Cinnabar and Alabaster

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26. "ancient greeks did not think of knowledge as something that could be owned or sold. a scribe could be paid feed for his labor, an author awarded prizes for his achievement, but the gift of the gods was freely given"; "socrates held the sophists in contempt for charging fees for their learning"
27. "a tour of the other great civilizations of the premodern world--chinese, islamic, jewish, and christian--reveals a striking absence of any notion of human ownership of ideas or their expressions"--"in china in the fifth century b.c. the philosopher confucius is recorded as saying 'i transmit rather than create'"; "throughout the islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years"; "the word 'koran' itself means 'recitation,' and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. the book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word"
28. "a certain notion of legal 'authorship' did emerge from islamic scribal practices. but a concept of intellectual property did not. sharī'a law against 'imposture' or 'fraud' was used to prevent the unauthorized appropriation of the reputation or authority of a great teacher through false attribution of written texts. but the teacher did not own the ideas expressed within his books"; quoth medieval theologians: "knowledge is a gift from god, consequently it cannot be sold"; "selling something that belonged to god constituted the sin of simony"; "even as books were increasingly bought and sold after the advent of print in europe in the fifteenth century, and even as writers began to sell their manuscripts to printers for a profit, there remained a dimension of the book, its spiritual legacy, that lay beyond the grasp of market relations"; "the renaissance elevated the poet, the inventor, and the artist to unprecedented social heights, but their 'genius' was still understood to be divinely inpsired rather than a mere product of their mental skills or worldly labors"
29. "this theologically informed moral revulsion to the idea of an individual profit motive in the creation and transmission of ideas continued to circulate in the united states well into the nineteenth century"; "the early modern period witnessed the emergence of elaborate systems of prepublication censorship, state-licensed monopolies to control the burgeoning printing and publishing trades, and the use of royal letters of patent or 'privileges' to give exclusive monopolies for the printing and publication of authorized texts"; actually, "the first known ordinance regulating publication was that of the emperor wen-tsing, in 835, forbidding the private publication of almanacs."
30. by contrast, "the earliest european initiative occurred in the republic of venice in 1469." & "in 1559, as part of her attempt to resolve the religious controversies that wracked the realm, elizabeth i issued an injunction against publication of any text unless it had been licensed by censors appointed by the crown. the stationers' company kept a registry of licensed books and the crown could, in principle, extend or revoke a license at will....these licenses were 'copied' into the registry book of the guild and soon came to be treated by members of the guild as exclusive rights to print a particular 'copy.'"
31. "a similar process of consolidation of great publishing empires, founded upon monopolistic claims rooted in royal privileges, occurred througout christian europe"
32-3. in the eighteenth century, "rather than selling a manuscript to a publisher, authors increasingly sought simply to sell the 'rights' to a single edition. with greater frequency, secular authors began to claim that they were the creators of their own works rather than the mere transmitters of god's eternal truths. as they came to view themselves as the originators of their work, they also began to claim that their creations were their own property, as susceptible to legal protection and as inheritable or saleable as any other form of property. daniel defoe wrote in 1710, 'A Book is the Author's Property, 'tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain: if he sells his Property, it then becomes the Right of the Purchaser.'"; "by the middle of the eighteenth century, the traditional system of publication was everywhere in shambles. first in england, and then in france and germany as well, calls for reform of the regulation of the book trade were coming from all parties involved. readers wanted cheaper books. government legislators sought to increase commerce and to encourage a more educated population within their realms. foreign and privincial publishers...clamored against the perpetual monopolies of the london and paris book guilds on the most lucrative books. authors wanted their property rights in their compositions recognized as absolute and perpetual"; "the reform of the publishing industry in europe thus entailed a rethinking of the basis and purpose of knowledge": quoth locke "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his"; "three generations later, the poet edward young...asserted that the author contributed more than simply his labor to a book--he imprinted its contents with his original personality"; "young's reflections, like those of john locke before him, constituted a dramatic secularization of the theory of knowledge"
34. "the individual personality supplanted god as the divine font of knowledge"; "it was gotthold lessing, the greatest writer of the german enlightenment, who most forcefully developed the notion of the author's unique personality as a source of property rights in ideas. in a 1772 essay, live and let live, lessing proposed a reorganization of the german book trade that attacked the foundations of the old system. he challenged directly the traditional ban on profits received from writing"
35. "a generation later, johann gottleb fichte, a philosopher and disciple of kant, probed the complexities of the problem even more deeply. fichte posed a difficult question: if creations of the mind were indeed 'property,' what exactly was immaterial property? clearly it did not simply consist of a physical manuscript..."
