Maps, Copies, and Rights: Boundaries of Ownership in Early American Piracy

The origins and development of copyright practices in the eighteenth century were at once a local, national, and imperial project. While literary property itself was limited to English soil — and English citizens — across the Atlantic a group of colonial and Indigenous Americans sought to establish an alternative legal regime with substantial political ramifications, ramifications that reverberated in the debates over intellectual property in the early national and antebellum periods.