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The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 80, Number 3, Fall 2013
- pp. 747-782
- 10.1353/elh.2013.0026
- Article
- Additional Information
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The copyright debate of the eighteenth century was informed by two antithetical accounts of style. From an older rhetorical view that stressed language’s refinement was derived the idea/expression dichotomy, the principle that copyright protects not a work’s ideas but only its arrangement of words. From a newer view of style as an expression of self was developed a modern defense of copyright as promoting the expressive diversity essential to a democratic polity. This essay considers how, with one account guiding the law’s application and the other its rationale, incompatibility helped to render copyright effectively indifferent to stylistic creativity.