Craft gift idea teacher

The concept of intellectual property -- the idea that an idea can be owned - is a child of the European Enlightenment. It was only when people began to believe that knowledge came from the human mind working upon the senses - rather than through divine revelation, assisted by the study of ancient texts - that it became possible to imagine humans as creators, and hence owners, of new ideas rather than as mere transmitters of eternal verities.

Besides being distinctively modern, intellectual property is a dense concept, woven together from at least three complex strands of jurisprudence - copyright, patent, and trademark - each with its own sources in premodern custom and law, and each with its own trajectory into our own era.

Still, copyright, and the complementary concepts of authors' rights and literary property in continental law - the focus of this essay - are at the core of the modern concept of intellectual property. It was here in the eighteenth century that the language of "ideas" and "property" first came into contact with one another, and first forged a legal bond. And it was here, too, that the very idea of a property right in ideas was most sharply contested - at the outset, and to the present day.

"From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing...." Thus begins Hesiod's Theogony, and many other texts of the ancient Greek world. The poet spoke the words of the gods, not his own creations. Knowledge, and the ability to make it manifest to man, was assumed to be a gift, given by the muses to the poet. Alternatively, Plato thought that all ideas were held from birth in the mind, where they had transmigrated from earlier souls. Ancient Greeks did not think of knowledge as something that could be owned or sold. A scribe could be paid fees for his labor, an author awarded prizes for his achievement, but the gift of the gods was freely given. And thus the libraries of the ancient academies were not sold, but were instead transmitted as gifts to the teacher's most worthy successor. Socrates held the Sophists in contempt for charging fees for their learning.

A tour of the other great civilizations of the premodern world - Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian - reveals a striking absence of any notion of human ownership of ideas or their expressions. In the Lun-Yii, or Analects, compiled in China in the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Confucius is recorded as saying, "I transmit rather than create; I believe in and love the Ancients." The measure of the greatness of a Chinese scholar was not to be found in innovation, but rather in his ability to render or interpret the wisdom of the ancients, and ultimately God, more fully and faithfully than his fellows. Wisdom came from the past, and the task of the learned was to unearth, preserve, and transmit it. Confucian thought despised commerce and thus also writing for profit; authors practiced their craft for the moral improvement of themselves and others. Reputation, and especially the esteem of future generations, was its own reward, even if it might, incidentally, bestow the worldly gifts of patrons upon its bearer.'

This is not to suggest that there was no commerce in books in China. In the land that invented movable type, a book trade flourished as early as the eleventh century. Still, Chinese authors had no property right to their published words. The contents of books could not be owned. Not even the particular expressions an author might employ could be claimed as his. Chinese characters were thought to have come from nature, and no human being could make a claim upon them that would exclude their usage by others. Only the paltry vessel - the paper and ink of a manuscript or a printed book that bore the ideas and expressions - could be bought or sold.2

Throughout the Islamic lands, too, there was no concept of intellectual property for many hundreds of years. All knowledge was thought to come from God. The Koran was the single great scripture from which all other knowledge was derived. A text that embodied the word of Allah, it belonged to no one. There were guardians of its true meaning, to be sure - the great Imams who formed schools at the sites of the most important temples. But the principle means of transmitting Koranic knowledge was oral recitation - from teacher to student, in an unbroken lineage from Muhammad himself to his disciples, and from these chosen few forward through the generations. The word "Koran" itself means "recitation," and oral transmission of the living word was always to be preferred over a written transcription. The book was merely an instrument, a lowly tool, to facilitate faithful memorization of the word, and manuscripts were continuously checked and rechecked against oral memory to ensure their accuracy and the authority of their lineage. The Islamic belief that oral recitation, rather than written transcription, best preserved the word of God and kept it pure across the generations meant that the technology of printing was very slow to penetrate into Islamic lands, and it was only widely adopted throughout the Middle East with the advent of the mass newspaper press in the nineteenth century.3

To be sure, a certain notion of legal "authorship" did emerge from Islamic scribal practices. But a concept of intellectual property did not. Shara `a law against "imposture" or "fraud" was used to prevent the unauthorized appropriation of the reputation or authority of a great teacher through false attribution of written texts.4 But the teacher did not own the ideas expressed within his books. A thief who stole a book was thus not subject to the punishment for

theft - the amputation of his hand. Islamic law held that he had not intended to steal the book as paper and ink, but the ideas in the book - and unlike the paper and ink, these ideas were not tangible property.5

The Judeo-Christian tradition elaborated a similar view of knowledge. Moses received the law from Yahweh and freely transmitted it to the people chosen to hear it. And the New Testament sanctified the idea of knowledge as a gift from God in the passage of the Book of Matthew in which Jesus exhorts his disciples, "Freely ye have received, freely give" (io:8). Medieval theologians interpolated this passage into the canon law doctrine "Scientia Donum Dei Est, Unde Vendi Non Potest" (Knowledge is a gift from God, consequently it cannot be sold).

Selling something that belonged to God constituted the sin of simony. University professors, lawyers, judges, and medical doctors were thus admonished not to charge fees for their services, although they might receive gifts in gratitude for the wisdom they imparted.6

Indeed, the language of gift-giving permeated all forms of knowledge exchange in the premodern period, and nowhere more so than in the dedicatory prefaces to books through which authors sought patronage in recompense for the symbolic offering of their works. Thus, even as books were increasingly bought and sold after the advent of print in Europe in the fifteenth century, and even as writers began to sell their manuscripts to printers for a profit, there remained a dimension of the book, its spiritual legacy, that lay beyond the grasp of market relations.7 The author might lay claim to the manuscript he created, and the printer to the book he printed, but neither could claim to possess the contents that lay within it. The Renaissance elevated the poet, the inventor, and the artist to unprecedented social heights, but their ,genius" was still understood to be divinely inspired rather than a mere product of their mental skills or worldly labors.

In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther could thus preach confidently in his Warning to Printers, "Freely have I received, freely I have given, and I want nothing in return." Well into the eighteenth century the idea of the writer as God's handmaiden held sway. Alexander Pope, in 1711, still conceived of the poet as a reproducer of traditional truths rather than an inventor of new ones, and Goethe could write fairly of the German poets of the early eighteenth century that "the production of poetical works was looked upon as something sacred. It was considered almost simony to accept or to bargain for payment of them."

This theologically informed moral revulsion to the idea of an individual profit motive in the creation and transmission of ideas continued to circulate in the United States well into the nineteenth century. Francis Wayland, the president of Brown University in the 183os, wrote in his college textbook The Elements of Moral Science that "genius was given not for the benefit of the possessor, but for the benefit of others." 8 And an intellectual of no less stature than George Bancroft added a Hegelian twist to the Christian tradition, writing in 1855 that: