Writing and literary work in copyright: A binational and historical analysis

Copyright would seem to be an appropriate subject for the discipline of social epistemology envisaged by Shera. Social epistemology was to be concerned with the intellectual processes of society as a whole, rather than primarily of the individual. This study traces the development of significant terms in United Kingdom and United States copyright: of writing, with some indications of contrasts with speech, and of a literary work or other artifact representing skill or labor in which intellectual property can inhere. This analysis is undertaken with a dual intention: first, and most importantly, to support the thesis that writing and the faculty for intellectual labor are unifying principle for documents and computers; and, second, to place the assimilation of computer programs to copyright protection in its historical context. The incorporation of computer programs to copyright protection, along with other written products of intellectual labor, can be read to imply, but does not state, that writing constitutes a unifying principles for documents and computers. Yet, if the insight offered by this categorization is pursued, it can yield a description of the development of computing from pre‐existing information technologies of greater explanatory power than the otherwise predominant analogies between the computer and human brain or mind. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.