. Hargrave, Argument in Defence of Literary
Property, 16.
74. Ibid., 6-7.
75. Locke, Two Treatises of Government,
305-6.
76. Monthly Review 51(1774):
209.
77. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 226. In this period, too, the figure of the
poet as hero was becoming familiar. As Robert Folkenflik remarks, “In the
Renaissance Tasso wrote Gerusalemme Liberata and Milton wrote Paradise
Lost; but in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, Goethe
wrote Torquato Tasso and Blake wrote Milton. An artist-hero was not in itself new…
Yet to find such a hero in the acknowledged major genres, tragedy and epic, is
something new and suggests the wider significance of the artist’s image in this
period.” See “The Artist as Hero in
the Eighteenth Century,” Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982):
91-108.
78. Woodmansee, “Genius and Copyright,” 442. For a related discussion of the economic
grounding of the aesthetic theory of “disinterestedness” as it developed in this
period in Germany see also Martha Woodmansee’s “The Interests in
Disinterestedness: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Emergence of the Theory of
Aesthetic Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Modern Language Quarterly
45 (1984): 22-47.
79. Quoted by Woodmansee, “Genius and Copyright,”
445.
80. Tonson v. Collins, English Reports,
96:189.
81. Anon., An Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Literary Property (
82. Millarv.
83. Quoted in Ralph S. Brown and Robert C. Denicola,
eds., Cases on Copyright (New York, 1985), 190.
84. Often quoted is Justice Joseph Story’s 1841 dictum
that copyrights, along with patents, “approach, nearer than any other class of
cases belonging to forensic discussions, to what may be called the metaphysics
of the law, where the distinctions are, or at least may be, very subtile and
refined, and, sometimes, almost evanescent”; quoted in
ibid.,
84
238. For a
wise and suggestive discussion both of some aspects of the history of copyright
and of some modern problems see Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of
Copyright (New York, 1967).
85. Prager, “Early Growth and Influence of Intellectual
Property,” 106.
86. Victor Hazan, “The Origins of Copyright Law in Ancient Jewish Law,” Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the
85