Enderle, Jonathan Scott2023-05-222023-05-222016-03-012016-08-18https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/38508Literary critics’ engagement with copyright law has often emphasized ontological questions about the relation between idealized texts and their material embodiments. This essay turns toward a different set of questions—about the role of texts in the communication of knowledge. Developing an alternative intellectual genealogy of copyright law grounded in the eighteenth-century contest between innatism and empiricism, I argue that jurists like William Blackstone and poets like Edward Young drew on Locke’s theories of ideas to articulate a new understanding of writing as uncommunicative expression. Innatists understood texts as tools that could enable transparent communication through a shared stock of innate ideas, but by denying the existence of innate ideas empiricists called the possibility of communication into question. And in their arguments for perpetual copyright protection, eighteenth-century jurists and pamphleteers pushed empiricism to its extreme, linking literary and economic value to the least communicative aspects of a text.flash_audioEnglish literature1600-1699Seventeenth CenturyLockeJohn (1632-1704)Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690)knowledgeideaepistemologycopyright lawCambridge PlatonistsYoungEdward (1683-1765)Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)BlackstoneSir William (1723-1780)1700-1799Eighteenth CenturyEnglish Language and LiteratureEpistemologyHistory of PhilosophyIntellectual HistoryIntellectual Property LawLaw and PhilosophyLegal HistoryLiterature in English, British IslesArticle