PRIVILEGES AND MONOPOLIES
The governmental regulations just described were similar to those
imposed upon all trades. The product of the printing press, however, was
not like that of other manufacturing establishments. The use of books is
clearly different from the use of ordinary manufactured products. The
modern printing press puts out a flood of material which is temporary in
its nature. Much of it never gets read at all and comparatively little
of it is considered as of permanent value. The early presses, however,
turned out books almost entirely. Practically the whole product was of
permanent value. It could be easily imitated, and in many cases the
imitation could be produced at much less expense than the original as
the imitation involved no labor of editors and compilers. Again,
communication in those days was very difficult and freight rates were
high. If a book could be reprinted freely by anyone who got hold of it,
a book printed in a given place could be sold much cheaper than one
brought from a distance. For example, a Paris printer could not compete
with a Lyons printer in Lyons provided the latter were permitted to
print the same books as the former.
But there was another far more important difference. The products of the
printing press materially affected the human mind and through it
influenced human action. When men began to read and printed matter began
to be cheap and plenty, the individual in particular and the state at
large entered an entirely new phase of existence. Minds of men might be
filled with information or misinformation, with noble or with base
desires and purposes, with high thoughts or low by the products of the
press. They might be roused to patriotic action or stirred to rebellion.
Their religion might be deepened, altered, or destroyed. Immense and
unimaginable influence might be and, as soon appeared, was exerted by
this new agency.
These facts gave rise to certain problems peculiar to the industry. What
right had the publisher to control his product and be protected against
a ruinous competition from other printers? Had he any such right at all?
Had the author any right to control the printing, publishing, and sale
of his works? Had he any right to be secured in the receipt of some
remuneration? How could that right be protected? Was the printing press
to be allowed to pour out anything its owners pleased, regardless of its
effect upon citizenship, religion, or morals, or should the product be
controlled so as to secure the helping and not the hurting of mankind?
If it was to be controlled, who was to decide upon the measures and
standards of control, and on what ground? What was helpful and what was
harmful?
The attempted solution of these problems, of course, grew out of the
accepted commercial usages of the time. Patents and copyrights as we now
know them, regulated by general laws and accessible to all inventors and
authors, were unknown. Their place was taken by monopolies which, as we
shall see, sometimes had much the same effect as a modern patent or
copyright.
A monopoly, sometimes called a privilege, was a grant to a certain
person of the sole right to sell or to manufacture a certain thing, to
trade in a certain locality, or do something of a similar nature.
Monopolies survive today in certain countries, though mainly as
governmental monopolies; for example, in Italy the sale of matches is a
governmental monopoly. No individual is allowed to sell them except as a
government agent, and the traveler is not allowed to take any across the
frontier, even in his pocket. In Russia the sale of vodka was a
governmental monopoly until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, when
its sale was prohibited. In the middle ages, however, private monopolies
were very common. It is important to know that these monopolies or
privileges were literally what the latter name indicates. Very often
they were given to royal favorites as a means for their personal
enrichment. They were purely acts of grace and did not imply any
recognition of right on the part of the person to whom they were
granted.
Those trades which could not obtain the protection of monopoly attempted
to protect themselves when possible by trade secrets. This was a much
more important protection in those days than it would be now.
Combinations and processes, tricks of the trade which had been
discovered experimentally by some clever workman, could hardly be
discovered by his rivals unless they could hit upon the same thing by a
tedious course of experimentation or could in some way secure betrayal
of the secret. Very few trade secrets can be hidden from modern science,
but modern science did not exist in the fifteenth century. The
apprentice was sworn not to betray his master’s secrets, and the
consequences of such betrayal were very serious. As we have already
seen, Gutenberg at first attempted to keep printing a trade secret, but
the obvious impossibility of doing so led to other methods of
protection.
Fortunately for the new art the great men of the time were interested in
it and, as a rule, it was not difficult to obtain a certain amount of
protection by privilege. Venice was perhaps the most advanced state in
Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century, certainly it was one of
the most advanced. The intelligent business men and astute nobles
trained in public affairs who made up the body of citizens of the
Republic of Venice were not slow in perceiving that a condition had
arisen which must be immediately attended to. The matter was therefore
taken up by the Council of Ten, an executive body which had large
functions in the government of Venice. Their methods of dealing with the
matter may be divided into four heads.
The first was the monopoly under which only one printer was allowed to
work in a given town. Such a monopoly was granted John of Spire who, in
1469, was given the sole privilege of doing printing in Venice.
Fortunately the unwisdom of this particular method of protection was
soon seen and other printers were allowed in Venice.
