The cento, Romanticism, and copyright. (2024)

Mature poets steal. T.S. Eliot The Sacred Wood

A composition formed by joining scraps from other authors":this is how Samuel Johnson defines the cento in his Dictionary, adefinition that then joins scraps quoted from other authors like Pope,for particularly fitting illustrations of the word's usage. Thisessay examines the genre of the cento in the period when new editions ofJohnson's Dictionary began to outlive him: the Romantic period, aperiod marked--like ours--by historic change in the regulation ofcopyright. I will proceed first by sketching the current status andoutlining a brief history of copyright, which Jeffrey Galin glosses as a"limited monopoly of rights [...] designed to balance the needs ofcreators to make a reasonable return on their works and inventions for alimited period of time, with the work then turning toward the publicdomain to serve as fodder for the development of future creativeworks" (10).

This outline of copyright history will include a discussion of fairdealing, a copyright law exemption for users' rights that seeks tocounterbalance those of copyright holders; fair dealing has importantbearing on my argument as it concerns appropriation in culturalproduction. The essay then details the cento, in its supplementaryrelation to Romantic literature and ideology, and its complexrelationship to creativity and criticism. In the process, salutary andsymptomatic examples of the cento's use by William Hazlitt andWilliam Wordsworth will be considered, two authors well known as majorproponents, in their time, of the Romantic ideology of culturalproduction as original creation (McGann 91), as opposed to Augustan andpostmodern theories of cultural production as imitation and bricolage.Hazlitt's and Wordsworth's uses of the cento illustrate theconstitutive contradiction between copyright's rationale and thematerialities of cultural production; their uses also suggestprototypical models of fair dealing, avant la lettre, as both auser's right and a resource for authorship. The essay concludes byconsidering the implications of the cento under the copyright regime ofEnglish Romanticism for appropriative art and scholarship undertoday's globalized regime.

As a genre of poetry composed entirely of quotations from otherpoems, the cento makes an interesting study for Romanticism andcopyright: it flies in the face of Romantic tradition, it shows howcopyright conditions the possibilities of cultural production, and itpoints up the contradiction between the cultural-legal hegemony oforiginality and the material processes of appropriation-basedproduction. The point is not that the cento is popular or pivotal toEnglish literature but, instead, that it poses a Derridean supplement tothis literature and its prevailing Romantic ideology, an ideology that,as Robert Macfarlane suggests, "continues to prosper in theliterary-cultural consciousness. If anything, indeed, it is moreunshiftably ensconced there than two hundred years ago, when it isgenerally taken to have been devised" (3).

A study of the cento and Romanticism has timely implications forcopyright and cultural production today, in the context of a digitizedmedia ecology of content abundance and the ensuing global"copyfight" over regulating this new mediascape. As SwedishPirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge has argued, and as the worldwideJanuary 2012 protest over the U.S.'s Stop Online Piracy Act (sopa)made clear, this copyfight pits an increasingly draconian copyrightregime not against commercial piracy but against civil liberties.Today's copyfight is a techno-cultural front in the class war,being waged on the 99 percent by the predominantly corporate copyrightholders among the 1 percent, who deploy both repressive instruments andideological strategies drawn from Romanticism. Appealing to the Romanticfigure of individual, expressive authorship is a rhetorical weapon ofchoice for copyright maximalist interests which are--it is important tostress--not individual creators, for the most part, but corporations(Marshall 2-3). So this essay refers to ideas of Romanticism andauthorship that may seem old-fashioned to scholars versed in theoreticaland historicist interrogations of them; however, these ideas still holdformidable popular purchase thanks to the culture industry's"adapted Romanticism" (Adorno para 7). As Paul Saint-Amourobserves, "the Romantic cult of the individual genius [...] hasproven both durable and adaptable" (6), and it has become astandard, disingenuous justification for corporate lobbying andlitigation against both the expansion of appropriation art forms(including user-generated content) and the exercise of users'rights like fair dealing to protect and promote such art forms, not tomention criticism and education too. While recent court cases in Canadaand the U.S. have been decided emphatically in favour of users'rights, there are a number of corporate agreements, regulatory andlegislative efforts, and trade talks, as well as terms and techniquesdetermining device and content use, that heavily tilt the scales oftoday's global copyright regime in favour of rights holders. Forunderstanding these present transformations, possibilities, andimperilments of culture and knowledge production, the history of earlierappropriation art and copyright regulation affords a fair deal ofillumination.

A Short History of Copyright and Fair Dealing

Copyright pretend[s] that every work of art is an inventiondistinctive enough to be patented.[...] Poetry can only be made out ofother poems; novels out of other novels. All this was much clearerbefore the assimilation of literature to private enterprise concealed somany of the facts of criticism. (Frye 96-97)

From the advent of print in the fifteenth century to the lateeighteenth century, the copyright or intellectual property (ip) regimein England can be summarized as a long period of increasing monopolyover published print works by an increasingly organized and regulatedLondon publishing industry. In 1557 the Stationers' Company wasincorporated in London as the print industry's intermediary; itregistered all printed works, enforced intellectual property customs,and organized its members into a privileged and powerful cartel. Thestate licensed and guaranteed perpetual monopoly rights in printed textsto the printer-publishers that produced them, and the state pre-censoredall print publications. In 1649 a state licensing system supplanted thatof royally conferred privileges. In the Restoration, statepre-censorship tightened, but the mid-century Licensing Act lapsed in1695, leaving the Stationers' Company to privately regulate itsmembers' practices until, in 1710, Parliament passed copyrightlegislation, the Statute of Anne. The statute reassigned copyright froma work's publisher to its author and limited its term to fourteenyears, renewable once if the author outlived its expiry. The Statute ofAnne enabled "the simultaneous emergence in legal discourse of theproprietary author and the literary work [...] two concepts [...] boundto each other" (Rose 91). Despite the statute's clear termsand recognition of authorship, the London publishers continued to claimperpetual copyright, which was upheld in English courts by injunctionsagainst infringers who tried to reprint ostensibly out-of-copyrightworks; in contrast, Scottish law upheld the statute's limited term.Tensions and legal actions between English and Scottish publishersculminated in 1774, when, in Donaldson v. Becket, the House of Lordsaffirmed the statute and declared perpetual copyright claims illegal.

