YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

168 RICHARD FREEDMAN
Authorial control is identified not with profit, but with the public good. Ronsard’s
works, like the royal patents that protect them are freely ‘given’ to society at large.
During the sixteenth century, as Natalie Zemon Davis has recently argued, printed
books were poised at the intersection of two kinds of transactions, one hidden within
the other. Title pages of printed works stress the commercial aspects of the object,
such as the bookseller’s address, the existence of an official patent protecting the
printer against pirate editions, or the utility or novelty of the book as an appeal to
prospective buyers. In contrast, texts of dedications (which appear inside the covers)
frame the author or editor of a work as one who freely ‘gives’ his intellectual labor
to the reader, patron, or public. 22 The world of printing, with its earnest commercial
claims of materials, physical labor, and profit, clearly manifests itself in privileges
of protection from undue competition. But the domain of authorship long remained
isolated from modern preoccupations with intellectual property as capital that are so
familiar to us today (with suits over who owns music, software, and even genetic
information). Echoing a long intellectual tradition that understood knowledge as a
gift from God, the authorial privileges held by Ronsard and Lasso limn a delicate
space between the demands of an increasingly commercial world (on one hand) and
the public uses of learning (on the other). Elements of this dynamic appear in the text
of a treaty recently concluded by the World Intellectual Property Organization in
Geneva (from 1996). Participants agreed that, while the producers of sound recordings
had the right to control how and when such material would be distributed, performing
artists themselves retained a ‘moral’right to make certain that their recorded
performances were not distorted, mutilated, or modified in ways that would be prejudicial
to their reputations. Setting aside any question of the economic aspects of
sound recording, this body saw fit to recognize that creators retain a permanent right
to assure the integrity of their ideas. 23 A related tension, by the way, persists in current
debates about the ownership of academic research. As scholars, we ‘give away’
our ideas, just as institutions ‘grant’tenure and other forms of prestige. Is our research
‘work’? Can it be sold? Do we reserve a ‘moral’ right of ownership that permits us
to govern how and in what forms it is disseminated? 24
22 N.Z. DAVIS, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Madison, Wisconsin, 2000, p. 46.
23 Article 5 (Moral Rights of Performers) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 23 December 1996, reads, in part: “Independently of a performer’s
economic rights, and even after the transfer of those rights, the performer shall, as regards
his live aural performances or performances fixed in phonograms have the right to claim to be identified
as the performer of his performances, except where omission is dictated by the manner of the use
of the performance, and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of his performances
that would be prejudicial to his reputation.” Treaty text cited in
[accessed on 10 March 2003].
24 For a timely discussion of academic work in the context of sale and gift, see C. McSHERRY, Who
Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.