<
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200410/10255644272/happy-birthday-statute-anne.shtml>
"The Statute of Anne, whose anniversary of coming into force on April
10, 1710 we celebrate today, is one of the founding pillars of modern US
and UK copyright law. At the time of its passage it reflected an
enormous change in attitude about how the copy right should be handled.
Before it came along English law (which is not to be confused with
Scottish law, whose own system already bore more features of what we
would recognize as modern copyright law) granted a monopoly in the copy
right to a handful of printers that had the king's permission to
publish. (It was fitting, in fact, that the Copyright History conference
itself took place in a hall of the Stationers’ Company, one of the most
powerful companies of the 17th century that then had near-exclusive
license to print.) This use of a royal printing license to create a
monopoly in publishing limited to just these few printers gave the
government the ability to also limit what ideas could be published,
which necessarily limited discourse.
However, the political pressure for democratic reform eventually caught
up with this system, and by 1695 it finally gave way for good. And that
set the stage for the Statute of Anne to be enacted in 1710, which
changed the approach to copyright entirely. While the Licensing Act of
1662 was “[a]n act for preventing the frequent abuses in printing
seditious treasonable and unlicensed books and pamphlets,” the Statute
of Anne was purposefully “[a]n act for the encouragement of learning.”
Whereas the former was about government control over ideas, the latter
was about spreading them. Instead of using royal printing licenses to
administer the copy right as a means of controlling discourse, by its
very design the Statute of Anne was meant to stimulate it."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
