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 o...
Éditeur : Open Book Publishers
Lieu d’édition : Cambridge
Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 14 février 2013
ISBN numérique : 978-1-906924-20-1
Collection : OBP collection
Année d’édition : 2010
ISBN (Édition imprimée) : 978-1-906924-19-5
Nombre de pages : 308
Martin Kretschmer, Lionel Bently et Ronan Deazley
Introduction. The History of Copyright History: Notes from an Emerging Discipline.Oren Bracha
4. Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors’Copyright in AmericaMaurizio Borghi
6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual CopyrightStef van Gompel
7. Les formalités sont mortes, vive les formalités! Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for their Decline in Nineteenth Century EuropeFriedemann Kawohl
8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the Reprinting Sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794Frédéric Rideau
9. Nineteenth Century Controversies Relating to the Protection of Artistic Property in FranceKatie Scott
10. Maps, Views and Ornament: Visualising Property in Art and Law. The Case of Pre-modern FranceIsabella Alexander
12. ’Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words’: The Birth of the Performing Right in BritainKarl-Nikolaus Peifer
13. The Return of the Commons – Copyright History as a Common SourceWilliam St Clair
15. Metaphors of Intellectual PropertyWhat 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 his 1644 Areopagitica speech ‘For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing’, accuses 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. Contributions also address the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts. These essays provide essential reading for anybody interested in copyright, intellectual history and current public policy choices in intellectual property. 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): www.copyrighthistory.org . As with all Open Book Publications the entire work is available free to read online, while printable digital editions of the volume together with additional resources can be downloaded from the publisher’s website: www.openbookpublishers.com
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).
Professor of Information Jurisprudence and Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University, UK. His research includes a long-term project on artists’ labour markets and earnings funded by the Arts Council and Collecting Societies ALCS and DACS, as well as numerous interdisciplinary studies addressing specific policy issues (funders include European Commission, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the UK Strategic Advisory Board for IP Policy).
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).

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.