That decision stimulated a competitive market in old, "publicdomain" texts: prices fell, sales rose, and readerships grew. Fornew print works, though, prices rose sharply, to exploit their"brief copyright window" of statutory protection: prices forpopular modern authors like Scott, Byron, and Landon were so high thatthe buying of books and even the renting of books from circulatinglibraries remained a luxury reserved for the wealthy: "Aparliamentary inquiry of 1818 reported that books were more expensive atthat time than they had ever been in the history of British books"(St Clair 196). This "brief copyright window"--as William StClair calls this period of short-term copyright protection for newlypublished works (487)--lasted until 1808, when the statutory copyrightterm was doubled. In 1814 the term was unconditionally extended totwenty-eight years or the author's life, whichever was longer. Andfrom 1836 the lobbying of publishers and authors like Wordsworth andDickens culminated in the 1842 Copyright Act that effectively closed thebrief copyright window and re-established long copyright. The 1842 actsignificantly extended the term of copyright protection to forty-twoyears from publication or, if the author was still alive thereafter, toseven years after the author's death (Zall 144). Since the earlynineteenth century, the history of copyright has largely been aboutfurther lengthening it and internationalizing it, first in agreementsamong specific territories and later formalized globally in the 1891Berne Convention (St Clair 55).

In the U.S. and Europe, the term is the author's life plusseventy years. Copyright in Canada currently protects a work for fiftyyears after the author's death, but Canada has long facedpersistent pressure from U.S. trade interests to lengthen the copyrightterm (Geist, "Leaks") and to toughen copyright generally,which (as of this writing) the Harper government is doing by signingCanada to copyright-maximizing trade deals like the ComprehensiveEconomic and Trade Agreement (ceta) with the eu, as well as theTrans-Pacific Partnership (tpp), and by including in the copyrightamendment act, Bill c-11, technology-specific provisions that favourrights holders over content users (a development that will be revisitedin closing). The globalized maximalism of copyright's newenclosures produces what James Boyle calls "corporate welfare"(8-9), entrenching the monopolistic dominance of a very few massivelyconcentrated, conglomerate rights-holders, based in the U.S. and, to alesser extent, in western Europe. As the Worldmapper project shows,"this means that a few people living in less than a tenth of theterritories in the world [...] receive the US$30 billion of net exportearnings for these services" (Newman et al). For the sake ofcontrast, the next closest intellectual property exporters U.S. are theuk (with $1.75 billion in net ip exports) and France (with $1.5billion). Yet economic evidence does not justify the extraordinarycopyright maximalism sought in global trade talks and legislation today.Andrew Gowers's 2006 report on ip for the uk Treasury cites boththe 1840s term extension debate and postmillennial economic studies toconclude "that the length of protection for copyright works alreadyfar exceeds the incentives required to invest in new works," that"the optimal length of copyright is at most seven years," and"that the extra incentives to create as a result of term extensionare likely to be very small beyond a term of 25 years" (50). Theeconomic evidence suggests that the architects of the 1710 Statute ofAnne, with its fourteen-year copyright term, may have had the right ideaall along in limiting copyright term to something more like a decadethan a century.

Another crucial aspect of copyright history concerns itsstakeholders. Despite the 1710 statute's turn to an emphasis onauthorship, copyright before and since has tended to reflect more theeconomic interests of corporate concerns--publishers, printers, recordlabels, and film studios--than those of individual authors and artists.Until the mid-nineteenth century, an author sold her or his right tocopy a work outright, to a publisher, for a fixed sum; the royaltysystem, in which the author earns marginal income on every copy sold,commenced in 1855 with a novel contract between Elizabeth Gaskell andChapman and Hall (Saunders 139). Writers have since come to rely onroyalty income; however, music and film copyrights tend to becorporately held, hence the ironic disingenuousness of "BigContent" companies and lobbies making appeals on behalf ofromanticized "creators" (whom Big Content companies themselvesroutinely exploit, but that's another story [see Masnick, "HowSony"]).

The Romantic period thus started during the first opening of theEnglish public domain and ended amidst new enclosures of this domain.For discussing the cento, a crucial detail of copyright in the periodconcerns its control of quotation and adaptation. St Clair shows thatbefore 1600, English print culture teemed with "anthologies,abridgements, and adaptations [...] verse miscellanies [... and]collections of short quotations [...] known as sententiae, or in English'select sentences' " (66-67). But "after 1600, forabout 180 years we find only a handful of newly compiled printedcollections of quotations of English literature" (70). St Clairreads this change as a clampdown by the London print cartel on any andall appropriation of published texts--the cartel's privately heldintellectual properties--and he documents suggestive evidence that,after about 1600, "a regime intended to control the use ofquotations from printed books unauthorized by the intellectual propertyowners [was] being put in place" (493).

The clampdown on quotation and adaptation was checked somewhat by a1740 case, Gyles v. Wilcox, which ruled in favour of thedefendant's adaptation of Gyles's text as a practice of"fair abridgment" (Rose 51) and provided the first of severalprecedents for fair dealing in copyright law. Fair dealing (whose U.S.counterpart is the more expansive fair use) is a limit on the copyrightholder's exclusive rights to a work (Boyle 66), a recognition that"not all copying should be considered infringement" (Hartnett176), as in study, teaching, or criticism. In Canadian law, fair dealingis an exception to copyright for users to, within limits, reproducecopyrighted works, without permission or payment, for specifiedpurposes, like research, study, criticism, review, reporting, and parody(Athabasca 2). An 1841 case in the U.S., Folsom v. Marsh, firstformulated the principle of fair use and formalized the practical"tests" for determining whether or not a given use ofcopyrighted material is fair. Fair dealing was first ensconced in uklegislation in 1911 and in Canada in 1921 (Katz). Recent landmarkSupreme Court decisions 2004 and 2012 have established and entrenched a"large and liberal" understanding of research and acorrespondingly capacious interpretation of fair dealing. The decisionalso codified six tests for assessing the fairness of a given"dealing" (or re-use), according to the purpose, character,amount, nature, and effect of the work, and in consideration ofalternatives to the dealing (caut 3).

Turning back to the late eighteenth century, we also see that theopening of the "brief copyright window" ended the longclampdown on quotation and adaptation, at least for the older texts itreleased into the public domain. "[T]he moment that therestrictions on reprinting extracts from certain older texts were liftedin 1774," writes St Clair, "we see a flood of verse and proseanthologies compiled almost entirely from those printed literary textswhich were then released into the public domain" (72 emphasisadded).

The cento belongs to a constellation of appropriative, curatorialgenres like anthologies, abridgments, and adaptations that, in StClair's long historical view, have withered under more restrictiveor maximalist copyright regimes, like that of the late sixteenth centuryto the late eighteenth, and bloomed under weaker or minimalist regimes,like that of the Romantic period, when the effects of the earlierDonaldson v. Becket case in 1774 became felt as an "explosion ofreading" driven by a "revival of the types of printed textwhich had been discouraged after 1600: abridgements, adaptations and,above all, anthologies" (135; see also 495).

