Convert creativity into property and the booksellers (and behind them the authors) will set up the necessary mechanisms to control production and distribution. And British publishers, as Orwell disgustedly discovered (when he vainly tried to get them to accept Animal Farm), are by nature "gutless". you have purchased them, in their material form, from the newsagent. Repeat a substantial part of this article in print, and I can sue you for infringement of my rights; Xerox them and - if I am incredibly small-minded - I can still act against you What then do I own? The arrangement of those words. They can be sold a million times (in your dreams, Sutherland); I still own them.Copyright was, for the authorities, a beautiful legal instrument.
Copyright, the most elegant of laws, was devised with the Queen Anne copyright Act of 1710. The basic idea of copyright requires an intellectual leap - the notion of "immaterial property". The copyright in the words I am currently writing, though you buy them for less than pounds 1 under the auspices of The Independent belong to me - even after 1 The Independent has paid me for them, 2. It facilitated the circulation of subversive, blasphemous and pornographic materials - all of which corroded the moral foundations of society and its hierarchies.Unlike dirigiste France, Britain quickly realised that the control of the printed word was best achieved by a network of quasi-legal controls, working in a semi-autonomous way.
It was a potent instrument of mass education, and a literate population (particularly a self-taught population) is difficult to keep in line. If you want to test the continuing strength of the Hansard monopoly, go into the visitors' gallery at Westminster with a pencil and note pad. You'll be shaken down quicker than a Yemeni going through airport X-ray security with an Uzi in his underpants.The printing press was dangerous for the state in a number of ways. It allowed the dissemination, on an unprecedentedly massive scale, of dissident ideas It invaded the state's monopoly of "intelligence". The great university presses, Oxford and Cambridge, established their half-millennial cultural dominance with the Bible privilege.
