Privilege and Property Essays on the History of Copyright

Copyright history had been the subject of intense and sustained study during several periods in the past, in the sense that there was a common set of questions, a community of scholars who read and responded to each other’s concerns, and an audience to which this history mattered. Between around 1740 and 1790 copyright history was elevated to an academic sub-discipline under this (sociological) definition in at least Britain, France and the German-speaking countries. William Blackstone (1723-1780), Denis Diderot (1712-1784) and Johann Stephan Pütter (1725-1807) all searched in different ways for the historical sources of a law prescribing norms of copying. Copyright history is also present in virtually every nineteenth-century jurisprudential treatment of literary property, author’s rights, publisher’s rights or copyright law