While reprints of older, public domain works boomed, appropriationsand adaptations of newer, protected works were discouraged andsuppressed. Because of the strong copyright protection of newer works,modern literature was for the rich, while the rest were confined to the"old canon"--rich in tradition but also "increasinglyobsolete" (St Clair 224). However, a workaround to access modernliterature emerged in the period revival of the early modern commonplacebook or "album": a do-it-yourself, manuscript compilation ofliterary excerpts (in which Scott and Byron figured prominently). Somealbums were sold publicly; others were kept privately, sometimes passedon as heirlooms (226). In the 1820s, pre-selected print albums began tocompete with and displace the do-it-yourself albums: "For thereaderly freedom to control the texts to be reread [...] was substitutedthe confinement of receiving a commercially produced gift whose textshad already been pre-selected and pre-censored" (229).

In addition, protective publishers in the London cartel that couldnot successfully rely on the custom of perpetual copyright found thatthey could exploit legal ambiguities over "originality." Toextend the term of copyrights due to expire, some publishers printed"special" or sparingly revised editions; some smallerpublishers printed anthologies of quotations taken, at a remove, fromperiodicals (221). As the Scottish Lord Hailes complained of suchdevices in 1773, "the London booksellers enlarge the common-lawright by conferring the name of original author on every tastelesscompiler" (quoted in Rose 136). Mark Rose (among others) notes howthat practice has continued to the present: "In the discourse ofcopyright [....] the goal of protecting the rights of the creativeauthor is proudly asserted even as the notion of author is drained ofcontent" (136).

As the ability of enterprising upstart publishers to compilecopyrightable works from periodical excerpts suggests, the legal statusof excerpting in reviews was an uncertain issue:

 The eighteenth-century literary reviews [...] saw their main role as providing summaries of new books and often included substantial extracts. In 1797, quotations took up over half of the articles.[...] But this loophole was closing. The advancing intellectual property law and custom not only forbade anthologies and abridgements but quotations in reviews that were thought long enough to undermine sales. (186-87)

Some reviews pointedly tried to hurt sales this way:Shackell's Register reprinted most of Hazlitt's 1823 LiberAmoris "in eighteen closely printed columns of selections,"notes Hazlitt's biographer Stanley Jones, "ma[king] it hardlynecessary to lay down money to read it" (338).

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the period'sminimal but inconsistent copyright regime was in the legal withholdingof copyright from works deemed seditious or obscene. Ruled by the courtsas ineligible for copyright, the radical play Wat Tyler (1817)proliferated in pirate editions that could not be legally suppressed byits embarrassed author, the poet laureate Robert Southey (Perillo17-21). Radical and pirate publishers quickly moved to publish similarlyuncopyrightable works, like Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824) and PercyShelley's Queen Mab (1825), and the copyright law that providedstrong "textual controls" for state prepublication censorship(St Clair 311) backfired spectacularly, propagating a "radicalcanon" of modern, subversive literature that was rapidlydisseminated across England and among different classes (336).

The brief copyright window that conditioned Romantic literaryproduction is thus characterized by contradiction and inconsistency.Perpetual copyright was illegal, but many publishers continued to claimit until at least the 1810s (113). Publishers prosecuted infringers,pirates, and generous quoters to defend their monopolies on originaltexts, but they also sometimes needed to vitiate the definition oforiginality to sustain copyright protection. Entrepreneurial writers andpublishers also exploited the low legal threshold of"originality" to publish and copyright anthologies and othermainly or strictly intertextual works, provided they did not deal withworks still in copyright; the law held no fair dealing exemption. Andironically--as has been more recently argued of Disney's turn fromappropriation (Lessig 23) to litigation (158)--those authors producingnew works, whose copyrights their publishers jealously protected, werebeneficiaries of a new and burgeoning public domain, which suppliedtheir work with an old canon (of Milton, Shakespeare, etc.) from whichthey borrowed allusions, tropes, plots, and other literary elements(Macfarlane 29). The explosion of reading, the commodification ofappropriative, intertextual forms, and the unresolved legal status ofperiodical quotation illustrate both the limits and opportunities ofcopyright as a legal foundation for cultural production both amateur andprofessional. Which brings us to the cento, a curious supplement to theRomantic period's curious copyright regime.

"Masterworks of tastelessness"

Authors do not really create in any literal sense, but ratherproduce texts through complex processes of appropriation andtransformation. (Rose 8)

The cento is a genre with roots in antiquity (Okacova 1). The Romanpoet Ausonius formalized rules for composing a cento in the fourthcentury, establishing the genre as a form of poetry: lines lifted fromHomer, Virgil, and the Bible and reworked as sacred Christian verse oras bawdy satire. The cento variously pays homage to, parodies, and/orperverts its source texts, recontextualizing its borrowings by findingnew connections for them with equally recontextualized lines from otherworks. Wholly intertextual and structurally ironic--expecting itsreaders to recognize its sources and delight in their detournement--atraditional cento is its own generic mash-up: it looks like a lyric, butthe apparent identity of its voice masks its technically dramatic ordialogic composition as a collage of different voices. In its ancientand early modern career it was widely read as a poetic form of satire;in the eighteenth century, both its forms and its functions became morevaried. As a strictly intertextual collage form, the cento prefiguresthe visual collages of Victorian and Dada artists, the"cut-up" poetry of Dada and Beat poets, the dub and remixprocesses of dj culture (among other "prospects of recording,"as Glenn Gould mused [331]), and the sample-saturated digital mediascapeof mash-ups and aggregators, in which "everything is a remix"(see Ferguson and Rutherford). As a transformative and critical use ofquotations from creative works, the cento also has implications forcitation in scholarship, which will be considered in closing.

Saint-Amour calls the cento "the ultimate neoclassicalform" and notes that it "thrived during the eighteenth centuryand continued in the early nineteenth": an 1806 cento repurposedLatin verse to celebrate Nelson (41); an homage to Shakespeare,"Formed from his Works," celebrated his birthday in 1814(221). Through the nineteenth century, the cento (also known as"mosaic" or "patchwork" poetry) kept its poeticbasis, but it also became adapted to prose. An anonymous 1823 long prosecento lampooned the Scottish minister Edward Irving, taking the form ofa mock court case. A 1798 conduct book, The Cento: Being a Collection ofChoice Extracts, from the Most Approved Authors; Chiefly designed forthe Instruction of young Persons, is also anonymous, suggesting that itsproducers perhaps sought to evade prosecution for infringement. One 1842cento, to which we will return, borrowed pointedly from Wordsworth--amajor lobbyist for copyright maximalism in his day--in order to lampoonsaid lobbying, which resulted that year in the more maximalist CopyrightAct. By 1860, Charles Bombaugh could define the cento more expansivelyas "a work wholly composed of verses, or passages promiscuouslytaken from other authors and disposed in a new form or order, so as tocompose a new work and a new meaning" (quoted in Saint-Amour 40-41,emphasis added).

Since antiquity, the cento has drawn derision: for its perceiveddisrespect of sources, for its pedantry, and for its derivative,seemingly mechanical form (Okacova 3). The latter criticisms becamepronounced in the Romantic period, when, as Macfarlane argues, the turnfrom Augustan aesthetics (signaled for instance by Edward Young's1759 Conjectures upon Original Composition), the emergence of moreindividualized and democratized forms of subjectivity, and newefficiencies of mass production (as well, I would add, as theperiod's copyright regime) all conditioned Romanticism's"increased admiration of literary originality" (23). Theproliferation of older public domain works and newer pirated ones, inmultiple editions by multiple publishers, indicated new technologies andpolicies that occasioned a kind of "crisis of authenticity" inliterature, "the anxiety that indebted work was in some wayequivalent to the unthinking reproduction of machines" (24). ThomasCarlyle's 1829 "Signs of the Times" remains one of themost symptomatic statements of this techno-cultural anxiety:"Literature, too, has its Paternoster-row mechanism, itsTrade-dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffingbellows; so that books are not only printed, but, in a great measure,written and sold, by machinery" (para 12).

On the shift in aesthetics and its impact on the cento, ReinerHerzog writes, "It was only after Romanticism and Historicism hadpropagated the originality and unique historicity of the artwork, andafter literary historical positivism in the late nineteenth centuryrevisited the tradition of the Cento on their premises, that generaldisregard of the form developed" (6 n24). (1) As a critical verdictrepresentative of this growing disregard, Herzog quotes a modern Frenchdescription of the cento as a "masterwork of tastelessness" (6n24).

While denigrating an author as a "centonist" in theperiod was to judge her or his work as unoriginal, producing a cento wasto signal the producer's affluence and command of literaryresources and capital. As Saint-Amour suggests, "cento-making [was]necessarily an activity for the leisured classes. In itsnineteenth-century resurgence, the cento enabled the members of thisprime readerly demographic to write back through [...] reading, toproduce a literature of extravagant consumption" (45-46). Forexample, a thirty-eight-line cento from 1875 was "said to haveoccupied a year's laborious search among the voluminous writings ofthirty-eight leading poets" (Dobson quoted in Saint-Amour 45);after all, this was long before Google. The sense of work invested beingdisproportionate to the quality of the final product contributed to thecento's dismissal as "laborious trifling" (45): the workof dabblers, not authors.

But while the cento represents "a counterdiscourse to Romanticauthorship" (Saint-Amour 40), it also exemplifies (like the album)the period's commodification of appropriative forms. Toward theclosing of the brief copyright window, during the transition fromRegency to Victorian rule, the threshold of "originality"required to secure protection under copyright law was low enough thatanthologists, compilers, and even centonists could get copyrightprotection for their largely or exclusively intertextual works (Rose136, St Clair 221). Saint-Amour relegates to a footnote this rathersurprising upshot of the period's minimal but inconsistentcopyright regime:

Although neither the cento nor the [album] is "fresh" inthe Romantic sense of radically original, both meet copyright'smore modest standards of originality [...] Both genres belong to thecategory of works that are at once "derivative" of antecedentworks and eligible for the copyright protection accorded"original" works. While none of these texts' verbatiminclusions of protected works was itself copyright in its new context,the aggregate recombination (e.g. the whole cento [...]) was protected.(Saint-Amour 242 n59)

That is, despite its "mosaic" composition of more or lessopenly appropriated lines from other poets, the cento's newsequencing supplied sufficient originality to qualify it as a new work,eligible for copyright protection, depending on the public-domain orprotected status of its source material. This kind of protection hadbeen established by the 1740 decision on "fair abridgement"and amidst the legal actions that led up to the outlaw of perpetualcopyright in 1774, but it had also been established by the London printcartel's own exploitations of legal ambiguities over"originality."

The imitative, repetitive cento, then, both countered and exploitedthe Romantic discourse and legal institution of creative authorship,with their linked premises in "property, originality,personality" (Rose 128). Composing centos went hand in hand withcompiling commonplace books: it was for aficionados and amateurs, notfor professional authors, although it could sometimes prove publishable.

Hazlitt's "bricolage of quotations"

No one, whether author or intellectual property owner, canreasonably claim that any substantial text has been compiled solely fromprivately owned materials. (St Clair 53)

The radical essayist William Hazlitt was a "key figurecontrolling the transmission of the idea of literary originality"in the period (Macfarlane 34), as exemplified in his literary lecturesand his collection of essays on contemporary cultural and politicalfigures, The Spirit of the Age (1825). The text demonstrates both thestatus of the cento in relation to the nascent Romantic ideology and theform's increasing adaptation to prose. For instance, of the novelsof anarchist philosopher William Godwin, Hazlitt writes approvingly that"there is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarlycopiousness of borrowed wealth" (289). Hazlitt's portraits ofLord Byron, the lawyer James Mackintosh, and William Wordsworth areespecially noteworthy for their references to the cento. Writing ofByron, Hazlitt criticizes the poet's style as too self-absorbed,and figures his productions as paradoxically solipsistic centos:"Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his ownheart; [...] he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns;and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, hemakes out everlasting centos of himself" (Spirit 154).

To James Mackintosh's Lectures on the Law of Nature andNations, Hazlitt gives some suggestively faint praise: they "wereafter all but a kind of philosophical centos. They were profound,brilliant, new to his hearers; but the profundity, the brilliancy, thenovelty were not his own" (Spirit 217). Ironically, Hazlittmentions the cento first to criticize Byron's poetry for being toooriginal and then to critique Mackintosh's lectures for not beingoriginal enough.

More ironically, while the content of Hazlitt's essaysdenigrates the cento in references like these, their form deploys it,thus articulating something of the contradiction between literaryproduction and its regulation. As a "bricolage of quotations"(Paulin, Day-Star 27), Hazlitt's prose style "melts down notraw, but already processed material into a new and beautifulshape." According to Tom Paulin, "the essay as cento, as apatchwork of quotations, [is] part of the deep structure ofHazlitt's imagination" ("Introduction" xi), areading echoed by David Chandler, as Paulin's co-editor ofPenguin's single-volume Hazlitt selection, The Fight and OtherWritings. Introducing the volume's notes, Chandler discusses howHazlitt not only "quoted compulsively" but also "freelyadapted the material he was quoting," and only rarely cited it."The problem for the annotator," Chandler reflects, "isknowing when to stop" (553). A close reading of even just this onerepresentative volume's notes reveals interesting patterns andpreferences in Hazlitt's quotation practice. The majority of hisquotations are from Shakespeare (Chandler 554), and many others are frompublic domain writers like Milton; however, Hazlitt also quotesextensively from the copyrighted works of his own contemporaries,including Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth.

