• Current opened records

  • Print, Plants, and Piracy: Botanic Herbals and the Emergence of Intellectual Property

Awards
Author(s):
  • Emelia Lehmann
Category:
  • History
Institution:
  • University of Chicago
Region:
  • USA & Canada
Winner Category:
  • Highly Commended
Year:
  • 2017
Abstract:
  • The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century changed the way in which texts and images were produced and exchanged throughout Europe during the Renaissance. Suddenly, books could be printed on a massive scale and distributed in various languages to diverse groups of people. This increased accessibility of printed material facilitated the emergence and circulation of new forms of knowledge and writing, in particular, of the sciences and scientific publications. At the forefront of these works were Herbals, botanical publications containing highly-detailed illustrations of plants and their culinary and medicinal properties. Herbals represented a partnership between scientists, publishers, and artists, all of whom were looking to produce accurate and beautiful texts and develop botanical learning that could be shared with the rest of the European community. With the expanded publication of works like these Herbals came issues of ownership and property. Images could be easily copied and reprinted without the permission or knowledge of the original artist. This sort of ‘piracy’ deprived many artists and scientists of credit for their work and threatened the livelihoods of publishers who had invested in these Herbals. From these issues emerged some of the first cases of copyright and intellectual property, as publishers went to court to claim ownership over printed images and fight for the right to publish and distribute them. By comparing printed botanical images published throughout this period, this paper analyzes the proliferation of piracy and imitations of Herbal illustrations in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. This paper explores how image theft and reproduction affected the history of the botanical sciences and scientific publications, and the ways in which these early cases contributed to current policies in intellectual property law.
Attached Documents: