was in territory controlled, or about to be controlled, by the Royalists. He feared confiscation of his valuables and muniments and so had engaged Bracegirdle to move them, including the rarest items in the library, to his London house. What happened, however, was that the Royalist forces moved on London, blocking his path. So he buried the treasure and sent Dunbarton a letter informing him where he’d buried the swag.
Buried treasure, said I, noncommittally, and I asked him what this had to do with intellectual property. The library, he said, the library.
I asked him what was in the library, if he knew.
He didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I knew what the Leicester Codex was. As a matter of fact I did. One of the growing edges of the IP game is the digitization of books, manuscripts, and artworks, and the assignment and negotiation of the various rights thereto pertaining. Mr. William Gates, the software billionaire, is a major player in this field, and IP lawyers tend to keep themselves apprised of his many doings. I told Bulstrode that I knew that some ten years ago Gates had purchasedthe Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s notebooks, for thirty million dollars.
At this, Bulstrode blurted out, Dunbarton had a Shakespeare manuscript. Can you imagine the value of such a thing? Now all reticence was gone, an odd little light shone in his mild eyes.
Those eyes were starting to positively bulge here, so I nodded amiably and said I supposed it would be worth a great deal, and with these words there struck the first pangs of that leaden claustral feeling I always get in the presence of a maniac. It is sadly not an unfamiliar one, for we IP lawyers are all too well-acquainted with the mad. No showbiz hit, no world-conquering diet book, no moneymaking product of the human imagination ever appears unaccompanied by a gang of shabby pretenders clutching greasy folders stuffed with documentary proof that they thought of it first. And they don’t want to hear that no one can copyright an idea, a concept. They don’t want to hear that ideas are like water or air or carbon, free for the taking, and the only thing from which loot can be wrenched by copyright is a particular set of words, or musical notes, or chemicals. I admit I had not had the Secret Document type before, but here he now was. I recall hoping that the poor bastard’s check was good.
So I waited for the florescence of the craziness: an outpouring of hectic enthusiasm about how important the lost manuscript was, what literary secrets it might reveal, its provenance, how close he was to cracking the secret code, but, somewhat to my surprise, he seemed to deflate after his revelation, and I thought that he was regretting having shared so much, and had already started to work me into his paranoia, yet another potential thief of his Precious.
We signed the forms and he left. I had Ms. M. zip downstairs and deposit the check and place the package in our safe-deposit box; and then, although I was feeling the belly rumbles of my delayed lunch, I turned to my computer and googled Andrew Bulstrode, and found a good deal more on Dr. B. than one might have expected on a simple academic. Five years ago, it appeared, Bulstrode had been a professor of English lit at Oxford, an expert on Shakespearean editions, and he had fallen prey to a man who turned out to be one of the great forgers of modern times.Leonard Hastings Pascoe was a name that even I recognized. His specialty was early printing—incunabula—and manuscripts associated with significant authors, and he was very clever indeed. He claimed to have discovered a new bad quarto of Hamlet . A bad quarto is a sort of early literary piracy, in which printers would assemble a play from the memories of actors, and whatever actual scripts they could get hold of, and print it without the permission of the author.
This was apparently a major find, for (according to the googled articles) the publishing history of Hamlet
Buried treasure, said I, noncommittally, and I asked him what this had to do with intellectual property. The library, he said, the library.
I asked him what was in the library, if he knew.
He didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I knew what the Leicester Codex was. As a matter of fact I did. One of the growing edges of the IP game is the digitization of books, manuscripts, and artworks, and the assignment and negotiation of the various rights thereto pertaining. Mr. William Gates, the software billionaire, is a major player in this field, and IP lawyers tend to keep themselves apprised of his many doings. I told Bulstrode that I knew that some ten years ago Gates had purchasedthe Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s notebooks, for thirty million dollars.
At this, Bulstrode blurted out, Dunbarton had a Shakespeare manuscript. Can you imagine the value of such a thing? Now all reticence was gone, an odd little light shone in his mild eyes.
Those eyes were starting to positively bulge here, so I nodded amiably and said I supposed it would be worth a great deal, and with these words there struck the first pangs of that leaden claustral feeling I always get in the presence of a maniac. It is sadly not an unfamiliar one, for we IP lawyers are all too well-acquainted with the mad. No showbiz hit, no world-conquering diet book, no moneymaking product of the human imagination ever appears unaccompanied by a gang of shabby pretenders clutching greasy folders stuffed with documentary proof that they thought of it first. And they don’t want to hear that no one can copyright an idea, a concept. They don’t want to hear that ideas are like water or air or carbon, free for the taking, and the only thing from which loot can be wrenched by copyright is a particular set of words, or musical notes, or chemicals. I admit I had not had the Secret Document type before, but here he now was. I recall hoping that the poor bastard’s check was good.
So I waited for the florescence of the craziness: an outpouring of hectic enthusiasm about how important the lost manuscript was, what literary secrets it might reveal, its provenance, how close he was to cracking the secret code, but, somewhat to my surprise, he seemed to deflate after his revelation, and I thought that he was regretting having shared so much, and had already started to work me into his paranoia, yet another potential thief of his Precious.
We signed the forms and he left. I had Ms. M. zip downstairs and deposit the check and place the package in our safe-deposit box; and then, although I was feeling the belly rumbles of my delayed lunch, I turned to my computer and googled Andrew Bulstrode, and found a good deal more on Dr. B. than one might have expected on a simple academic. Five years ago, it appeared, Bulstrode had been a professor of English lit at Oxford, an expert on Shakespearean editions, and he had fallen prey to a man who turned out to be one of the great forgers of modern times.Leonard Hastings Pascoe was a name that even I recognized. His specialty was early printing—incunabula—and manuscripts associated with significant authors, and he was very clever indeed. He claimed to have discovered a new bad quarto of Hamlet . A bad quarto is a sort of early literary piracy, in which printers would assemble a play from the memories of actors, and whatever actual scripts they could get hold of, and print it without the permission of the author.
This was apparently a major find, for (according to the googled articles) the publishing history of Hamlet
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