CHAPTER IIPrivileges 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 religionmight 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, privatemonopolies 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 ofcopyright 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 beproperty 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.

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 peculiarto 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.

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