36-7. "the tension within enlightenment epistemology left those policymakers concerned with the book trade on the horns of a philosophical dilemma. did knowledge inhere in the world--or in the mind? to what extent were ideas discovered--and to what extent were they invented?"; "those who sided with locke, young, diderot, fichte, and the subjectivist camp argued that there was a natural right to perpetual property in ideas and that legal recognition of that right was simply the confirmation in statute of a universal natural right. the utilitarian position thus understood the public interest as the highest aim of the law, while natural-rights proponents argued that the sanctity of the individual creator whould be the guiding principle of any legislator. over the course of the eighteenth century, every european country witnessed a series of legal battles over which of these principles would prevail." "parliament finally filled the legal vacuum in 1710, when the so-called statute of anne definitively separated the question of censorship from that of literary property. the statute ruled that authors, and those who had purchased a manuscript from an author, would have an exclusive right to publish the work for fourteen years....in effect, the statute of anne...represented an uneasy compromise between the position of the stationers' company and the advocates of authors' natural rights on one side and the position of the pirate publishers and advocates of the 'public interest' on the other." in 1774 "the donaldson v. becket decision was crucial in two respects": "it established the 'encouragement of learning' as the highest aim of laws regulating books" and "even though copyright was acknowledged to be a natural right rooted in common law...held that copyright in practice hinged on government legislation"
38. "in early america...colonies differed as to which theory formed the basis of their laws"; in "the united states copyright statute of may 31, 1790" "the author or inventor was acknowledged as an individual with special claims upon his own ideas--but the public good dictated that those claims be limited...a similar tension in french legal thinking provoked a parallel set of court battles"; "in 1777, the french crown, confronted with mounting criticism, was forced to revise the system of privileges...[now] granted authors their own category of privileges....these new privileges were to be perpetual and inheritable, like any other form of personal property." then "the revolution changed everything. 'freedom of the press' was declared and literary privileges abrogated....authors were now widely celebrated not as private creators and possessive individuals, but rather as civic heroes, servants of public enlightenment"
39. "hoping to establish the french book trade on a new, secular footing, the abbé sieyès in 1791 proposed passing a 'law on the freedom of the press'...[that] "recognized authors' texts as a form of property, originating with their creators, and susceptible to legal protection; yet at the same time, the sieyès law reflected condorcet's conern for the 'public interest' by limiting exclusive claims upon literary property to the lifetime of the author, plus ten years"; "a number of individual german states did pass laws similar to the revised sieyès law" but "it was not...until 1870 that imerial germany successfully adopted a uniform copyright law similar to those of the french and the english." "it is no coincidence that the english phrase 'intellectual property' should first appear [in the OED] in 1845"... "because the modern laws regulating intellectual property rest on a largely unexamined set of contradictory philosophical assumptions, these laws have been uniquely vulnerable to challenge--not least by the continuing rise of new methods of distributing ideas and information across national boundaries."
40. in 1886 the berne conferences "led to the signing by ten european nations of the first international copyright treaty"; "this progressive shift in the legal spectrum toward the enforcement of natural rights has led to a steady strengthening of private intellectual property right claims over the doctrine of the public interest"; "as...the united states...evolved from being a net importer of intellectual property to a net exporter, its legal doctrines for regulating intellectual property have tended to shift from the objecivist-utilitarian side of the legal balance toward the univeralist-natural-rights side"
42. "american theologians, including the reverend isaac funk, now [1886] denounced the 'national sin of literary piracy' (which had allowed him to make his fortune on his pirated life of jesus) as a violation of the seventh commandment"; "in 1891 an international agreement with england for reciprocal copyright protection was finally signed by congress"
43. "developing nations...find themselves in the position of the united states in the nineteenth century. and the tendency has been for these nations to hold fast to the utilitarian claim that the national public interest should come before recognition of the natural right to property"; "chinese authorities during the cultural revolution promulgated the following popular saying: 'is it necessary for a steel worker to put his name on a steel ingot that he produces in the course of his duty? if not, why should a member of the intelligentsia enjoy the privilege of putting his name on what he produces?"
44. "in islamic jurisprudence...where the koran is silent, governments are permitted to make a new law, as long as it does not explicitly conflict with koranic injunctions. as a consequence, in the twentiety century a body of intellectual property law has emerged in most islamic states, based on western legal codes"; "the law has preserved the state's right to censor all publications as it deems necessary"; "in general, developing nations--including not only china, taiwan, russia, and the middle eastern states, but african and south american nations as well--have employed the utilitarian argument, derived from condorcet, that intellectual property is inherently social in nature and that the state has the right to limit the indvidual claims of its citizens as well as others in the name of the public good."
45. "conversely, the united states and western europe have witnessed a shift in their jurisprudential traditions away from the utilitarian side of the eighteenth-century intellectual property balance and toward an unprecedented strengthening of the doctrine of the universal natural rights of authors and inventors to the exclusive commercial exploitation of their creations and inventions. and since the 1970s the united states and western european nations have been increasingly aggressive in using trade sanctions and international trade agreements to coerce developing nations to recognize precisely this view of intellectual property rights"; "the consequences of this evolution...are troubling for several reasons": (1) "the dominance of the natural-rights view leads to immediate suffering and to the appropriation of local knowledge for international gain." (2) "the loss of a legal balance in the global arena risks giving monopolistic power to exporter nations." (3) "it puts at risk the liberal political balance between individual gain and the public good that was the foundational aim of the intellectual peroperty laws within western democratic polities themselves"