Returning to Hazlitt's portrait of Byron, for example, itsfirst two pages alone include five explicit quotations: quotingCoriolanus (to great ironic effect), Hazlitt writes that Byron

holds no communion with his kind; but stands alone, without mate orfellow "As if a man were author of himself,

And owned no other kin." (Spirit 150)

Hazlitt's image of Byron is that of a modern"centonist," an image ironically composed in cento-likefashion itself, in a wry juxtaposition of originality and imitation,"extreme ambition of novelty" and "charges ofplagiarism": Byron, Hazlitt writes, "takes the thoughts ofothers (whether contemporaries or not) out of their mouths, and iscontent to make them his own, to set his stamp upon them" (152). IsHazlitt perhaps protesting too much? He quotes from his owncontemporaries--never mind himself--as contentedly as Byron might. Hisportrait of Wordsworth, for example, cites his subject author nine timesand his own prior work twice. In the notes to The Fight, not justWordsworth but specific poems emerge as particular favourites forHazlitt (as Paulin and Chandler produce him here, anyway): specifically,The Excursion (1814), "Ode on Intimations of Immortality"(1807), and "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"(1798). Hazlitt quotes generous excerpts from Excursion and"Tintern Abbey" in his 1811 lecture "On Shakespeare andMilton" (Fight 108-09), enhancing the literary value of both"old canon" and contemporary writers alike in theircross-referential quotations that, as St Clair observes of appropriativeworks, "perform the selecting, canonising, and memorialising role[.] which has often been seen as among [their] essential purposes andcharacteristics" (71).

To these purposes we might add that of fair dealing: Hazlitt'sfrequent and adaptive quotation of his contemporaries prototypes thepractice of repurposing copyrighted works, and in writing that hasfurnished some foundational statements on literary Romanticism, no less.He quotes often but never substantially enough to compromise acontemporary work's commercial prospects and usually, instead, topromote the work, implicitly or explicitly. His quotation from"Tintern Abby" in "On Shakespeare and Milton"misquotes lines 39 to 42 of Wordsworth's poem to attribute its"burthen of the mystery" not to a "blessed mood" butto "them," his subject authors (Fight 109). Then again,sometimes this promotional quotation backfires, as in "My FirstAcquaintance with Poets" (1823), where Hazlitt credits Chaucer witha line from The Excursion (253). As will be discussed below, Wordsworthwas very protective of his intellectual property, so it is telling thatthe historical record shows no legal actions between them (the kinds ofactions to which Hazlitt was no stranger (2)); as will also bediscussed, Wordsworth modeled fair dealing in his own way too.Hazlitt's divergent statements on and uses of centonism, then,aptly illustrate the contradiction between Romantic cultural-legaldiscourse and Romantic literary production and point to the kind ofappropriation we now recognize as fair dealing.

Appropriation as Creativity and Criticism

Every poet is a thief. (u2)

Like Hazlitt's liberal and adaptive prose centonism, thecento's exhibition of judicious selection and sequencingillustrates that curation and editing are themselves profoundly creativewriting processes. "The derivative nature of the cento is all tooobvious," writes Zoja Pavolvskis; "what is not obvious is thatthe act of composing a cento is strikingly original" (71).Contemporary legal support for this view recently arose at the SupremeCourt of Canada (which has ruled consistently to keep an appropriatebalance in copyright), in its 2011 hearing of a fair dealing case, whichincluded a discussion of appropriation in the creative process. AsMichael Geist reports, Chief Justice McLachlin "noted that worksoften involve bringing together several other works into a new whole.When counsel responded that this was a compilation, the Chief Justicereplied that it might actually be an entirely new work, bringing theissue of remix and transformative works to the Supreme Court ofCanada" ("The Supreme Court").

T. S. Eliot--no stranger to the cento himself, as shown in TheWaste Land (Ricks quoted in Eliot, Inventions 288)--has made this casefor literature more generally, in his comment that "immature poetsimitate; mature poets steal [...] The good poet welds his theft into awhole of feeling which is unique" (Sacred Wood 114). The widespreadmisquotation and misattribution of the comment lend it an irony that isamplified by the fact that Eliot's literary estate is infamouslyantagonistic to scholarly citation of his work, whether licensed or infair use (Galin 11). Further amplifying this irony is the likeness toEliot's famous comment of the U2 lyric quoted above, givenu2's own copyright maximalism, from the 1991 Island Records v. SSTRecords case (see McCarvel) to lead singer Bono's recent opinioncolumn calling to renew the crackdown on file-sharing by targetingInternet service providers, "whose swollen profits," heclaims, "perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the musicbusiness." These reception contexts of Eliot's writing andu2's music demonstrate the particularly strong copyright protectionpresently afforded to what the law terms creative or original works incontrast to the weaker protection afforded to factual or derivativeworks (Galin 11). This reductive legal language might be understood as asort of utilitarian variation on the Foucauldian distinction betweenprimary and secondary orders of discourse; in addition, such languageillustrates the Romantic premise of copyright law, in its privileging oforiginality and creativity.

In light of such formal and legal distinctions, the cento--a remixof existing works at once derivative and unique--embodies anintertextual kind of creativity like that of parody. And parody is wellunderstood to serve a critical function; as Linda Hutcheon points out inThe Poetics of Postmodernism, the "parodic intertextuality" ofpostmodern art sometimes critiques not just its source material but alsocopyright and cultural property, the "ideological and economicunderpinnings to the idea of originality" (190). Recognizing thecento as a parodic creative form means recognizing its critical functionas commentary (Verweyen and Witting 172-73). An appropriative culturalproduction, whether a cento, a collage, or even a dj mix, becomeslegible as criticism according to the principles of selection andorganization that structure it (McCutcheon, "For the record").The recognition of appropriation as criticism is well established inpostmodernist and postcolonialist theories of readerly rewriting,repetition with difference, and counter-discourse and is gaining widerpurchase in humanities and legal scholarship on copyright issues inappropriation art. Rebecca Tushnet argues that because sexuality is apossible interpretation of original works that authors may notexplicate, the sexualization of works constitutes a transformative useexposing a latent meaning; that is, it constitutes criticism ("MyFair Ladies" 275-78). We find this form of appropriation ascriticism, for example, in Elisa Kreisinger's Queer Carrie project,which remixes Sex and the City footage, and in Jonathan McIntosh's"Buffy vs Edward (Twilight Remixed)"; both videos remixpopular Hollywood television shows to challenge Hollywood'sheteronormative and patriarchal narratives and to promote fair use. (3)

The cento thus stands as a precursor to such radically intertextualforms of cultural production and critique, which are as readily enabledby new media technologies as they are challenged by changing copyrightlaws. The cento constitutes a kind of meta -genre that simultaneously,paradoxically subverts the principle of genre: the cento is a simulacrumof literature, cutting up literature to comment on it, blurring theboundaries between primary and secondary cultural forms.

