Customary Norms

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-142
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Enforcement Mechanisms ◽  
The Right ◽  
Property Regime ◽  
Potential Origin

Analyzing twenty-two examples of fan fiction, Chapter 3 uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production and dissemination of these works. After defining customary norms as an alternative to formal law and briefly accounting for their potential origin, this chapter analyzes each norm in detail. In all, five rules, or customary norms, governed the production of fan fiction in the eighteenth century. Together, they amounted to a customary intellectual property regime comprising rights, trespass norms, exceptions, and enforcement mechanisms. This chapter then examines an exception to the rules for publishers who held the right to publish sequels and continuations. Finally, it focuses on Nicolai’s Joys of Young Werther and Schiller’s Geisterseher as examples of the effectiveness of these mechanisms, showing how they prevented egregious departures from the customary norms.

Sanctions and Strategies of Control

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-168
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Final Volume ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Enforcement Mechanisms ◽  
Critical Notes

Chapter 4 examines the ways in which authors, publishers, and critics punished violations of the customary norms that governed the production and dissemination of fan fiction in eighteenth-century Germany. Sanctions included official complaints, advertisements, negative reviews, and literary and personal attacks—norms that scholars refer to as public shaming or truthful negative gossip. This chapter then examines the effectiveness of these mechanisms and their wider fallout. In some instances the sanctions motivated third parties, like the famous engraver Chodowiecki, to refuse to deal with perpetrator authors. In other cases, the sanctions inspired the creation of memorable texts, like Goethe’s ribald poem, “Nicolai at Werther’s Grave.” Authors’ critical notes in prefaces, footnotes, and the texts themselves were among the most common form of sanction. Traces of these enforcement mechanisms linger in the texts we read today, long after the censured fan fiction has disappeared from our collective memory. This chapter concludes by analyzing additional strategies authors used to maintain exclusive control over the characters they invented, offering a new explanation for familiar practices in the book trade, such as the practice of announcing the final volume of a novel and soliciting reader feedback for ongoing works.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
Century Literature

The Introduction raises the main questions answered by the book: how were characters regulated before the existence of intellectual property laws? Why does fan fiction proliferate after 1750? And how did fan fiction and its rules affect authorship and the law? It further provides a brief history of fan fiction from Homer to Goethe and offers an explanation of the methodology used in this text, combining legal anthropology, literary criticism, and historical analysis based on archival work. The Introduction places the work within existing scholarship on legal history, studies of eighteenth-century literature and the book trade, and intellectual property law.

Characters Before Copyright

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Consumer Habits ◽  
Archival Work

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.

Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Trial ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Defense Counsel ◽  
Trial Procedure ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Right

My subject is the story of the entry of lawyers into the English criminal courts and their impact on trial procedure. Until the eighteenth century lawyers played little part in the trial of felonies in England—in the trial, that is, of those accused of the most serious offenses, including murder, rape, arson, robbery, and virtually all forms of theft. Indeed, the defendants in such cases were prohibited at common law from engaging lawyers to act for them in court. In the case of less-serious crimes—misdemeanors—defendants were allowed counsel; and those accused of high treason, the most serious offense of all, were granted the right to make their defense by counsel in 1696. But not in felony. Accused felons might seek a lawyer's advice on points of law, but if they wanted to question the prosecution evidence or to put forward a defense, they had to do that on their own behalf. The victim of a felony (who most often acted as the prosecutor in a system that depended fundamentally on private prosecution) was free to hire a lawyer to manage the presentation of his or her case. But in fact few did so. The judges were generally the only participants in felony trials with professional training. They dominated the courtroom and orchestrated the brief confrontation between the victim and the accused that was at the heart of the trial.

scholarly journals The Czech Nobility's Use of the Right of Patronage on Behalf of the Hussite Reform Movement

Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Klassen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Southern France ◽  
The Right ◽  
Instrumental Role

Throughout European history the aristocracy has been involved in reform movements which undermined either ecclesiastical or monarchical power structures. Thus the nobles of southern France in the twelfth century granted protection to the Cathars, and in fourteenth-century England lords and knights offered aid to the Lollards. The support of German princes and knights for Lutheranism is well known, as is the instrumental role played by the French aristocracy in initiating the constitutional reforms which gave birth to that nation's eighteenth-century revolution. The fifteenth-century Hussite reform movement in Bohemia similarly received aid from the noble class. Here, when the Hussites were under attack in 1417 from the authorities, especially the archbishop, sympathetic lords protected Hussite priests on their domains.

Nordic retirement contracts and the economic situation of widows

2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
BEATRICE MORING
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
The Family ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Right

The aim of this article is to explore the economic status and the quality of life of widows in the Nordic past, based on the evidence contained in retirement contracts. Analysis of these contracts also shows the ways in which, and when, land and the authority invested in the headship of the household were transferred between generations in the Nordic countryside. After the early eighteenth century, retirement contracts became more detailed but these should be viewed not as a sign of tension between the retirees and their successors but as a family insurance strategy designed to protect the interests of younger siblings of the heir and his or her old parents, particularly if there was a danger of the property being acquired by a non-relative. Both the retirement contracts made by couples and those made by a widow alone generally guaranteed them an adequate standard of living in retirement. Widows were assured of an adequately heated room of their own, more generous provision of food than was available to many families, clothing and the right to continue to work, for example at spinning and milking, but to be excused heavy labour. However, when the land was to be retained by the family, in many cases there was no intention of establishing a separate household.

The Market

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-278
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
The Self ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Market Institutions ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
The Right ◽  
Objective Existence

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

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