Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

Author:Adrian Johns [Johns, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, Language Arts & Disciplines, Europe, Piracy (Copyright), Publishing, Copyright, Intellectual property infringement - History, Civil Law, Piracy (Copyright) - History, Graphic Arts, Printing - History, Law, Intellectual History, Intellectual Property, Typography, Software piracy, Legal History, Printing, Software piracy - History, Copyright infringement, Business & Financial, Intellectual property infringement, Design, Copyright infringement - History
ISBN: 9780226401188
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-01-15T07:45:53.648702+00:00

FIGURE ii.i. Henry C. Carey. H. C. Carey, Miscellaneous Works, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: H.C. Baird, 1883), vol. i, frontispiece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

In Carey's hands, piracy and copyright became elements in a massive and ambitious would-be science that encompassed the natural and social worlds. He sallied forth several times on the topic, but his Letters on International Copyright represented his most important effort. The Letters appeared first in 1853, at the peak of his agitation in the shaping of Republicanism. Written to oppose a treaty that the secretary of state had negotiated with Britain, it became the single most influential tract against the establishment of copyright between Britain and the United States. In part, it rested on the specific constitutional question of whether a treaty could legitimately determine domestic policy, since it need not be ratified by the House of Representatives-high-handedness that he associated with "centralized" governments.32 But Carey credited it with almost singlehandedly preventing such copyright being adopted in any form. In 1872 he published a sequel, The International Copyright tuestion Considered. These together formed the foes et origo of the anti-internationalization camp. Read alongside Carey's "societary science," they provided an authoritative and apparently scientific argument not only against the internationalization of literary property, but for its strict limitation even at home.

In challenging free trade, there is a sense in which Carey wrote so much because he had to: he was confronting the central orthodoxy of classical political economy. Free trade, as he remarked, had the status in London, Manchester, and Glasgow of "unquestionable scientific truth." To confront it successfully therefore required more science - and different science. This was what Carey set out to produce. He tried to supplant Ricardo's political economy with a societary science that would overturn most of its axioms, methods, facts, and prescriptions at once. He aspired to produce a unified system of knowledge that extended, in principle, from the most basic natural facts to the highest laws of society. His opposition to what he always insisted on calling "British free trade" would then be based on "societary laws" as certain in the social world as that of universal gravitation was in the natural. Andwhat was at stake in discovering those laws, Carey insisted, was the "great question" of his age: "that of civilization." There is no denying that the answers he produced were peculiar-not to mention extremely convoluted. But his presumptuousness in advancing them was typical of his age, when many proposed sciences just as presumptuous: Bagehot in Britain, Tarde in France, even Marx himself. And that age took Careyvery seriously indeed.

Where did Carey get the idea for a unified system of sciences? He got it, quite simply, from reading. That is, he gleaned it, in part at least, from products of the American reprinting system. In particular, Carey devoured Auguste Comte's Course ofPositive Philosophy in Harriet Martineau's translation as soon as it appeared in America, which it did in a reprint by none other than Appleton. Carey inhaled Comte, and circulated copies to his acolytes along with his own anticopyright tracts.

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