For Digital Images and
Further Information Contact:
Martha Chiplis
The Caxton Club
312-467-6486
martha@sherwinbeach.com
Heather Malec
The Newberry Library
312-255-3553
malech@newberry.org
(CHICAGO, February 19 , 2006) -- Join the Caxton Club and the Newberry Library for a one-day symposium, The Past and Future of Intellectual Property, on Saturday April 1, 2006, to explore historical and philosophical alternatives to the present system of copyright as we move into the 21st century.
The program will be held at the Newberry Library and will bring together four distinguished scholars of history, literature, communications, and law to Chicago for an intensive day of informal talks and discussions with a broad public audience. Intellectual property includes not only printed and manuscript texts but also music and other artistic works, electronic publications, and cultural properties.
Junie Sinson, president of the Caxton Club, explained, "In planning this symposium, we were interested in providing a scholarly forum for Chicagoans and students of the history of the book. We also wanted to provide a contemporary forum for talking about William Caxton, the first printer in English, and the issues that occupied him as a man involved in every aspect of a book's production."
On the occasion of the symposium, the Newberry will also display some copyright-related treasures from its collections. From March 15 to April 22, the general public can view works that exemplify intellectual property issues as they were confronted by such disparate individuals as Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius, painter/poet William Blake, author Mark Twain, and Chicago designer Oswald "Oz" Cooper.
The program is free and open to the public, however, seating is limited and advanced registration is required. Registration forms are available at www.caxtonclub.org or call the Caxton Club at (312) 255-3710 for more information.
The Issues
Public debates on intellectual property in the United States tend to center upon celebrities or else on disputes over lucrative new media. These hot-button cases and the mass media forums in which they are usually aired have resulted in discussions that are incomplete, conceptually naïve, or narrowly legal in focus.
Meanwhile, scholars in several humanities fields have been exploring alternative concepts of intellectual property drawn from British, European, and American literary and art history, anthropology, non-Western philosophy and law, and literature.
The 2006 Symposium will showcase some of these perspectives based on the best and most exciting new humanities scholarship, bringing them to a broad general audience of professionals in fields directly or indirectly related to the present legal debates.
As Paul Gehl, the Newberry's Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, put it, "The public hears the same old things about copyright every time a new court decision comes down. We want to give both the lawyers and the non-professionals some new ways of framing the debate."
Speakers and Topics
The Past and Future of Intellectual Property will explore alternative notions of intellectual property within our own Anglo-American tradition, not in copyright case law, but in the history of authorship before copyright laws. Speakers will then explore some more recent historical situations that offer still other perspectives. The program will conclude with a look to the future.
Joseph Loewenstein of Washington University will start the discussion with a review of pre-copyright ideas of authorship in England. Before the copyright laws of the early eighteenth century, the largest intellectual property issues concerned the nature of authorship and the subordinate relationship of the author to the copyholder, typically a publisher. The new technology of printing promoted change, but ancient privileges channeled new ideas into well-worn paths. Within the constraints of such a system, authors often risked something akin to modern identity theft. Lowenstein will offer as examples a variety of cases from the early seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Examples such as the plays Hamlet and Martin Guerre and The Red Cross Knight; as well as the films North by Northwest, Runaway Bride, and His Girl Friday show the persistence of the problems and the modern relevance of pre-copyright ideas.
James Caudle of Yale University will continue our consideration of the British antecedents of modern copyright. The English authors of the eighteenth century, newly endowed with property rights in their textual productions, vigorously debated copyright and related issues and frequently took their publishers (and each other) to law. The issues included the proper duration of copyright; its origin in natural, common, or statute law; the question of property rights in unpublished works, and the proper role of the government in the censorship of printed matter. These issues are still debated in recent case law, largely because the writers and jurists of the Enlightenment placed them at the center of notions of intellectual property embodied in all subsequent legislation.
Martha Woodmansee, who holds a joint appointment in the history department and the law school of Case Western Reserve University, will conclude the historical portion of the program. As the nineteenth century progressed, America increasingly entered the world economy and Americans frequently found themselves at odds with British and Continental culture brokers. Translations, piracy, and reprinting all entered into a complex history on both sides of the Atlantic that led to the forging of international conventions on intellectual property. At the same time, Anglo-American law increasingly came to depend on notions of authorship that derive from Romantic literary ideals of the author as creator. More recently, copyright and other kinds of intellectual property rights have merged in law and public perception as well. Woodmansee would like to recover some of the more communal impulses from the period of copyright's origin in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that may serve as models as well as inspiration in our effort to rethink and adapt this system to a post-colonial, global world. This is a particularly urgent task in an age in which creative production and distribution increasingly take fluid, digital form.
Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University will present some of his controversial new work on the future of copyright at the end of the morning. As "information economies" grow in importance in all corners of the world, the United States and Western Europe are striving to standardize the laws, technologies, and practices of information distribution in such a way as to lock in their early competitive advantages. As such, they are promulgating a form of "electronic cultural policy." There are two competing streams of resistance to this standardization effort: the inchoate yet liberally informed "Free Culture Movement" and the more established albeit politically marginalized "Native Culture Movement." The battle comes down to corporatism vs. liberalism vs. multiculturalism. Professor Vaidhyanathan will examine the points of friction among these three movements and outline some ways of reaching common ground.
Places and Times
The morning session will begin at 9 am in the Ruggles Hall of the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton Street, Chicago. The afternoon session will be held at The Fortnightly Club, 120 E. Bellevue Place, Chicago. There will be a reception after the conclusion of the panel presentation with hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar.
About the Caxton Club
The Caxton Club of Chicago was founded in 1895 by fifteen Chicago bibliophiles whose intent was "the literary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books." Named in honor of the first English printer, William Caxton, The Club has more than 300 members including collectors, librarians, authors, scholars, binders, conservators, dealers, designers, editors, and publishers. Dinner programs are held the third Wednesday of each month and lunch programs are held the last Friday of each month.
The 2006 Symposium on the Book is supported with a generous gift from Bell, Boyd & Lloyd LLC, and the contributions of the members of the Caxton Club. For more information call (312) 255-3710 or contact the Club at caxtonclub@newberry.org.
About the Newberry Library
The Newberry Library is an independent library open to the public for research and reference in the humanities. One of the largest independent research libraries in the United States, the Newberry holds an extraordinary collection of more than 1.5 million books, 5 million manuscript pages and 300 thousand historic maps. As one of the world's leading repositories of a broad range of books and manuscripts relating to the civilizations of western Europe and the Americas, the Library's mission is to acquire and preserve research collections of such materials, and to provide for and promote their effective use by a diverse community of users. Visit the Newberry online at www.newberry.org.