Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright

Copyright law is the site of significant contemporary controversy. In recent years copyright history has transformed as a subject from being one of interest to a few books historians to the focus of sustained historical investigation attracting the attention of scholars from across the humanities. This book comprises a collection of essays on copyright history by leading experts drawn from a range of countries and disciplinary perspectives. Covering the period from 1450 to 1900, these essays engage with a number of related themes. The first considers the general movement, from the sixteenth century onwards, from privilege to property-based conceptions of copyright protection. The second addresses the relationship between the protection provided for literary and print materials and that provided for other forms of cultural production. The third concerns the significance and relevance of these various histories in shaping and informing contemporary policy and academic practice. Essays include: 0. The History of Copyright History, by Kretschmer, Deazley & Bently; 1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent, by Joanna Kostylo; 2. A Mongrel of early modern copyright: Scotland in European Persepctive, by Alastair Mann; 3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne, by Mark Rose; 4. Early American Printing Privileges: the Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America, by Oren Bracha; 5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones, by Laurent Pfister; 6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright, by Maurizio Borghi; 7. Les formalités son mortes, vive les formalities! Copyright formalities in nineteenth century Europe, by Stef van Gompel; 8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the reprinting sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794, by Friedemann Kawohl; 9. Nineteenth Century Controversies relating to the protection of Artistic Property in France, by Frédéric Rideau; 10. Maps, Views and Ornament. Visualising Property in Art and Law: The Case of pre-modern France, by Katie Scott; 11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Art Copyright Bill 1862, by 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, by Isabella Alexander; 13. The Return of the Commons: Copyright History as a Common Source, by Karl-Nikolaus Peifer; 14. The Significance of Copyright History for the Publishing History and Historians, by John Feather; 15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property, by William St Clair. 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.or

Watery words : language, sexuality,and motherhood in Joyce's fiction

The idea of a dangerous, dirty, or lifegiving stream of water, bodily fluids, or even words -- as if words were the essence of life itself -- recurs throughout Joyce's work and becomes the prevailing, dominant metaphor of Finnegans Wake. Indeed, the maternal sea in which Stephen Dedalus fears he may drown is also the sordid, seductive, sustaining tide of life or language which the Joycean artist, absorbing it into himself, penetrated by it, transforms into art. In a sense, Joyce'.s selfconscious emphasis, in ° Finnegans Wake, on the "literalness" of language and the Itmetaphoricity" of relations between things is both "logocentric" and "deconstructive," preserving a delicate balance between the knowledge that words are signs which need to be interpreted (in the context, it would seem, of childhood relationships) and the fantasy that they are a magical essence which one needs, simply, to possess. What may disappoint us, however, is that Joyce's preoccupation both with language and with infantile fantasy is so repetitive, so monotonous, so obsessive. In attempting to deal with personal relationships and personal conflicts by these means, he also to some extent avoids them. This may be the legacy of a shame-ridden, sexually confused culture, whose fathers were often unable to be adequate fathers and whose mothers -- in carrying out the role of what they believed a "good mother" to be -- may not have been so good for their children after all

Brilliance of a fire: innocence, experience and the theory of childhood

This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education - both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood

Between overt and covert research: concealment and disclosure in an ethnographic study of commercial hospitality

This article examines the ways in which problems of concealment emerged in an ethnographic study of a suburban bar and considers how disclosure of the research aims, the recruitment of informants, and elicitation of information was negotiated throughout the fieldwork. The case study demonstrates how the social context and the relationships with specific informants determined overtness or covertness in the research. It is argued that the existing literature on covert research and covert methods provides an inappropriate frame of reference with which to understand concealment in fieldwork. The article illustrates why concealment is sometimes necessary, and often unavoidable, and concludes that the criticisms leveled against covert methods should not stop the fieldworker from engaging in research that involves covertness

Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: the place of Jerusalem pilgrimage in the various Christianities

The great majority of the world's holy cities and sacred shrines attract pilgrims from culturally circumscribed catchment areas, and thus host pilgrims united by strong degrees of cultural homogeneity. Jerusalem, on the other hand, draws pilgrims from a vast multitude of nations and cultural traditions. During religious festivals - which tend to be imbricated because of the antagonistic engagement of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Jerusalem's streets swarm with men and women displaying a rainbow of secular and religious costumes, speaking a cacophony of languages, and pursuing a plethora of divine figures. Other sacred centres which attract pilgrims from areas as heterogeneous as those which provide Jerusalem's pilgrims - eminent among these Mecca (which nonetheless services only the sects of a single religion) - funnel their devotees through ritual routines which mask differences beneath identical repertoires of movement and utterance2. Jerusalem's pilgrims, on the other hand, go to different places at different times where they engage in very different forms of worship. The result is a continuous crossing and diverging - often marked by clashes - of bodies, voices and religious artifacts. Jerusalem does not, in fact, appear so much as a holy city as as a multitude of holy cities - as many as are the religious communities which worship at the site - built over the same spot, operating at the same moment, and contending for hegemony

the garden city in america: crevecoeur's letters and the urban-pastoral context

the garden city in america: crevecoeur's letters and the urban-pastoral contex

On Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond

Note on Damien Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond. Philosophical and Theological Exchanges between Christians and Muslims in the Third/Ninth and Fourth/Tenth Centuries, (Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and Texts, 124), Brill: Leiden–Boston, 201

Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 1876–1900

This article examines the ways in which promoters and developers of Florida, in the decades after Reconstruction, engaged with a popular myth of the West as a means of recasting and selling their state to prospective settlers in the North and Midwest. The myth envisaged a cherished region to the west where worthy Americans could migrate and achieve social and economic independence away from the crowded confines of the East, or Europe. According to state immigration agents, land-promoters and other booster writers, Florida, although a Southern ex-Confederate state, offered precisely these 'western' opportunities for those hard-working Northerners seeking land and an opening for agrarian prosperity. However, the myth, which posited that, in the west, an individual's labour and thrift were rewarded with social and economic improvement, meshed awkwardly with the contemporary emergence of Florida as a popular winter destination for wealthy tourists and invalids seeking leisure and healthfulness away from the North. Yet it also reflected and reinforced promotional notions of racial improvement which would occur with an influx of enterprising Anglo-Americans, who would effectively displace the state's large African American population. In Florida, the myth of the West supported the linked post-Reconstruction processes of state development and racial subjugation

Editorialising practices, competitive marketablility and James Thomson's 'The seasons'

The lapse of Andrew Millar's copyright for James Thomson's The Seasons in 1765 resulted in an increasing number of new editions of the poem being published in the late eighteenth century. This article compares the print-cultural make-ups of three editions of The Seasons that were issued in the 1790s. An examination of the print-cultural differences between these publishing ventures reveals distinct editorial practices and marketing strategies. In an attempt to increase the attractiveness of their editions with visual and textual paraphernalia, the producers developed their own versions' of The Seasons and, in the process, fashioned new interpretations of Thomson's poem