Immanuel Kant on Intellectual Property

The three writings by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) I am going to talk about are the following: Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing (1785; KGS 8:77-87), “What is a book?,” which is a section of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797; KGS 6:289-91), and On the Production of Books (1798; KGS 8:431-438). They have all been translated into English. Besides, ten years ago, Jocelyn Benoist translated them into French for the Presses universitaires de France under the suggestive title of Qu’est-ce qu’un livre?, with the very useful addition of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s (1761-1814), Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing (1791; GA I/1:409-27). Fichte’s essay helps our understanding of the context in which Kant wrote on intellectual property for the clear and uncompromised stance it took in a debate that in those years was reaching its climax and that opposed, yesterday as it does today, the defenders of intellectual property to the standard-bearers of its free use. Given that both Kant and Fichte joined the party of the defenders, it has seemed interesting to offer one voice representing the party of free use. I have chosen Publishing Considered anew with regard to the Writer, the Publisher, and the Public, published in a journal by Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus (1729-1814), in April 1791 (Deutsches Magazin, 2:383-414). This paper provoked Fichte’s immediate reaction in the already mentioned essay of October 1791 and found its completion in the same journal in the Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, published in October 1791 (Deutsches Magazin, 2:564-96), i.e., together with Fichte’s intervention. The need for a protection implemented by law of literary works was felt as soon as the printing press was invented, when the multiplication of the exemplars of a work generated the growth of substantial profits. Today things have changed. For example, the Italian publisher Carlo Feltrinelli (n. 1962) commented the jubilee of his house, the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore saying that half a century of quality publishing are a big result, for “continuing to publish is not easy, besides it is not the business of this century.” The beginning of the twenty-first century is indeed comparable to the end of the eighteenth in so far as in both the publishing industry is hit by a profound crisis, caused then by pirate reprints and today by the information infrastructure