Author spotlight: Augusta Dimou
In Contesting Copyright: A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans, Augusta Dimou offers an interdisciplinary and comparative study of the historical development of copyright regimes in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. You can purchase a copy of the book here or read it in open access.
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What first sparked your interest in the history of intellectual property (IP) in East Central Europe and the Balkans?
Augusta Dimou: I came to intellectual property via preoccupation with the generic concept of property. In the 2010s, I was involved in a collaborative project researching different modes of property (agrarian, industrial, and intellectual), and inquiring into the reasons why property has become such an emblematic institution to the regulation of modern societies, both practically and metaphorically. Moreover, we explored why and how different political systems employed different property regimes in order to institutionalize and legitimize their agenda of modernity. It is there that I crossed paths with Hannes Siegrist, an outmost expert in IP history, and became fascinated by the topic. What was the trajectory of this institution that decisively regulated the economy of culture but was barely noticeable to the general public, myself included? It wasn’t long before I became aware that while IP history had been quite well researched for Western Europe, there was comparatively little research available for Southeast and East Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I saw a chance there. That is how I embarked on the topic, through curiosity and by the desire to fill a research lacuna.
What is one book that changed your perspective during your studies?
AD: It is hard to mention one single book that changed my perspective, since IP research is such a truly interdisciplinary field. Naturally, copyright is predominantly the concern of legal historians but it also attracts social, cultural, literary, economic historians, and last but not least, historians of knowledge, technology and media. All those disciplines have a say and often bring different perspectives into IP history. This is what makes the topic so fascinating and so contested at the same time. If I nevertheless had to limit myself to one book, I would choose William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), which paradoxically does not deal strictly with IP but with the ample world of book production, circulation and consumption, reading practices, publishers’ models, book piracy, and much more during the Victorian age. It invites us to understand copyright through the back door, i.e., through commerce and the actors involved in it. Methodologically, it is as eclectic and interdisciplinary as it can get. It combines the impact of economics, legal history, popular culture, societal structure, and bibliographic evidence. An amazing feat.
What do you hope readers will take away from Contesting Copyright?
AD: In the first place, I hope the readers will enjoy the story. It plays out in multiple locations, from authors’ writing desks to international conferences, to the regulation of copyright in imperial colonies, South America, and China. The book operates with variable scales of analysis that include local, national, regional, international, and global perspectives, mostly woven together through comparison. Copyright, though central to cultural production, is often considered to be tedious and inconspicuous, the esoteric preoccupation of a handful of initiated legal experts, and for this reason often stays below the radar of historical analysis. By employing a “thick description” rooted in practice, I hope my book succeeds in making visible the invisible. I also hope to convince the reader to see copyright with different eyes, that is, as an institution at the heart of productive society and as an issue that concerns us all, from video game and internet to library end users. Moreover, I hope the reader will appreciate copyright in historical context by gaining a better understanding of the historical mutations and adaptations copyright has gone through, and the stakes that each age and concomitant technological (r)evolution have generated. Copyright is neither a natural nor a universal value or norm. Rather, it is a man-made solution addressing specific problems in the field of cultural production. Copyright is not the goal, it is only a means in order to reach a goal. Society, in every age, has the responsibility to formulate and safeguard the value of culture and knowledge for humanity. Furthermore, it has to find fair solutions for how to regulate the reciprocal relationships between stakeholders in the field of knowledge and cultural production. By any means, no simple task, indeed!
Which finding from the book surprised you the most?
AD: Well, there were several findings that caught me by surprise. One major revelation was the often observed discrepancy between the rhetoric and the effect of copyright. While the palpable justification for copyright enforcement is protection (of the author, of his/her work), my work revealed that historically copyright fostered predominantly monopolistic expansion (i.e., the protection of markets). While these two functions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they are not synonymous either. Moreover, the aspect of labor that lies at the heart of copyright justification (i.e., remunerate intellectual labor and prevent its encroachment by others) is clearly secondary when it comes to copyright’s core business. In the long chain of copyright stakeholders and beneficiaries, authors can often be found at the tail end of this chain, not necessarily at its front. Another surprising aspect was the asymmetrical effect that copyright could have in different cultural markets. While in some cases, particularly the most dynamic, expansive, and commercialized cultural markets, copyright apparently had a noteworthy regulatory function, this was less the case in small markets either due to the size of the consumers or the ambit of the particular language. In such cases, the introduction of copyright in the cultural sphere had a very limited effect, and sometimes no effect at all. Many more thought-provoking aspects can be found in the book, and I hope readers will have the chance to find out themselves.
What project are you working on now?
AD: Currently, I am participating in an ERC project hosted by the New Europe College in Bucharest (Romania), which is dealing with the transnational history of corruption in Southeast and East Central Europe from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. I am part of a wonderful team of international scholars who examine, everyone for their own region and area of competence, how discourses of corruption became an important political currency for negotiating modernity during the Sattelzeit. At the same time, building on my work on IP, I am currently devising a project on the history of news agencies in East and Southeast Europe, which from a similar interdisciplinary perspective will examine the distribution and flow of information at the intersection between local, national, regional, international, and global contexts and institutions of news production.
What advice would you give to young scholars writing their first books?
AD: Experiment, experiment, experiment! Be ready to explore and delve into things you never thought might form part of your research endeavor when you started out your research. Be systematic about your research design, but let yourself be equally guided by curiosity; while exploiting your sources, learn to listen to them (also their silences); play with the scales of analysis, the chronological framework, the contours of your object of analysis in order to find out what kind of story each configuration of scale, time, and place will reveal to you; work interdisciplinarily and allow yourself to get practical, methodological, and theoretical inspiration and advice from neighboring disciplines (sociology, anthropology, literary studies, science, and area studies and so on); use not only your analytical skills but also your (historical) instinct and your imagination when you go about understanding a phenomenon. While rigorously committed to reconstructing historical truth, also be prepared to accept that our accounts are partial. After all, history is not what happened in the past but our perception of what happened in the past.