The Booksellers' Monopoly

The Statute of Anne, Donaldson v. Beckett, and the Birth of the Public Domain

A physical acre of Devonshire pasture can be grazed by only one flock of sheep at a time; if a hundred strangers drive their cattle onto the grass, the pasture is trampled into mud. A printed poem or a mathematical treatise obeys the opposite physics: ten thousand readers in Edinburgh, Dublin, and Boston can read copies of Paradise Lost simultaneously without diminishing a single syllable held by a reader in London. Yet for 150 years after Queen Mary I granted a royal charter to the Worshipful Company of Stationers in 1557, the guild of London printers and booksellers forced English law to treat literature exactly like real estate.

Under the Stationers' Company regime, only members of the London guild were legally permitted to operate printing presses, and whenever a guild bookseller entered the title of a manuscript into the Hall Register near St. Paul's Cathedral, the cartel claimed a perpetual copy-right over that text until the end of time. The living author was merely a piecework supplier. In 1667, John Milton sold the manuscript of Paradise Lost to printer Samuel Simmons for five pounds down and two conditional five-pound payments; once the bill of sale was signed, the London booksellers claimed they owned Paradise Lost forever, keeping book prices artificially high and passing shares of Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton from father to son like landed manors.

When the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695, ending pre-publication state censorship, the London booksellers lobbied Parliament for a new statute to rescue their guild monopoly. Instead of rubber-stamping perpetual ownership, however, reformist parliamentarians influenced by John Locke and Daniel Defoe drafted a legislative inversion. Enacted in April 1710 as the Statute of Anne (8 Anne, c. 19)—formally titled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned—the law dismantled the Stationers' cartel through four structural mechanisms:

• Authorial Origination: For the first time in legal history, initial ownership of a text was vested in the author* who composed it rather than the guild printer who owned the press.
• * The Strict Statutory Clock: For any newly composed book printed after April 10, 1710, the exclusive right to print and reprint lasted for fourteen years from first publication, renewable for one additional fourteen-year term only if the author was still alive at the end of the first term (while pre-existing books received a single twenty-one-year transitional wind-down).
• * Mandatory Library Deposit: To claim statutory protection, the publisher had to register the title at Stationers' Hall before publication and deliver nine free physical copies for public scholarship—to the Royal Library, the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen, Sion College, and the Faculty of Advocates.
• * Automatic Expiration into the Public Domain: The moment the fourteen- or twenty-eight-year statutory clock expired, the monopoly vanished and any printer in the realm was free to publish the work.

Refusing to surrender their fortune when those statutory terms expired in the 1730s and 1740s, the wealthy London booksellers concocted an audacious legal workaround. When enterprising Edinburgh publisher Alexander Donaldson opened a shop in the Strand in 1763 selling inexpensive pocket reprints of James Thomson's poem The Seasons—whose twenty-eight-year copyright under the Statute of Anne had expired in 1757—the London cartel sued him. They argued that alongside the Statute of Anne's temporary statutory right, authors possessed a perpetual common-law copyright under natural law, which authors assigned forever to the London booksellers upon selling a manuscript. In 1769, Lord Mansfield and a divided Court of King's Bench endorsed this theory in Millar v. Taylor, and London bookseller Thomas Beckett—who had bought the shares of The Seasons at a tavern auction for 505 pounds—obtained a Chancery injunction shutting down Donaldson's press.

Donaldson appealed to the House of Lords. For three weeks in February 1774, crowds packed Westminster as the eleven common-law judges advised the peers, and Lord Camden warned that perpetual copyright would lock all human knowledge inside the vaults of a few mercenary booksellers who could set whatever price they pleased. On February 22, 1774, the House of Lords voted 22 to 11 in Donaldson v. Beckett to overturn the Chancery injunction, ruling that once a book is published, any common-law property right is extinguished and governed solely by the finite clock of the Statute of Anne. The morning after the Lords announced their verdict on February 22, 1774, the centuries-old London booksellers' cartel collapsed, flooding Britain with inexpensive pocket editions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Locke and inspiring the Limited Times clause of the United States Constitution.