Abstract
Recent work on the history of authorship has looked to the development of copyright law for confirmation of the simultaneous emergence of the property-owning author and the development of a market for literary works.' A central premise of this scholarship has been that changes in the law and in the marketplace were reciprocal and mutually enabling. Mark Rose in particular has argued that the modem concept of the author as proprietor finds its origin within the domain of law-specifically, in the eighteenth-century British struggle over interpretation of the Statute of Anne (1710)-and that the law of copyright, in turn, facilitated the development of authorship as a market phenomenon. For Rose, it is the legal elaboration of the Lockean notion that an author, like any other workman, has a natural right to the product of his labor that enables both the text and authorship itself to become assimilated into the world of ordinary commodities. However accurate Rose's analysis may be to the terms and conditions of British authorship,2 his claims cannot easily be translated into the American context without misrepresenting the historical origins and cultural consequences of American copyright law. At the simplest level, to suggest that American law inherits and perpetuates a British concern with individual property rights in texts is to assume a false continuity between these legal traditions. As I will argue below, the landmark American copyright case Wheaton v. Peters (1834) self-consciously restages the British debate over literary property, reformulates its terms, and rejects both common-law copyright and the Lockean argument that undergirds it. Rather than confirming the author as the owner of a text that was clearly defined as a commodity,
Published Version
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