Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BE4COPY (Before Copyright: Printing Privileges and the Politics of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-09-01 do 2025-02-28
BE4COPY examines the long-term history of printing privileges from a cross-disciplinary and European perspective. These privileges provided exclusive rights for the production of books and images: they can be considered one of the precursors of what we now call ‘copyrights’. Introduced around 1470, shortly after the invention of the printing press, privileges were abolished around 1789, when new notions of ownership emerged alongside new ideas about political representation. The BE4COPY project studies the changing nature of the printing privilege over the course of these turbulent 300 years. The intimate relationship between legal frameworks and the politics of knowledge is the primary focus of the project. Although numerous studies have examined printing privileges in their local context, there are to date no historical studies that have examined how different European systems of printing privileges were interrelated. BE4COPY will change that and thus contribute to a better understanding of the origins of copyrights as a specific form of shared European heritage. It does so by (1) examining the distribution of printing privileges on a European scale, exposing existing trade routes and political alliances, and (2) rethinking the relationship between legal protection and political interests. How did shifting discourses of expertise and stewardship influence the proprietorship of intellectual creations’ How did the interplay between law, economy, and politics shape the production of knowledge? And how did ‘authorship’ and ‘ownership’ eventually emerge in that context as twin categories? BE4COPY employs an innovative archive-based approach centered around the cross-cutting themes of ‘Censorship and Promotion’, ‘Travelling Ideas and People’, and ‘Authorship and Readership’. The project adds a new layer to our evolving understanding of copyright and opens up new perspectives regarding the question of how knowledge was produced and shared in early modern Europe.
The first phase of the project focused on specific geographical areas: Italy, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. For example, we have added a new Scandinavian section to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), in an attempt to promote cross-disciplinary integration of Scandinavian research on the subject with existing research elsewhere. Another important milestone was the reinterpretation of the role of printing privileges in the Low Countries, resulting in a special issue showing that these legal instruments not only served economic interests but also functioned as instruments of political influence, a perspective that has been underexplored. Such insights help to reshape the narrative of early intellectual property law, broadening its scope beyond economics to include political and social dimensions.
We have learnt much more about the interplay between different printing privilege systems, and also about the political significance of licenses within early forms of intellectual property law. The development of relational database software was also a key part of the first phase, which will help us in the next steps to better uncover relationships between existing systems beyond the state of the art. In the coming years, we will continue to expand the database and foster interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure further uptake. In addition, further funding and partnerships could support extending the scope of the research to other regions or types of privilege, ultimately enhancing the internationalization and long-term impact of the project.