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Common Knowledge: Epistemology and the Beginnings of Copyright Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jonathan Scott Enderle
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Abstract

Literary critics' engagement with copyright law has often emphasized ontological questions about the relation between idealized texts and their material embodiments. This essay turns toward a different set of questions—about the role of texts in the communication of knowledge. Developing an alternative intellectual genealogy of copyright law grounded in the eighteenth-century contest between innatism and empiricism, I argue that jurists like William Blackstone and poets like Edward Young drew on Locke's theories of ideas to articulate a new understanding of writing as uncommunicative expression. Innatists understood texts as tools that could enable transparent communication through a shared stock of innate ideas, but by denying the existence of innate ideas empiricists called the possibility of communication into question. And in their arguments for perpetual copyright protection, eighteenth-century jurists and pamphleteers pushed empiricism to its extreme, linking literary and economic value to the least communicative aspects of a text.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 289 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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