The next was a form of privilege something like the modern copyright.
Under this a publisher or even an author was granted the sole right to
print or cause to be printed a certain book. The first one of these
copyrights was issued to Antonio Sabellico in 1486. Sabellico was the
official historian of Venice and the copyright covered his history.
Unlike modern copyrights, which cover but a single book, these
privileges might cover anything that an author had written or might
write. It is clear that such a blanket copyright in the hands of a
publisher might be used very injuriously, and there is evidence that
they were so used either to extort money or to impede publication. It is
probable that in many cases this form of privilege involved some
arrangement between the author and the printer whereby the author shared
the profits.
Copyright privileges ran from one to twenty-five years and were
sometimes extended. Not infrequently copyright privileges were issued
with limiting clauses or conditions, such as that the books should be
sold at a “fair price,” that the work copyrighted should be published
within a year, or that a certain number of copies should be printed per
week, and the like.
The third method of protection was by a privilege like a modern patent,
covering certain processes or certain kinds of printing. For example:
Aldus was granted the sole right to use the italic character, while
others were given the sole right of printing in some foreign language.
The fourth method was the absolute prohibition of the importation of
books printed outside the territories of the Republic. This was coupled
with the refusal of copyright privileges to all books not printed in
Venice. Of course, in this whole discussion we must understand that
Venice was not the modern city, but the medieval state, which at times
was of considerable extent.
This system had certain rather serious defects in practice. In the first
place the Council of Ten which issued all these privileges, although
usually an extremely businesslike body, kept no record of its relations
with printers. Probably this was not a serious matter for the first few
years, but the time soon came when no member of the Council could
remember what privileges had been granted either to printers or authors.
Consequently privileges were very liable to duplication and the Council
finally got out of the difficulty by issuing its copyrights with the
proviso “If no previous copyright has been issued.” This was very
comfortable for the Council, but rather uncomfortable for the printer,
because it threw upon him the burden of finding out facts which were
nowhere on record. Again, there was no machinery for the enforcement of
the privileges. While it is probable that legal proceedings could be
instituted under them, some other machinery ought to have been provided
to make them effective. Lastly, and this was, as we shall see, a common
difficulty with all early privileges, they were very narrow in
application. Privileges applied only to the territory of Venice and were
worthless elsewhere. As we have seen in the case of Aldus, the products
of the Venetian press were sold throughout the civilized world, but
outside of their place of production they were unprotected by any
copyright or other defence. In some cases they were excluded by
protective laws similar to those by which Venice attempted to secure her
printers from foreign competition. At a somewhat later period some
difficulty arose because of the claims of the Papal Court to issue
privileges outside of the States of the Church. On the whole, however,
the Venetian system was about the best and the simplest of the early
systems for dealing with the problems of the printing press.
Turning next to Germany, we find that practically all of the books
printed from 1450 to 1500 were reprints of old books. The literary
pirate made his appearance almost as soon as the printer appeared. We
have already seen that Fust himself was the first of the brood. The fact
is not surprising, however, when we remember the conditions of the time.
The idea of property in a book excepting as one particular object, a
piece of furniture so to speak, never occurred to anybody. Throughout
the entire period of manuscript books it was everywhere held that any
man who had possession of a book, even temporarily, had a right to copy
it. That the owner of the book had any right to control its duplication,
even though he had been at great expense to make a copy, was not
considered worth discussion. If a man could copy a manuscript which had
cost a hundred crowns to make, might he not reprint a book which cost
less than one tenth of that amount? It was held that ownership of a
printed book carried with it the same rights of reproduction which had
from time immemorial been attached to ownership of a written book.
Men who wrote books wrote for the love of it. There was no such thing as
authorship as a profession and no such thing as the sale of an author’s
work, except so far as the books themselves were concerned. It is true
that certain writers were helped and perhaps supported by wealthy
patrons of literature in the old world or by rich men and politicians
who were willing to pay for verses or pamphlets eulogizing their names
and praising their exploits. Doubtless, there were writers who lived by
their wits in this way, but their case was far different from that of
the modern author who either sells his work to a publisher or makes a
contract for a royalty. If a man was paid for writing a poem in praise
of his patron neither he nor his patron was supposed to control the
poem; in a word, there was no conception of any kind of literary
property, and the printers soon found that there must be property in
books or printing would become impossible.