Given the popular explosion of reading and the pitched periodicalhostilities that characterized the Romantic period, the centos producedat that time often demonstrated the genre's critical function. Theanonymous "cento of criticism" on Irving makes the criticalfunction abundantly clear, in the text's title and its lengthycaricature of Irving's "quackery" (Anonymous 4).Similarly, the didactic 1798 Cento calls attention both to itspedagogical purpose and to its critical discernment, "in being ableto select the good and useful from the pernicious and hurtful."Significantly, neither editors nor the "Most Approved Authors"are named; only the printer's name provides any specificattribution, although the telling absence of the printer's addresshints that the book may be a piracy. The preface justifies thetext's anonymity and total lack of acknowledgement by alluding tothe copyright regime: "It may not be amiss, perhaps, just tomention one thing [...] the not mentioning the different authors, fromwhose works the following pieces are compiled. [...] some of them werenot known when this collection was made; owing to many of the piecesbeing extracted without noticing any of the authors, before there wasany intention of making them public" (1). That this centoarticulates its compiler's anxiety over possible infringementaction--in what it says and, just as much, in what it doesn'tsay--suggests that not all centos qualified for copyright protection.Even during the brief copyright window, printed works dealing inextensive adaptation and quotation appeared to enjoy inconsistentcopyright at best, tempered by case-specific contingencies, businesscustoms, and the dispositions and cultural capital of the compilers andtheir sources' authors alike.

In 1842, the year of the term-extending Copyright Act, a satiricalmiscellany called George Cruikshank's Omnibus deployed the cento togreat critical effect. The book includes a chapter called "OriginalPoetry," attributed to "Sir Fretful Plagiary" (the nameof the critic character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1779 playThe Critic). The chapter consists of centos and commentary and in itslampoon of "originality" becomes legible as a retort to thecopyright act, as Saint-Amour notes (267). "These poems bear noresemblance to anything ever before offered to the public" thecommentary claims, introducing the first of its "original"poems: "Ode to the Human Heart," a cento of lines from bothpublic-domain and protected works, including a pointed sample of"Intimations of Immortality" by Wordsworth, who had lobbiedfor years to win perpetual, posthumous copyright for authors. The firsttwo stanzas read as follows:

 Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, Pursue the triumph and partake the gale! Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees, To point a moral or adorn a tale. Full many a gem of purest ray serene, Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, Like angels' visits, few and far between, Deck the long vista of departed years. (35)

The commentary subverts its own claims to originality, and sharpensthe satire, by adding a footnote to the first stanza that reads like alegal disclaimer, while repeating the original appropriation. Thefootnote feigns bafflement that "the printer's devil had takenupon himself to make the following additions to these lines," thenreprints the first stanza with parenthetical annotations thatacknowledge the composition's sources: "(Oh! it's DrJohnson)" reads the annotation added to the fourth line. "Whatdoes he mean?" the footnote rhetorically asks. "Does he meanto say he has ever met with any one of those lines before?" (35).This chapter of the Omnibus deflates the discourse of original geniuswith its repetitious insistence on its centos's"originality" and reasserts the intrinsic intertextuality ofliterary production. In one especially suggestive passage, the satirestrikes at Wordsworthian claims to originality and Hazlitt'smisquotations alike, while also putting in question the originality ofEliot's remark: arguing that too few modern poets "want thatgreatest art, the art to steal," the commentary "hold[s] thatin all cases of literary borrowing, or robbery (for it comes to the samething), it is ten million times better to rob or borrow without theleast disguise, equivocation, or mutilation whatsoever. Take the line asyou find it" (38).

Wordsworth's "favourite passages"

The possibility of pure origination makes possible the notion thatlanguage--that most public and publicly created of domains--can beprivatized by an individual. (Macfarlane 2-3)

But despite the flagrancy of the Omnibus's provocation,Wordsworth could hardly complain of such sampling. Much has been writtenon Wordsworth's work for copyright reform; much less on his work asa published "centonist." Susan Eilenberg callsWordsworth's interest in copyright "excessive" (352); itsuggests both an obsession with literature's profitability and alack of business acumen. Wordsworth could not have easily afforded manyof his own books (St Clair 202). Yet he urged at least one acquaintancewho had bought his work not to lend it (Eilenberg 353), exerting a kindof physical rights management. He lobbied for perpetual copyright,arguing it would drive down book prices (Zall 142), while publisherslobbied for it knowing that a longer copyright term would keep priceshigh (St Clair 207-08).

And while Wordsworth professed the original genius of Romanticauthorship, he was, as John Hayden shows, a writer well versed inappropriating an extensive repertoire of English literature. Toillustrate the "eclecticism" and "extent" ofWordsworth's borrowings, Hayden composes his own cento out of themany references to poetic forbears that he finds in no less a touchstonethan "Tintern Abbey." Hayden's comparison of the cento to"Tintern Abbey" counters the traditional reception both ofWordsworth "as preeminently a Romantic poet and of originality aspreeminently a Romantic virtue" (214-15). Moreover, as Haydenobserves, Wordsworth himself published a cento in the 1835 YarrowRevisited volume.

According to Wordsworth's "advertisem*nt" to Yarrow,the book compiles "miscellaneous poems" initially intended for"interspers[ing]" in other selected or collected editions;instead, Wordsworth has gathered these into "a separatevolume," in "consideration of [...] purchasers of his formerworks, who [...] would have reason to complain if they could not procure[these pieces] without being obliged to re-purchase what they alreadypossessed" (v). In other words, while Wordsworth had intended torelease a new "best of" album that would include previouslyuncollected pieces, he instead gathered the latter into their ownB-sides album.

In this book's section called "Evening Voluntaries,"the ninth piece ("ix" 177) is a cento, or as Wordsworthdescribes it, a "compilation" (175):

 IX. Throned in the Sun's descending car What Power unseen diffuses far This tenderness of mind? What Genius smiles on yonder flood? What God in whispers from the wood Bids every thought be kind? [Akenside 153] O ever pleasing Solitude, Companion of the wise and good, [Thomson 346] Thy shades, thy silence, now be mine, Thy charms my only theme; My haunt the hollow cliff whose Pine Waves o'er the gloomy stream; Whence the scared Owl on pinions grey Breaks from the rustling boughs, And down the lone vale sails away To more profound repose! [Beattie 62-63]

As Wordsworth says in the poem's parenthetical preface, thepoem joins "a fine stanza of Akenside,[...] with a still finer byBeattie, by a couplet of Thomson" (175). In the version shown here,I have added parenthetical citations of Wordsworth's sources, sothe reader may compare his borrowings with the original works. Theresulting compilation is a vesper mediation on solitude imbued withsublimity; in it, each quotation occupies a different place inWordsworth's sequence than that which it occupies in its originalpoem. Wordsworth joins two stanzas that are similar in rhythm and themewith an intervening couplet that sustains this rhythm while carryingforward the first stanza's rhyme. Wordsworth borrows very modestlyfrom his sources, especially from Thomson, whose work was at the centreof the disputes that led to the outlawing of perpetual copyright in1774. Nevertheless, all these sources were technically in theperiod's public domain, leaving him free to exploit themcommercially without risking infringement.

