LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 22:9 September 2022
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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From Auctor to Author: Evolution of the Idea of Authorship Through
Legal and Cultural Discourse

Dr. Satveer Singh

Abstract

This paper examines the ideas of authorship and copyright as they developed through the complex discursive traffic of forensic and literary arguments during the 18th century in England. It carries out a brief survey of few legal cases which played a critical role in determining the nature of the ideas of literary property, authorship, and copyright. The original transcripts of these courtroom trials are not readily accessible. My work, therefore, is based on the fragments of textual evidence incorporated in the work of authors who have discussed these ideas in wide detail and made it possible, through their labor and shrewd understanding of legal provisions, for people like me to develop a working understanding of the concept of authorship.

Keywords: Authorship, Copyright, Censorship in 17th and 18th Century England.

Introduction

From the perspective of legal and cultural rationality, each of the legal cases discussed in this paper represent a kind of threshold, a scandal, in the positive and constitutive sense of that term. These scandals, or “stumbling blocks” are responsible for intense and impassioned self-reflexivity. Susan Stewart in her remarkably erudite work, Crimes of Writing, argues that the laws of copyright were in fact products of these legal scandals. “It is not so much as the ballad scandals of eighteenth century were the products of rules regarding forgery, authenticity, plagiarism and originality as that the ballad scandals helped produce such rules” (Stewart: 103). Terry Eagleton also affirms this positive implication of the term scandal: “that which the builder has rejected as skandalon or stumbling block will become the cornerstone” (Eagleton: 288).

I would like to begin with a brief discussion of the idea of copyright. What is copyright and what are its many possible applications and implications? Mark Rose describes copyright as “‘the practice of securing marketable rights in texts that are treated as commodities’” (Rose: 3). The definition has the advantage of being simple, yet it is this very simplicity that inveigles us into the trap of believing that there is nothing problematic about the concept of copyright.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. Satveer Singh
Assistant Professor (English)
NIT Raipur
Veer.rj18@gmail.com
Ssingh.hss@nitrr.ac.in
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