CONCEPT
The Genius and the Copyright
Martha Woodmansee's demonstration that the concept of original genius was not a discovery about the nature of creativity but an economic strategy—invented in the late eighteenth century to justify property rights for writers in a marketplace that had replaced the patronage system.
The genius and the copyright are, in
Martha Woodmansee's account, two faces of the same invention. The genius is the philosophical concept; the copyright is the legal mechanism; and both were constructed together, in the same decades, under the same economic pressure, by people who understood—or half-understood—that one required the other. When the patronage system collapsed in late-eighteenth-century Germany and writers had to sell their work to publishers and readers in a commercial market, they needed property rights to protect their texts from piracy. The existing law had no framework for this, because text had never been understood as property in the relevant sense. The solution was to argue that a text was uniquely the expression of its author's individual mind—that no one else could have written exactly this, because no one else was exactly this person—and therefore that copying it without permission was not merely theft of a commodity but