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 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.

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

Read this Book: Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright

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Author: Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (Editors)
Publisher: Open Book Publishers (June 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 190692418X
ISBN-13: 978-1906924188

About the Authors:
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 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).

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 the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded digital archive: Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900).

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