The Piratical Enlightenment
The Piratical Enlightenment
This chapter shows how eighteenth-century German states, as net importers of intellectual property, found that piracy—the free reproduction of books first published by others—could support the Enlightenment ideal of free and open access to knowledge. However, the ensuing debate about the comparative value of a restricted copyright (the English system) and liberal reprinting (German piracy) not only implicates the mediation of Enlightenment (where piracy offers robust circulation of knowledge) but also bears upon what became the most important positive rational for seeing writing as an expression of the self: the idea that the writer is a genius, whose distinct form of thought emerges from a unique self. Ownership in the form of copyright became the primary way of instituting this connection between writing and genius.
Keywords: German states, intellectual property, piracy, knowledge access, copyright, mediation, self, writing, genius
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
