A history of how copyright became a tool and product of both individual and state power in the United States

Intellectual property is both familiar and mysterious, essential to United States politics and economics, and yet opaque in many ways. In The Engine of Free Expression, Nora Slonimsky chronicles the relationship between intellectual property and authority in the origins of the United States and contributes to a deeper understanding of intellectual property, specifically copyright, by doing two things.

First, Slonimsky traces how writers, artists, publishers, lawyers, and others who produced forms of intellectual and creative expression in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—well before there were laws to protect them—thought about the political and commercial recognition of their labor. She calls their thinking “copyright consciousness.” Second, using a wide range of sources and evidence not often associated with intellectual property, Slonimsky argues that copyright was an important tool in the development of governing institutions in the early United States. As those writers and others pressed for protected acknowledgment of their work, they simultaneously relied on and strengthened those institutions, a mutually reinforcing process she calls “copyrighting the state.”

Describing this process over a hundred-year period, The Engine of Free Expression concludes in our present, explaining how this deep history between copyright and government impacts our civic life, from authentic and accurate expression, social media, AI, and digital communication; to the importance of learning, education, and knowledge; and to the health of our democratic institutions.