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Includes bibliography (pages 397-426) and index.

Introduction. The history of copyright history : notes from an emerging discipline / Martin Kretschmer, with Lionel Bently and Ronan Deazley -- From gunpowder to print : the common origins of copyright and patent / Joanna Kostylo -- 'A mongrel of early modern copyright' : Scotland in European perspective / Alastair J. Mann -- Public sphere and the emergence of copyright : Areopagitica, the Stationers' Company, and the Statute of Anne / Mark Rose -- Early American printing privileges. The ambivalent origins of authors' copyright in America / Oren Bracha -- Author and work in the French print privileges system : some milestones / Laurent Pfister -- Venetian experiment on perpetual copyright / Maurizio Borghi -- Copyright formalities and the reasons for their decline in nineteenth century Europe / Stef van Gompel -- Berlin publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the reprinting sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794 / Friedemann Kawohl -- Nineteenth century controversies relating to the protection of artistic property in France / Frédéric Rideau -- Maps, views and ornament : visualising property in art and law. The case of pre-modern France / Katie Scott -- Breaking the mould? The radical nature of the Fine Arts Copyright Bill 1862 / Ronan Deazley -- 'Neither bolt nor chain, iron safe nor private watchman, can prevent the theft of words' : the birth of the performing right in Britain / Isabella Alexander -- Return of the commons - copyright history as a common source / Karl-Nikolaus Peifer -- Significance of copyright history for publishing history and historians / John Feather -- Metaphors of intellectual property / William St Clair -- Bibliography -- Index.

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"What can and can't be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership-of privilege and property. This volume conceives a new history of copyright law that has its roots in a wide range of norms and practices. The essays reach back to the very material world of craftsmanship and mechanical inventions of Renaissance Italy where, in 1469, the German master printer Johannes of Speyer obtained a five-year exclusive privilege to print in Venice and its dominions. Along the intellectual journey that follows, we encounter John Milton who, in 1644 accused the English parliament of having been deceived by the 'fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of bookselling' (i.e. the London Stationers' Company). Later revisionary essays investigate the regulation of the printing press in the North American colonies as a provincial and somewhat crude version of European precedents, and how, in the revolutionary France of 1789, the subtle balance that the royal decrees had established between the interests of the author, the bookseller, and the public, was shattered by the abolition of the privilege system. Some of the essays also address the specific evolution of rights associated with the visual and performing arts."--Publisher's website.

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