Content area
Full Text
Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. By Mark Rose * Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. x + 176 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.50. ISBN 0-674-05308-7.
Reviewed by Jane Gaines
One way of reading this book is as science fiction. As a look into the world of British book publishing before the advent of copyright law as we know it today, Mark Rose's study forces us to imagine the book market without authors in a time when it was considered "ungentlemanlike" for writers to publish their works. Most interesting of all, the book invites the reader to consider the eighteenth century as a period when the book trade was not based on an idea of property in the authorial work but was subject to regulation with no reliance whatsoever on an author's claim. In the debates following the 1710 Statute of Anne, authorial property emerges as a new idea, an unfamiliar concept that has to be tested, argued, and analogized.
I say science fiction because this significant history is a start toward defamiliarizing ourselves with Anglo-American copyright as we have known it for three hundred years, a distancing in preparation for the technological future to which Rose alludes at the end of his book. In an abrupt but effective tone and voice change in the last paragraphs he asks: "But will this unstable, problematic, often deeply frustrating institution continue to exist?" That institution, he...