Lord Byron's Trademark

Michel Foucault wrote that "an author's name" enables us not only "to group together a certain number of texts" but also to "differentiate them from and contrast them to others." Scholars have explored the relation between copyright law and concepts of authorship, but the legal principle which is most relevant to the differentiation Foucault described is trademark, and this principle was first applied to authorial identity in the case of Byron v. Johnston (1816). After James Johnston published Lord Byron's Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Byron's publisher John Murray, acting in the poet's name, was granted an injunction ordering Johnston to stop representing Pilgrimage to the Holy Land to the public as Byron's composition. The lord chancellor, Lord Eldon, granted the injunction on unusual grounds: the Court of Chancery would restrain someone from diverting to himself the benefits of another person's reputation for desirable products. Authorial identity here was less a kind of literary property than a kind of commercial good will.