One of the classes I'm taking this term is called the History and Future of the Book. One of the major assignments in the class comes in 4 parts: a presentation, short essay, tiktok/short video, and blog post on a chosen topic. This is my blog post for that assignment. I'll talk a little about what I learned, but I mostly want to share what my learning process has been like for this assignment.
I picked the topic of the invention of copyright, and researching it was certainly an experience. I started by acquiring about 13-14 different sources to read through, including 11 physical books. In order to get most of these books I had to find the Law Library on my Campus, and from there had to navigate to the Stacks to find majority of the books I needed. I'm very thankful for the librarian who helped me locate the Stacks hidden in the basement of the building. As a whole, finding my sources required a good amount of effort!
That's to say nothing of reading my sources. Given that most of the books I used were from the Law Library, I found that the texts expected me to already be familiar with copyright and some of its history, which was challenging. In the end, I narrowed my sources down to 7, and spent an entire day reading them thanks to my procrastination. My goal for my presentation was to develop a sort of timeline regarding the invention of copyright, and that was a little more challenging than I had anticipated. I had to piece together chunks of history from many sources in order to get a clear sense of the events. As my knowledge stands now, this is my simplified timeline (emphasis on simplified!):
15th century (1400's)- Printing Press takes off
1487- Court of Star Chamber established in England to control the press
1530- Henry VIII's proclamation for a licensing system
1556- London booksellers establish Stationer's Company
1557- Royal Charter gives SC control over book trade
1637- CSC attempts to codify its laws
1643- first of many Licensing Acts, based on CSC's laws
1662- every printed item must be registered with SC
1695- Licensing Act expires, booksellers lobby for protection
1710- Statute of Anne invents copyright
1774- Donaldson v. Becket ends argument for perpetual copyright
To sum up centuries worth of developments, here are the absolute basics: if you wanted to print a book, you either had to get permission from the Crown or register with the Stationer's Company, who would then get the legal rights to the copying and publication of the book. The Stationer's Company was allowed to run its monopoly because it centralized the book trade, which made censorship by the Crown easier. 1710's Statute of Anne is the first time that authors get copyright, but its wording is super vague and things continue as before until 1774. Publishers argued that they should have perpetual copyright, rather than the 21 years allowed to them by the SoA, since you don't lose the rights to a piece of land after a certain amount of time. This argument is demolished in the Donaldson v. Becket case.
We are also asked to include at least one image in our post, and so I figured I'd use the image of the Statute of Anne. I found this on Wikipedia, here is the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
If for some reason you find yourself interested in the invention of copyright, I'll list the sources I used below. My recommendations are the Ross article and the book by Birrell, even though it is very old (copyright from 1899!)
Works Cited
Edited Bently, Lionel; Suthersanen, Uma; Torremans, Paul. Global Copyright: Three Hundred
Years Since the Statue of Anne, From 1709 to Cyberspace. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.,
2010.
Edited Porsdam, Helle. Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the
Commodification of Creativity. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2006.
Birrell, Augustine. Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books. Cassel and
Company, Ltd., 1899.
Loewenstien, Joseph. The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. University of
Chicago Press, 2002.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Ross, Trevor. “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26,
No. 1, 1992, Pp. 1-27.
Slauter, Will. Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright. Stanford University Press, 2019.
Teilmann-Lock, Stina. The Object of Copyright: A Conceptual History of Originals and Copies
in Literature, Art and Design. Routledge, 2016.
