The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property

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.