Hence the question posed in this lecture: what is a book? It's not a new question. Kant formulated it explicitly in 1798 in his Metaphysical Principles of the Doctrine of Law. The first reason for this was his involvement in the debate on literary property and counterfeit books that had been going on in Germany since 1773. This discussion, which involved philosophers, poets and publishers, had to do with the specific features of publishing activity in Germany. The political fragmentation of the Empire imposes strict limits on bookshop privileges, whose legality applies only to a particular - and often restricted - territory. As a result, the reproduction of works outside the sovereignty that granted the privilege was massive, and while it was held to be legally legitimate by booksellers and publishers located in other states, it was perceived as intellectually illegitimate by authors and their first publishers, who saw themselves as unjustly robbed of their rights. For Kant, as for Klopstock, Becker and Fichte, it was therefore a matter of formulating principles capable of justifying authors' ownership of their writings, and thus of having their publishers recognize authors' remuneration, not as a favor, a grace or an " honorarium ", but as a just reward for the work of writing.
But there is another reason for the unexpected question Kant poses to himself in the "Doctrine of Law" of the Metaphysics of Morals , which is detached from any specific circumstance, since the object of the "philosophical doctrine of law" is to establish universal principles a priori, disregarding particular cases. Thus, Kant bases the division of rights that can be acquired by contract on the very form of these contracts, and not on the subject matter of the exchanges. The three classes thus distinguished are contracts of beneficence (loans, donations), onerous contracts, subdivided into contracts of alienation (exchange, sale, loan) and contracts of hire (hire of a thing or of labour power, power of attorney contracts, which presuppose a " mandatum "), and contracts of guarantee (pledging, surety). If Kant comes to consider a particular object, the book, within this universal taxonomy, it is because it poses a specific problem within the class of power of attorney contracts. As a "material product", the book is the object of a real right , defined as the right over a thing that authorizes private use shared by all those in possession of the same thing, such as the purchasers of different copies of an edition. But a book is also a form of speech, the object of a personal right that justifies unique and exclusive ownership. It can therefore be the subject of a power of attorney contract authorizing the management of an asset in the name of another, without alienating the property of its possessor. This places the book in the class of "mandates" and rental contracts, rather than alienation contracts. The bookseller acts on behalf of the author, whose ownership is not transferred, and not in his place. The illegitimacy of reproductions made at the expense of the bookseller-publisher, who has received a mandate from the author, and the author's personal right, a unique and exclusive right, inalienable and imprescriptible, which prevails over the real right attached to the object, to the "opusmechanicum " which has become the property of its purchaser, are thus founded together. Reproduction of the speech is acceptable only if it is legally based on a mandate given by the author; conversely, ownership - albeit legitimate from the point of view of real right - of a copy of this speech is insufficient to justify its reproduction.
