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.
Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright
Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds) | June 2010
xii + 438 | 11 black and white illustrations | 6.14" x 9.21" (234 x 156 mm)
ISBN Paperback: 9781906924188
ISBN Hardback: 9781906924195
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781906924201
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0007
BIC subject codes: LNRC (Copyright law), HBTB (Social & cultural history); BISAC: LAW050010 (LAW / Intellectual Property / Copyright); OCLC Number: 644288794.
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
© 2010 Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently
Contributors are free to re-publish their contributions in whatever other ways they choose.

Details of allowances and restrictions are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
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.
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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).
This is a most valuable, sometimes provocative, always interesting contribution to the construction of knowledge of the history of copyright [...] Buy it, read it and copy it to your friends.
(Archive for Copyright and Media Law), Vol 2 (2011)
...extremely rigorous and thoroughly researched, with an impressive apparatus of bibliographical references.
You can read the full review on page 19 here.
[...] I'm intrigued both by the prospect of a good, scholarly read and by the business model on which this title is based. With luck, it should maximise exposure of the contributors to their readers while also capturing a chance to secure some income from reasonable pricing plus a flexible set of options such as only the internet can provide.
In the Times Literary Supplement (6 August 2010), Jonathan Bate includes in his article on copyright law, ‘Fair enough?’ a discussion of Privilege and Property.