Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…How does that come back to the copyright? The way that comes back to copyright stuff is that the Inquisition needs to please local authorities in order to get to operate at all. So the Inquisition will therefore try to figure out things that will please local authorities. If a book is being presented for publication that has a recommendation letter at the beginning written by an important political figure, the Inquisition will push it through. When printing presses and authors say, “Hey, can we have this be a monopoly license?”, figures like Machiavelli realize we could ask for, “Hey, you’re giving us permission. Can you deny everyone else permission? ” The Inquisition immediately realized, this is a great way to get publishers on our side, to get authors on our side, and to get their bosses on our side, because we are protecting the book that is important to the duke because it’s dedicated to the duke, or it’s dedicated to his grandfather. The Medici give permission to print The Prince partly because it’s dedicated to a member of the family, and it celebrates their fame. They want to be able to control its quality and make sure that it’s published in good quality and that it always has that dedicatory letter at the front. They have an incentive to control what we would now think of as copyright. The Inquisition, wanting to please them, has an incentive to give them that control. To close off, do you have some sense of how to think about why Machiavelli’s remembered so differently from not only what he wrote, but why he was writing?…

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