The Intellectual Properties of Learning by John Willinsky — inventing copyright

Intellectual property is central to commercial and cultural life in the digital era. The notion that ideas create and hold value, and that the originators of those ideas should be able to profit from them, has enabled many individuals and companies to gain great wealth. But the web has also encouraged piracy on an unprecedented scale, posing a contemporary challenge: how much should we recognise that knowledge advances through individuals being able to utilise the work of others, and how much should we protect the originators of that work?

This issue is not new. In the 18th century, the “knowledge economy” of the early Enlightenment was managed through a series of legal measures in Britain, beginning with the Copyright Act of 1710. Forged in part from the ideas of John Locke and intended “for the encouragement of learning”, the act introduced concepts such as the limited duration of copyright, balancing access to knowledge on the one hand and the protection of rights on the other.

In The Intellectual Properties of Learning, John Willinsky goes in search of the origins of these ideas. A professor of education at Stanford University, Willinsky is also a leading figure in the Open Access movement, which promotes the publishing of research papers in forms that are freely available to the public. Bringing historical insights to bear on a modern debate, he finds the impulse to assert intellectual and moral ownership of texts in cultures of learning going back as far as the 4th century to St Jerome and St Augustine.

Willinsky’s account takes us from the practices of monastic scriptoria to the early commercial copyists, organised by stationers, who pioneered forms of commercial publishing surrounding the Universities of Paris and Oxford in the 13th and 14th centuries. We learn about the parallel practices of Arabic scholars and scribes in European centres such as Spain as well as in north Africa and the Middle East — an important reminder that IP has always been a global phenomenon. Moving on to the age of print, Willinsky then highlights the disruptive influence of new technologies that speeded up the reproduction of texts and in the process made piracy much easier.

Willinsky is at his most compelling on the early modern era. In England, the growth of printing and publishing industries out of the medieval guild known as the Company of Stationers went hand in hand with the expansion of English, Scottish and Irish universities and their respective libraries. The private arrangement between the Bodleian Library and the Company began the practice of free deposit of publications in these libraries and a handful of others, and was enshrined in the Copyright Act of 1710 and subsequent legislation.

Here Willinsky could have brought the reader up to date by looking at legislation from 2013 that extended this 400-year-old practice into the realms of digital publishing and web archiving. The rapidity of innovation and development in digital publishing, both in terms of business models and technology, will mean that laws governing intellectual property dealings will inevitably have to be updated much more frequently than was necessary in the era of print.

In the final pages, Willinsky focuses on the principles of the 1710 Copyright Act, outlining forcefully his central thesis about the close connection between the dissemination of scholarship and intellectual property in its modern sense. The 1710 Act brought centuries of development to a neat conclusion, supporting learning through investing copyright privileges and protection especially to learned authors, governing fair and affordable pricing, allowing free trade in learned books between nations, and making the notion of the preservation of learning (through libraries) both affordable and state-sponsored. These principles became widely adopted across the globe, even finding their way into the US constitution. The current concepts of IP derive from this long gestation of practice, custom and law.

The problem today, Willinsky argues, is that IP in the digital era has been separated from the idea of “encouraging learning”, to the ultimate detriment of society. He ends his book with a call to bring digital technology to the aid of disseminating scholarship more openly. Locke would surely be cheering him on.

The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke, by John Willinsky, The University of Chicago Press, RRP£30/$40, 400 pages

Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and president of the Digital Preservation Coalition

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