Since the acquirer of such a product possesses, in the copy as a single thing, its full use and value, he is a complete and free owner of it as a single thing, although the author of the writing or the inventor of the technical device remains the owner of the universal manner of multiplying such products and things — a universal manner which he has not directly alienated, but may reserve to himself as a peculiar mode of expression of his own.

The substantial element of the right of the writer and the inventor is not, in the first place, to be sought in the fact that, in alienating the individual copy, he arbitrarily makes it a condition that the possibility, coming thereby into the possession of the other, of likewise producing such products as things, should not become the property of the other but should remain the property of the originator. The first question is whether such a separation of the ownership of the thing from the possibility, given along with it, of likewise producing it, is admissible in concept and does not annul full, free ownership (§ 62) — on which point it then falls to the arbitrary discretion of the first spiritual producer either to keep this possibility to himself, or to alienate it as a value, or to attach no value to it for himself and to relinquish it along with the individual thing. For this possibility has the peculiarity of being that side of the thing by virtue of which it is not merely a possession but a resource (see below, § 170 ff.), so that this lies in the particular manner of external use made of the thing, a manner distinct and separable from the use to which the thing is immediately destined (it is not, as it is called, a natural accession such as foetura is). Since, then, the distinction falls within what is, by its nature, divisible — within external use — the retaining of one part while alienating the other part of the use is not the reservation of a lordship without utile. – The merely negative, but very first, promotion of the sciences and the arts consists in securing those who work in them against theft and affording them the protection of their property; just as the very first and most important promotion of trade and industry was to secure it against robbery on the highways. – Since, moreover, the product of spirit has the determination of being apprehended by other individuals and made their own in representation, memory, thought, and so forth, its expression — whereby it becomes something learned (for learning does not mean merely committing words to memory by rote; the thoughts of others can be grasped only through thinking, and this rethinking is itself also learning) — likewise becomes a thing capable of alienation; some peculiar form is always readily found, so that people may regard the resource arising from this as their own property, and claim for themselves the right to such production on that basis. The propagation of the sciences in general, and the specific business of teaching in particular, is, according to its determination and duty — most definitely in the case of the positive sciences, the doctrine of a church, jurisprudence, and so forth — the repetition of fixed thoughts already expressed in general and taken up from without, and hence also in writings whose purpose is this business of teaching and the propagation and dissemination of the sciences. To what extent the form that results from such repetitive expression transforms the existing scientific treasury, and in particular the thoughts of those others who are still in external ownership of their* products of spirit, into a special spiritual property of the reproducing individual, thereby giving him the right to make them his external property as well — or to what extent it does not — that is, to what extent such repetition in a literary work becomes plagiarism — cannot be stated by any precise determination, and hence cannot be settled legally or by statute. Plagiarism would therefore have to be a matter of honor, and be restrained by that. – Laws against unauthorized reprinting accordingly fulfill their purpose of legally securing the property of writers and publishers, though only within a determinate, yet very limited, scope. The ease of deliberately altering something in the form, or of contriving some small modification to a great science or a comprehensive theory that is another’s work, or, indeed, the sheer impossibility of adhering, in the exposition of what one has grasped, to the very words of the originator, gives rise — quite apart from the particular purposes for which such repetition becomes necessary — to an infinite multiplicity of alterations, which stamp another’s property with the more or less superficial mark of being one’s own; as the hundreds upon hundreds of compendia, extracts, collections, and so forth, arithmetic books, geometries, devotional writings, and the like demonstrate, and as every idea in a critical journal, literary almanac, encyclopedia, and so on can immediately be repeated, likewise under the same or an altered title, yet claimed as something original — whereby the profit that his work or idea promised the writer or the inventive entrepreneur is easily brought to nothing, or mutually diminished, or ruined outright. – As for the effect of honor against plagiarism, it is striking that the expression plagiarism, or even learned theft, is no longer heard — whether because honor has had its effect in driving out plagiarism, or because it has ceased to be contrary to honor, and the feeling about it has disappeared, or because some small idea and the alteration of an external form is now rated so highly as originality and independent production that the very thought of plagiarism no longer arises.

* [Handwritten:] i.e., that of the other.