His preface to the poem, however, still registers anxiety overpotential infringement. The preface to "ix" reads as follows,and for our purposes it is perhaps of more interest than the poemitself:

For printing ["ix"], some reason should be given, as nota word of it is original: it is simply a fine stanza of Akenside,connected with a still finer by Beattie, by a couplet of Thomson. Thispractice, in which the author sometimes indulges, of linking together,in his own mind, favourite passages from different authors, seems initself unobjectionable: but, as the publishing such compilations mightlead to confusion in literature, he should deem himself inexcusable ingiving this specimen, were it not from a hope that it might open toothers a harmless source of private gratification. (Wordsworth 175)

The preface illustrates how the cento problematizes bothRomanticism and copyright. Wordsworth defends "this practice [...]of linking together [...] favourite passages" as an"unobjectionable" mental exercise; and he "excuses"its publication as a means to the "private" enjoyment ofreaders. Wordsworth denies the poem any originality, describing it as aprivate "indulgence" and as a "specimen" of possible"confusion in literature." (Such confusion did later occur, inmisattributions of Thomson's "cliches" about nature toWordsworth [St Clair 285].) His preface affirms the cento genre'sfunction as an unclearly primary and secondary form, even as literarycriticism: Wordsworth judges Beattie's stanza as "finer"than Akenside's and, in appropriating these "favouritepassages" from all three authors, in this way promotes them,activating the cento's canon-forming function in both private andpublic terms. Wordsworth's preface encodes the arguments that he(together with politicians like Thomas Noon Talfourd) would moreexplicitly make for stronger copyright: arguments on behalf ofimaginative literature and its value to the nation (Vanden Bossche 50).

But in "hoping" the work would produce "privategratification," the preface also encodes the arguments thatopponents of the 1842 Copyright Act would make: on behalf of usefulknowledge and its value to the public interest (46). In addressingcopyright, the preface justifies the poem's publication byspeculating on its private value to readers, "private" not as"property" but as what we'd now call "personal,non-commercial" use. This makes for a curious disavowal of thecommodity status of the printed cento itself, an object of commercialprofit to Wordsworth justified for the non-commercial pleasure it mightafford the reader who pays for it.

The resulting contradictions between public and private inWordsworth's rationale show the pressure copyright exerts overliterary production: as is made explicit here, this cento, like thewhole institution of copyright, "stands squarely on the boundarybetween private and public" (Rose 140). The preface demonstratesWordsworth's preoccupation with copyright, in its conscientiousacknowledgements and its anxiety over "publishing suchcompilations" at a time when compilations and quotations helduncertain and contested copyright status. In the process, the prefaceand the poem, taken together, comprise a prototype for what would laterbe recognized as fair dealing. Wordsworth justifies his "prey[ing]... on the Leaves of ancient Authors" (Pope) as a service toreaders and a duty to posterity.

Contrary to more cursory surveys of Romantic attitudes to thecento, then, period writers display not a straightforward rejection ofthe genre but, rather, a more ambivalent and contradictory disavowal ofit; both Hazlitt and Wordsworth sometimes reject it, sometimes exploitit. Similarly, Macfarlane finds more ambivalence and diversity amongRomantic writers over the definition of originality, arguing that thisambiguity and diversity are only simplified and hom*ogenized into"Romantic ideology" in the Victorians' retroactive,"selective editing" and construction of Romanticism (33).Given the growing maximalism of copyright since 1842, we mightunderstand the broader Victorian construction of Romanticism (Faflak andWright 3) as a production of cultural history conditioned by aconsolidating and expanding copyright regime. The same period whoseascendant ideology of authorial originality demoted the cento tosubliterary status is that whose fraught copyright regime cultivated therevival of this and similar appropriative genres (St Clair 135).

Rights Holders and Users' Rights

There is no such thing as an autonomous text or an original geniusthat can transcend history. (Hutcheon A Theory of Adaptation 111)

Late Romanticism reveals an instructive moment of copyright regimechange: a moment on the cusp of the first of significant andstill-continuing copyright term extensions; a moment on the cusp of theformalization of fair dealing; a moment rich with literary forms thatdemonstrate the contradictions of copyright (sometimes sensationally, asin the Wat Tyler affair). The cento genre in the Romantic periodrepresents a literary precedent for fair dealing and for later cut-up,mixed-up, and mashed-up cultural forms; it also provides an objectlesson in how copyright regulation contradictorily conditions culturalproduction, determining its acceptable forms, its very possibilities.The cento points up contradictions between the practices and regulationof literary production that can illuminate the stakes of the currentcopyfight and help us as scholars to recognize and reflect on our ownpositions in this copyfight.

The long trend, since the late Romantic period, toward morecopyright maximalism impacts critics and scholars, especially those whoinvestigate creative works like art and literature, since creative worksare more strongly protected by copyright than factual works. This trendis producing several chill effects over how we conduct suchinvestigations. One of the most pervasive of these effects is simply theloaded character of public discourse on copyright, which corporaterights owners dominate with language that best serves their interests;thus, we frequently refer to digital copying as "piracy,"although most digital copying purposes are non-piratical (Lessig 53).Another effect is the tightening restriction on how scholars use quotedmaterial, restriction imposed by publishers, literary estates, andsometimes even disciplinary organizations. Publishers normally requestscholarly authors to minimize or just exclude quotations of creativeworks; as David Orr notes, the fees asked by rights holders for poetryexcerpts can fluctuate wildly. At the 2011 congress panel on scholarlypublishing, one university press representative put the matter bluntly:"If you want to quote song lyrics or a poem in your book, I'vegot one word for you: don't." By way of offering an example,the representative mentioned that two lines of a Bob Dylan song couldcost $4000 in permission fees. The American PsychologicalAssociation's online instructions for apa journal authors set outstrict and specific allowances for quotation; single text extractsshorter than four hundred words, or a series of extracts shorter thaneight hundred, constitute the association's fair use limit; theinstructions advise authors to seek permission for any longer extracts("apa"). Major authors have weighed in on public copyrightdebates with statements that antagonize educators (as in AccessCopyright's 2011 pr video "[C]anadian Writers Speak Out")or evince a disturbing unfamiliarity with copyright law (see Knopf onMargaret Atwood's misrepresentations of "fair dealing").Several organizations post guidelines for copyright and fair dealingthat are far more conservative than the law allows; for example, theAucc's 2012 Fair Dealing Policy, which many universities haveadopted, arbitrarily imposes a limit of "up to 10% of a copyrightprotected work" (aucc 1), despite the absence of any suchquantification in the legal language of fair dealing. Amidst theglobalized changes taking place in the copyright regime and the morespecific uncertainties surrounding educational copying and referencepractices, uncertainty and litigation-averse conservatism about fairdealing prevail in Canadian universities and affiliated institutions.

