Two Ways of Looking at a Printed Book

Abstract

This article revisits a recent debate in copyright scholarship surrounding the dominant utilitarian-proprietary approach to copyright and its limits as identified by three readers of Immanuel Kant's 1785 essay, ‘On the Wrongfulness of Reprinting’. It is argued that although these scholars have demonstrated the power of Kant's essay and its concept of the book as communicative act to reshape our understanding of authorship and copyright, they have also underestimated the material dimension of the text that affords the production of its meaning. A more adequate understanding of Kant's text and how it could illuminate the present digital transformation of authorship and copyright would require that we attend closely to its medial-materialities.