Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright

What can and can’t be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership – of privilege and property.

This volume conceives a new history of copyright law that has its roots in a wide range of norms and practices. The essays reach back to the very material world of craftsmanship and mechanical inventions of Renaissance Italy where, in 1469, the German master printer Johannes of Speyer obtained a five-year exclusive privilege to print in Venice and its dominions. Along the intellectual journey that follows, we encounter John Milton who, in 1644 accused the English parliament of having been deceived by the ‘fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling’ (i.e. the London Stationers’ Company).

Later revisionary essays investigate the regulation of the printing press in the North American colonies as a provincial and somewhat crude version of European precedents, and how, in the revolutionary France of 1789, the subtle balance that the royal decrees had established between the interests of the author, the bookseller, and the public, was shattered by the abolition of the privilege system. Some of the essays also address the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts.

The volume is a companion to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Privilege and Property is recommended in the Times Higher Education Textbook Guide (November, 2010).

Since publication this book has been viewed over 11000 times. Last updated March 2013.

Title: Privilege and Property
Subtitle: Essays on the History of Copyright
Editors: Deazley, Ronan
Kretschmer, Martin
Bently, Lionel
Publication date: June 2010
Number of pages: xii + 438
Dimensions: 6.14” x 9.21” | 234mm x 156mm
Illustrations: 11 black and white
BIC Subject Codes: LNRC (Copyright law), HBTB (Social & cultural history)


Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Introduction
The History of Copyright History: Notes from an Emerging Discipline
Martin Kretschmer, with Lionel Bently and Ronan Deazley

1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent
Joanna Kostylo

2. ‘A Mongrel of Early Modern Copyright’: Scotland in European Perspective
Alastair J. Mann

3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne
Mark Rose

4. Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America
Oren Bracha

5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones
Laurent Pfister

6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright
Maurizio Borghi

7. Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for their Decline in Nineteenth Century Europe
Stef van Gompel

8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the Reprinting Sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794
Friedemann Kawohl

9. Nineteenth Century Controversies Relating to the Protection of Artistic Property in France
Frédéric Rideau

10. Maps, Views and Ornament: Visualising Property in Art and Law: The Case of Pre-modern France
Katie Scott

11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Arts Copyright Bill 1862
Ronan Deazley

12. ‘Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words’: The Birth of the Performing Right in Britain
Isabella Alexander

13. The Return of the Commons – Copyright History as a Common Source
Karl-Nikolaus Peifer

14. The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians
John Feather

15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property
William St Clair

Bibliography
Index

Ronan Deazley is Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775) (2004) and Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (2006, 2008).

Martin Kretschmer is Professor of Intellectual Property Law in the School of Law, University of Glasgow, and Director of CREATe. From 2000-2012, he was Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University(www.cippm.org.uk). From 1996-1999 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Cass Business School, City University, London (ESRC Media Economics and Media Culture programme). With Prof. Lionel Bently, Martin is the general editor of the AHRC funded digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) at the Centre for Intellectual Property & Information Law, Cambridge University (www.copyrighthistory.org).

Lionel Bently is the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, Cambridge. His published works include: The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (with Brad Sherman) (1999) and Intellectual Property Law, 3rd ed (2008).

Lionel Bently and Martin Kretschmer are joint project directors of Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900).

Listen again to an event hosted by the British Academy at the Royal Society (27 October 2010) about Creativity and Copyright. Privilege and Property contributor William St Clair is part of the panel discussion. Click here to access the recording.   

 

William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period is linked, in an online publishing blog, to the current copyright debates and Google's attempted takeover. You can read the post  here.

Privilege and Property is a companion to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

"Each of these essays is a delight to read, and the book’s varied subject matter makes it a pleasure to dip into. However, the collection as a whole does more than offer scholarly essays on aspects of copyright history. It presents a thoughtful and practical challenge to the grand but imprecise theories of copyright history (‘the romantic author hypothesis’, ‘the copyright bargain’, ‘the public domain’), by putting forward the material on which new narratives for new social conditions may be developed. It offers convincing and concrete proof that copyright history matters."
For further information on the questions Bate asks, about Fair Use and Fair Dealing, please see the Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research for researchers and publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences (published by the British Academy and the Publishers Association, April 2008). Click here for the link.