Audiobook · read by volunteers
Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
Read by D.E. Wittkower · 1 chapter · 27 min
About the book
In this short essay the German philosopher Immanuel Kant takes up a question that still feels very current: is it wrong to copy and sell a book without the permission of its author? Kant does not answer with a rule of thumb or a complaint about lost income. He builds an argument from first principles, asking what a publisher actually does when he prints another person's words, and whose voice is really speaking through the printed page. Along the way he distinguishes the physical book from the speech it carries, and he explains why he thinks unlicensed copying cannot be squared with justice. The reasoning is compact and sometimes demanding, yet it rewards close listening. At about half an hour, in a single recording, this is an easy way to hear one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment tackle a problem of ownership, authorship and public speech that has not gone away.
Introduction
Immanuel Kant, who lived from 1724 to 1804, spent his whole career in Königsberg and became one of the most influential philosophers in the European tradition. His major works on knowledge, morality and judgment are famously dense. By contrast, this piece is a short, focused text on a practical legal and ethical problem. It was first published in 1785, in a Berlin journal.
The essay deals with the reprinting of books by publishers who had no right to do so, a common practice in the German-speaking lands of his day, when there was no unified copyright law. Kant treats the matter as a question of right rather than of commerce. His central point is that a book is not simply an object but the delivery of an author's speech to the public, and that only someone authorised by the author may speak in his name. The English text heard here is a translation by John Richardson.
The recording lasts about half an hour and is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, D. E. Wittkower. Because the argument is brief and tightly built, it works well as an introduction to Kant's way of thinking. It also gives a historical perspective on debates about copying, publishing and authors' rights that continue in the digital age. Those who have never tried reading Kant will find this a gentle first step, since the subject is concrete and the essay is short. It also shows that the great philosophers did not only write about knowledge and metaphysics; they also thought hard about everyday institutions such as publishing and the law, and they did so with the same rigour.
Public domain
Immanuel Kant died in 1804: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text