To counter the kind of claims and arguments that corporate rightsholders and intermediaries like Access Copyright have used to divideauthors and educators (Doctorow), three points are worth making. First,the history discussed here has focused on prototypical practices of fairdealing by major authors because they model this practice for authorsand educators alike (particularly for English teachers, to whom thesubject authors are well known). Second, rights holders routinely pursueactions against other authors and creators, not just against critics andeducators: in the fall of 2012, the estate of William Faulkner sued SonyPictures for a nine-word misquotation from Faulkner's 1950 Requiemfor a Nun, used in Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris(Masnick "Faulkner"). Rights holders single out neithercritics and educators, nor parties perceived to have deep pockets (asthe Jammie Thomas case shows [Sandoval]), but litigate far moreindiscriminately, as evinced by the proliferation of copyright"trolls" (law firms that scour the Internet for litigationopportunities) and anti-infringement software that automatically blocksthe online distribution of copyrighted content (as dramatized in theabrupt shutdown of the 2012 Hugo Awards webcast; see Newitz). Third, theglobalized hegemony of neoliberalism, with its ruthless structuralsuppression of the arts and humanities--of social critique--on pretensesof "fiscal responsibility" means that authors and educatorshave far more common cause for solidarity and collaboration thandifferences over copyright regulation.

The potential consequences of these varied but related chilleffects over quotation and appropriation in contemporary art andknowledge production are considerable (as even a cursory browse ofChillingeffects.org suggests; the site monitors legal actions, likecease-and-desist letters, over Internet activity). Legal scholars andusers' rights advocates like Michael Geist, James Boyle, andJeffrey Galin point out that fair use and fair dealing only stay on thebooks if they get regular, vigorous exercise. Failure to do so is torisk losing this user's right altogether, under the persistentpressure of rights-holder lobbying and litigation. This increasinglychilly and jittery climate that surrounds copying in cultural andknowledge production, and in teaching and research, makes recent rulingsin Canada and the U.S. all the more welcome as assertions of fairdealing that entrench it as a robust user's right, toward restoringbalance in copyright law. In Cambridge v. Georgia State (2012), a groupof major academic publishers sought an order against Georgia StateUniversity for the unlicensed copying of text excerpts for teachingpurposes; the court found this copying constitutes permissible fair use(Knopf, "Georgia"). Later in 2012, the Supreme Court of Canadaissued decisions in five copyright cases concerning collecting societiesand fair dealing. In some cases, collecting societies pursued actionsagainst various businesses and institutions as attempts to curb, if notredefine, fair dealing. In other cases, institutions pursued actionsagainst the collecting societies: Alberta (Education) et al. v. AccessCopyright saw every province and territory except Quebec take on AccessCopyright (ac) for a K-12 educational copying tariff.

In all five cases, far from curbing fair dealing, the Supreme Courtdecided emphatically in favour of fair dealing as a user's right,"reaffirming]," as caut says, "the right to copy portionsof materials without permission or payment for non-commercial researchand education purposes." This year's "quintet" ofdecisions reinforce a large and liberal interpretation of study andresearch, as well as fair dealing itself; in addition, they introducethe principle of technological neutrality in copyright (meaning nodifferences among media, e.g. between print and digital, should apply incopyright law). (McCutcheon "Copyright quintent")

In addition, the Canadian government's long-awaited copyrightreform act, Bill c-11, is now law and provides important entrenchmentsand expansions of fair dealing as a user's right. These gains aremitigated, however, by "anti-circumvention" provisions thatprohibit users from circumventing digital rights management (drm) or theother technological protection measures (tpms) commonly found on itemslike e-books, dvds, and smartphones, despite the many lawful purposesfor doing so (Geist "The case" 205). The new language oftechnological neutrality in the 2012 Supreme Court decisions may trumpthe bill's anti-circumvention provisions (Geist"Beyond"). While this difference between legal ruling andlegislation remains an open question for now, it shows thatcontradictions abide in copyright regulation and that fair dealing isfinally gaining leverage to restore balance in the copyright regime,which has too long favoured rights holders over and against users,audiences, and consumers. It is up to educators and cultural producersalike to exercise the new gains in fair dealing, and the reasons fordoing so are legion, advancing broader public interests in the face of aneoliberal government that is actively attacking Canadians'"social literacy" and "manufacturing ignorance"(Brodie).

Without fair dealing, the "breathing room" it affordsinnovation brings us one step closer to the return of perpetualcopyright and the fossilization of the public domain, which wouldrepresent a dire impoverishment of public culture and intellectual life.As critics and scholars of creative works, we have no less aresponsibility than that of the courts to assert fair dealing, to quotecritically and confidently, and to legitimize licensing alternativeslike Open Access, in the service of a "large and liberal"research imagination and a better balance in copyright betweenusers' and rights holders' interests. Today'spredominantly corporate rights holders must not be allowed the completecontrol over the means of cultural production that is the implied end ofevery new trade talk or legislation in which copyright is put on thetable. In that end is also the end of cultural diversity and freedom ofany expression not amenable to the venal economic orthodoxy ofneoliberalism. So "come, writers and critics who prophesize withyour pen, and keep your eyes wide. The chance won't comeagain." (4)

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Athabasca University Academic Research Fundprogram for supporting the production of this research and thanks thereviewers of the draft version, who provided invaluable criticism on it.

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Mark A. McCutcheon

Athabasca University

(1) I am grateful to Anne Korn for translating this quotation fromthe original German.

(2) In addition to developing a cento-like style in his essays,Hazlitt also pursued larger-scale quoting and compiling work that, inone illustrative case, was thwarted for including work by his literarycontemporaries. Hazlitt's Select English Poets, or Elegant Extractsfrom Chaucer to the Present Time included work by contemporary writerslike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Scott, for whichreason it was no sooner printed than it was "rigorouslysuppressed" (Birrell quoted in Gates 170). The book was suppressedin England, that is; as with many suppressed English works, the editionwas shipped to the U.S. (which ignored and flouted foreign copyrightsthroughout most of the nineteenth century), where it "became widelyknown and highly regarded" while remaining "virtually unknownin England" (Gates 171-72).

(3) I am grateful to Sarah Mann for the references to Tushnet andKreisinger.

Mark A. McCUTCHEON is Associate Professor of Literary Studies atAthabasca University. He researches postcolonial popular culture,Romanticism, and copyright. His copyright research has appeared inrefereed journals like Science Fiction Film and Television 2.1 (2009)and Popular Music 26.2 (2007) and on his blog, academicalism.wordpress.com.