So "intellectual property" closely connected to the printed word?
Peter Kosenko
---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- From: John Mage <jmage at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Fri, 18 May 2001 15:25:50 -0400
>Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>>When did the term, intellectual property, first appear?
>
>In the fundamental case in the law of copyright, _Donaldson v. Beckett_
>in the House of Lords in 1774, Justice Ashurst (arguing for common-law
>copyright, which the House of Lords disallowed), according to the report
>in Cobbett some 40 years later, came within a hairsbreadth of putting
>the words together:
>
>"Making an author's intellectual ideas common, was, he observed, giving
>the purchaser an opportunity of using those ideas, and profiting by
>them, while they instructed and entertained him; but he could not
>conceive that the vender, for the price of 5s., sold the purchaser a
>right to multiply copies, and so get 500£. Literary property was to be
>defined and described as well as other matters, and matters which were
>tangible. Every thing was property that was capable of being known or
>defined, capable of a separate enjoyment, and of value to the owner.
>Literary property fell within the terms of this definition."
>
>17 Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. at 1002.
>
>john mage
>