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Trouble With Ownership: Literary Property And Authorial Liability In England, 1660-1730 (MATERIAL TEXTS) - Hardcover

Greene, Jody

 
9780812238624: Trouble With Ownership: Literary Property And Authorial Liability In England, 1660-1730 (MATERIAL TEXTS)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812238621 ISBN 13: 9780812238624
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Copyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place?

Jody Greene argues that while "owning" one's book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early modern England: that is, owning up to or taking responsibility for one's work. Greene puts forth what she calls a "paranoid theory of copyright," under which literary property rights are a means of state regulation to assign responsibility for printed works, to identify one person who will step forward and claim the work in exchange for the right to reap the benefits of the literary marketplace. Blending research from legal, historical, and literary archives and drawing on the troubled authorial careers of figures such as Roger L'Estrange, Elizabeth Cellier, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and Alexander Pope, The Trouble with Ownership looks to the literary culture of early modern England to reveal the intimate relationship between proprietary authorship and authorial liability.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jody Greene is Associate Professor of Literature and Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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IntroductionA new historical understanding of print is needed. What will it look like? One immediately evident feature will be its regard for the labors of those actually involved in printing, publishing, and reading. Another will be its respect for their own representations of printing, embracing both its prospects and dangers. The dangers in particular will loom larger and more substantial than they have hitherto. Historians tend to disregard such perils as accidental. Early modern readers and writers knew otherwise.
—Adrian Johns, The Nature of the BookThe story of modern, proprietary authorship is by now a familiar one. In the English context, it goes something like this: the period from 1660 to 1800 saw an explosion in new opportunities for authors unparalleled in the history of authorship. Increases in literacy, the growth of cities, falling paper prices, the influx of international commercial capital, the end of prepublication censorship, and above all, the newfound willingness of authors to make their work public transformed British literary culture from a courtly côterie into a thriving marketplace. In addition to these expanding material, commercial, and cultural opportunities, authors for the first time found themselves endowed with rights. A notion of literary property emerged in this period that transformed the relation between author and work, in the words of Mark Rose, into one of "proprietorship." Authorial copyright, albeit in a most rudimentary fashion, was codified for the first time in the "Copyright Act" of 1710, in a move that established the author, in Rose's formulation, as "a legally empowered figure in the marketplace" (4).

The "Act for the Encouragement of Learning," as the Copyright Act was formally known, has been described by recent commentators as a kind of historical accident, "an entirely contingent means," in the words of David Saunders and Iain Hunter, "of regulating the unstable technical, economic, and cultural capacities created by a new apparatus of literary production." The Act, they write, was only tangentially designed to address the needs and rights of authors, and offered little more than a "makeshift solution" to a whole range of commercial and legal problems confronting the print trade and the authorities who took it upon themselves to oversee that trade (485). Nonetheless, the Act had profound effects on the practice of authorship, in addition to its effect on the organization of the trade as a whole. In the first place, the Act was important because it conceived of an author's primary—even aboriginal—relation to his or her work as a matter of ownership. Although the nature of the proprietary relationship is never spelled out in the Act, the phrase "Proprietor or Proprietors" stands in, after the opening lines, for the author, as well as for the printers, booksellers, and others whose interests might be covered under its provisions. Living authors were henceforth considered to have control over their property, in the form of an exclusive right to determine who was to copy the work. This right was alienable for a fixed term, no longer passing to the buyer in perpetuity. Authors were permitted to retain the right to control the reproduction of their works as long as they could afford to publish without the aid of a third party to put forward the printing costs and act as an intermediary with the book trade. Should the author find it necessary to sell or otherwise part with this copyright, however, he or she could assign it to anyone, not only, as had previously been the case, to a member of the Stationers' Guild. This single change in the law may have had the greatest effect on the organization of the book trade, as Lyman Ray Patterson remarks in Copyright in Historical Perspective. "The radical change in the statute," he writes, "was not that it gave authors the right to acquire a Copyright—a prerogative until then limited to members of the Stationers' Company—but that it gave that right to all persons." Henceforth the Company's monopoly on the trade in printed materials would be broken, although Company members continued to wield significant commercial weight throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, although it remained the norm for most authors to sell their copyright, since most did not have access to the means of printing and publishing their own works, it was tempting for authors to try to eliminate the publisher's potentially lucrative role in this process, whether by keeping the copyright themselves or by attempting to reassign the right to a member of the trade willing to share the profits more equally than the traditional stationer. This, as later chapters show, was a favored strategy of that great authorial innovator, Alexander Pope, and also of his unlikely comrade-in-arms, John Gay.

Yet authors quickly found that the "Copyright Act" had consequences not only for authorial rights, but also for authorial liability. The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 had left something of a vacuum in the enforcement of press regulation. Although the licensing system had been only haphazardly effective in its final decades, and although the law regarding postpublication crimes such as libel and sedition remained unchanged, the absence of prepublication oversight made illicit, antigovernment publishing easier than it had been under the watchful eye of the licenser. In particular, it allowed for the rapid growth of periodical literature, including newspapers and weekly gazettes and reviews, the control of which preoccupied the government consistently from 1695 until the passage of a tax on periodicals in 1712. Above all, the disappearance of a centralized regulatory authority threatened to let forth a flood of wholly anonymous works—works with no information whatsoever on their title pages—as well as those sporting false imprints misidentifying the author, printer, bookseller, place of publication, and/or date of release. While all of these features could be falsified under the prior system, doing so was more difficult when a figure like Roger L'Estrange, with his own intimate knowledge of the ways of the trade, was at work surveying the press on a daily basis, as he was from 1663 until he was finally relieved of his duties in 1688.

Until the lapse of the Licensing Act, the stationers—with the help of government appointees such as L'Estrange—had been responsible for both the commercial and the ideological regulation of the book business, in a systematic tradeoff of rights and responsibilities that had been in effect since the charter of the Stationers' Company in 1557. After 1695, and especially after 1710, however, these two functions—call them "copyright" and "censorship," though neither term is satisfactory for covering the range of proprietary and regulatory interests described in this volume—were now no longer carried out by one centralized body, but were instead, at least according to almost all recent commentators, split off from each other. Rose goes so far as to argue that "the passage of the Act marked the divorce of copyright from censorship" (48). In so doing, he joins a long line of those who have seen in the relationship between these two regulatory functions an unhappy family romance. Rose himself describes the relationship between "censorship and trade regulation" after 1557 as a "marriage" (13). During the seventeenth century, he continues, they began to effect a "separation" that was only made complete in the divorce of 1710 (16). Fredrick Seaton Siebert takes the familial metaphor further by noting that the putative split left progeny, children of divorce, in the form of the generations of copyright legislation extending into the present:Henceforth the protection of property rights in printed matter was divorced completely from any attempts at control of the content or quality of...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812238621
ISBN 13 
9780812238624
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
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