Manchurian Books

Shakespeare's work was published by notorious pirates and
infringers of emerging intellectual property rights. Later,
the American colonies became the world's centre of
industrialized and systematic book piracy. Confronted with
abundant and cheap pirated foreign books, local authors
resorted to freelancing in magazines and lecture tours in a
vain effort to make ends meet.
Pirates and unlicenced - and, therefore, subversive -
publishers were prosecuted under a variety of monopoly and
libel laws (and, later, under national security and obscenity
laws). There was little or no difference between royal and
"democratic" governments. They all acted ruthlessly to
preserve their control of publishing. John Milton wrote his
passionate plea against censorship, Areopagitica, in response
to the 1643 licencing ordinance passed by Parliament. The
revolutionary Copyright Act of 1709 in England established the
rights of authors and publishers to reap the commercial fruits
of their endeavours exclusively, though only for a prescribed
period of time.
V.


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