Germany, like Venice, undertook to deal with the matter by the privilege
system, although German privileges seem to have been less varied and
more simple than those of the Venetians and to have concerned themselves
more exclusively with the printer, to the neglect of the author. As
elsewhere, a privilege was the sole right to print a work or a series of
works in a given place. The peculiar political condition which existed
in Germany made this a rather difficult matter. Germany in the fifteenth
century consisted geographically of what is now the Empire of Germany,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. It was
composed of a great number of states of very different sizes, from a
single city up to a reasonably large country. Each one of these cities
had a large degree of self government. They were all supposed to be
governed by the emperor. He was called the Holy Roman Emperor and was
supposed to be the heir of the old emperors of Rome. He governed largely
through assemblages of the princes, called Diets, which were held
wherever and whenever the emperor called them. There were also certain
imperial courts and governing councils. All this elaborate scheme of
government existed largely on paper. It was not generally strong enough
to govern effectively, but was generally strong enough to keep things
more or less in confusion.
The power of the emperor depended to a considerable extent upon his
personal character and his private resources. An emperor who happened to
be a strong man, governing a powerful state in the empire from which he
could draw money and military support, could hold the states, which were
liable to be extremely unruly, in their places and could collect the
imperial revenue. A man of weaker personality or without the backing of
such private resources could neither keep the turbulent princes in order
nor collect the revenue.
The local princes had no sooner begun to issue privileges than the
emperor began to do the same thing. A local privilege was not good
beyond the limits of the small state which issued it. An imperial
privilege was theoretically good throughout the empire, but practically
good only in spots. If it conflicted with a local privilege, or the
local authority happened to be on bad terms with the emperor it would be
worthless. The result of all of this was that at a very early period the
printers of Germany got together and made a sort of “gentleman’s
agreement,” as we say today, to respect each other’s undertakings. This
agreement was practically the best protection of the German book trade
until the development of copyright laws at a very much later period. It
appears to have been relied upon by the printers more than was the
privilege. Privileges were often obtained, partly because it was
desirable to keep on good terms with the local authorities and partly
because of the relation of privilege to censorship, which we shall
discuss later, but it is clear that printing in Germany would have
suffered greatly if it had not been for the existence of the “live and
let live” agreement of the German printers.
Printers’ privileges covered only old books. New books unless covered by
some author’s privilege were not covered at all, presumably on the
ground that in those days, before author’s rights to compensation were
fully recognized, the expense and risk of producing the classics for a
comparatively small market was greater than that of printing new books,
especially as many of the new books were controversial and the authors
paid the printers. Until about 1800 the printer was a much more
important personage in legislation than the author. There was
practically very little protection of literary rights of authors
excepting what came through privileges, and the printer’s privileges
were considered much more important than the author’s rights. Privileges
covered:
(a) Public documents, including church books and school books.
(b) The first printing of books from the body of the world’s literature.
(c) New books which were first treatments of some specific subject,
generally scientific, technical, or practical.
The granting of a privilege often carried with it exemption from
taxation.
Conditions in France were not greatly different from those in Italy and
Germany, although France dealt with the problem by means of privileges
only and had her problem somewhat simplified by unified administration
over a large territory. The first privilege to be issued in France was
granted Antoine Verrard in 1507 for an edition of the Epistles of Paul
with a French commentary. French privileges were sometimes issued to
printers for a single work and sometimes for all the works which they
might print. They ran from two to ten years. They might be general,
covering the whole kingdom, or they might be local, covering a single
province or district. For example, one might have the exclusive
privilege of printing certain books or the books of a certain author for
ten years, or another might have the privilege of printing anything of a
certain sort in the city of Lyons for five years.
It is understood, of course, that a privilege implied prohibition. If a
man had a privilege for the works of an author throughout France that
meant that no one else in France could print the same books. If he had
the privilege for all that he wanted to print in Lyons it meant that
nobody else in Lyons could print those books, although anybody outside
of Lyons could print them freely. The French law contained one provision
which does not appear elsewhere, namely that licenses could be revoked
before they expired. They were occasionally issued to persons not
residents of France, another provision which appears to have been
peculiar to the French law. A third peculiarity is that privileges were
occasionally given to authors for the control of their works, but
without the right to print them or to sell them. In such a case as that
the printer would have to get another privilege to print and sell the
books. He would have to pay the author for the right to do so. The
question of privilege in France, like the question of censorship, which
we shall soon take up, was greatly complicated by the multiplication of
authorities and consequent conflict and confusion. Privileges might be
issued by the king, by the Parliament of Paris (a misleading name, as
the Parliament of Paris was a judicial and not a legislative body), by
the University of Paris, and by the Provost of Paris. The tendency in
all things French, however, from early in the 15th century to the French
Revolution was toward the concentration of power, so that the right to
issue privileges was gradually concentrated in the hands of the king.