Compare Google’s recent assertions about the violable nature of authors’ copyrights to the great Whig lawyer, Lord Camden who in 1774, successfully fought to destroy the existing tradition of copyright and combined Pope’s opinion of the generality of booksellers with his own aristocratic scorn of the man who made his living by the pen. “Knowledge”, declared Lord Camden, “has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated…. Glory is the reward of science, and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views: I speak not of the scribblers for bread, who tease the press with their wretched productions; fourteen years is too long a privilege for their perishable trash. It was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, and Locke instructed and delighted the world; it would be unworthy such men to traffic with a dirty bookseller. When the bookseller offered Milton five pounds for his Paradise Lost, he did not reject it and commit it to the flames, nor did he accept the miserable pittance as the reward of his labour; he knew that the real price of his work was immortality, and that posterity would pay it.” -Frank Mumby, “Publishing and Bookselling: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day” (1954. London. Jonathan Cape.) 190-1.