Adrian Johns

We’re used to the idea of a “Gutenberg revolution,” when the invention of movable type suddenly made printed books (relatively) cheap and quick to produce and enabled a wide, rapid distribution of scientific knowledge around Europe, ushering in the age of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and the rest. Adrian Johns is there to remind us that it wasn’t quite that simple. Intellectuals had to learn to work with printed books as an authoritative source of scientific knowledge, whilst printers show more and booksellers had to work out how to deal with authorship and intellectual property to make their products appear reliable.

Anyone who has had anything to do with books published before about the middle of the 18th century knows that just about anything in the ostensible metadata of a book can be wrong — early printers frequently changed or obfuscated the title, the name of the author, the date and place of publication or the name of the printer, either for commercial reasons or to avoid legal consequences in case what they were publishing was considered subversive in some way. They also felt relatively free to correct, abridge, adapt or translate the text itself without the author’s permission. Johns takes us in detail through the way the book trade worked in 17th century London, including the inner workings of the main trade association, the Stationers’ Company, looking at the ways internal and government regulation of the trade interacted with the economics of legitimate and pirate publication. He makes it clear that piracy was pretty well universal, and that even senior officials of the Company, who were supposed to be regulating the trade, didn’t hesitate to take opportunities to bring out cheap pirate editions of successful books to cross-subsidise their riskier work on new titles. It was only with the development of copyright in the eighteenth century that the business started to settle down into something like the form we are familiar with.

At the heart of the book are two extended case-studies, one dealing with the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions, known to us as the longest-running scientific journal but far from secure when it was launched by Robert Hooke. Under pressure from foreign pirates and rival notions of trade-secrecy, it almost disappeared at the end of the 17th century. The other takes us through the publication history of Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s Historia Cœlestis Britannica — the definitive book of star positions for 18th century astronomers, but the subject of a long-running feud between Flamsteed (a classic case of the scientist who always wants to take just one more set of measurements before rushing into print) and his opposite numbers in the Royal Society, Hooke, Newton and Halley. Eventually Halley and Newton forced Flamsteed to allow them to bring out an edition of his observations, but he was so annoyed with the way they and the printer had treated him that he bought up all remaining copies of the 1712 edition and made a ceremonial bonfire of them in Greenwich. The definitive edition prepared according to his own wishes was only completed years later, seen through the press by his widow Margaret.

This is rather too long a book, given that Johns is not the liveliest of writers. Especially in the more theoretical and speculative passages it can be hard to follow his syntax, but there is a huge amount of fascinating detail here on the early days of publishing and intellectual property rights. Worth reading just for the account of the Stationers’ Company and its court and register, really. show less

Johns has an abiding interest in “piracy,” broadly defined. This book, though opening with a violent death in a dispute between pirate radio entrepreneurs in 1966, is really about how intellectual history (featuring Coase and Hayek, who both spent time analyzing British radio in particular) becomes political history. Here, changes in British radio listening practices, aided by cheap transistor radios, changed the social meaning of listening and therefore of broadcasting, opening a path show more for commercial radio. Johns argues that the “moral philosophy of digital libertarianism,” though often associated primarily with 1960s American counterculture, also derives from the politics and history of British radio. The idea of offshore data havens, after all, comes from offshore radio pirates (and indeed physically overlaps—Seahaven was a pirate radio station before it was part of a grand, failed data haven scheme). Johns chronicles not just lawlessness, though the violence isn’t surprising, but also the deep entanglement with the law that these pirates always had—they created corporate structures and called the police because they wanted and even needed to live in a jurisdiction with a functioning government, even as they wanted to escape those constraints as it suited them. This is Johns’ least theory-intensive book, and it sits not quite comfortably between narrative and theory, but I enjoyed it. show less

We think of books as distilled artifacts of knowledge, immutable, capable of speaking across time and space, the same in the US and in France. But that wasn’t always true—books did differ, printing was a move in a larger game rather than a source of independent artifacts that could be removed from their contexts--and Johns tells the story of how books, and printing, came to be understood as a standard of fixation: how they became trustworthy. For example, “the first folio of show more Shakespeare boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with nonuniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging, and irregular proofing. No two copies were identical. It is impossible to decide even that any one is ‘typical.’” Any book could find itself called a “piracy,” because authors and books were part of a struggle for authority. Also challenges the idea that copy-right as initially developed by the Stationers covered only exact copies; Stationers claimed rights against condensed versions, paraphrases, and translations; they even claimed control over entire genres. Stationers and licensers alsohad a complex relationship beforelicensing was abandoned; somelicensors were quite compliant, others didn’t read the books they licensed,and many fell prey to politics for allowing or not allowing certain books through. Long but very interesting, especially given that reliability of print is once again in question now that we have all these revision histories on Wikipedia and so on. show less

All of this has happened before, and if we’re lucky, all of it will happen again. Johns argues that piracy as a concept precedes and structures our definitions of intellectual property, focusing on England and then the U.S. and on copyright and trademark. Intellectual property and piracy debates have always invoked narratives of privacy, autonomy, and accountability.

If it’s happening in IP now, it happened then: There are echoes of Viacom’s shenanigans in planting supposedly show more “unauthorized” content on YouTube in 18th-century authors who occasionally connived to have unaturhoized editions published so as to be able to disavow responsibility for the sentiments expressed but still achieve fame; part of the process was to accuse the publishers of piracy. Also, prepublication copies were leaked by faithless employees, then to Dublin as now to the internet. Then as now, laws required publishers to identify themselves (today, many US states require CD/DVD pressers to identify themselves on the physical copy); then as now, pirates evaded the law.

Continuing on, antipatent agitation in the 19th century was founded in the belief that patents suppressed and distorted innate inventiveness in the masses and ignored the role of the intellectual commons; anti-patent folks also complained about patent trolls who didn’t practice their inventions and asserted their rights opportunistically.

Johns then offers a history of British radio broadcasting in which IP owners wanted to allow only sealed sets with predetermined frequencies; they called unlicensed listeners and listeners using unapproved equipment “pirates.” As with the DMCA, major players argued that experimenters’ licenses and the definition of acceptable experimentation had to be sharply limited so that not just anyone could experiment. In the 1950s, pirate record labels acted like anime fansubbers now, publishing otherwise unavailable jazz recordings in the name of preservation and proselytization, and agreeing to discontinue their activities whenever a licensed copy became available.

Here’s a presentist summary from Johns himself: “the situation confronting early Net users was reminiscent of that facing authors and booksellers in the eighteenth century itself. Claims about the scaredness of authorship and a new age of reason had been loud and legion then too. Pirates had been attacked for offenses that ranged beyond literal theft and impugned credit, fidelity, and authenticity. Practices comparable to what are now termed identity theft or phishing (the imitation of institutions) were rampant. Printed communication was hailed as emancipatory, rational, and enlightened in principle, but in practice seemed riddled with problems…. The reality, extent, and epistemic implications of piratical practices were held up as not only challenges to intellectual property—those those challenges were widely declared to be fundamental—but as threats to the possibility of a rational online public.” show less