Abstract
The objective of the study is to present Kant's conception of copyright and publishing law. The author proceeds from two of Kant's lesser-known texts, the article "On the Injustice of Reprinting Books" ("Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks", 1785) and the treatise On Turning Out Books (Über die Buchmacherei, 1798), which he analyzes and interprets in relation to § 31 of Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), where Kant lays out and tries to answer the question "What is a book?" in the context of the discussions and conflicts of the period.
On this basis, the author comes to the conclusion that Kant derives his conception of copyright and publishing law from his conception of the nature and function of the book as a manuscript and a printed text. It is further argued that the texts of Kant being scrutinized here can be additionally used for both historical as well as philosophical and systematic research of the issues related, on the one hand, to copyright and publishing law and, on the other, to the problematic of textuality and mediality, which is currently being discussed in the fields of systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy, including professional Kantian research.