The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship

Copyright Law's Musical Work

“…Following Mark Rose (1988Rose ( , 1993, I would argue that the influence of copyright law on the arts in the late 18th century was not confined to its role in facilitating commerce in cultural products and contributing generally to changing perceptions of the relationship between commerce and creativity. Rather, the very manner in which the artist's identity and that of the work of art were thought about and discussed by Romantic philosophers, theorists and critics in the 19th century was anticipated by the developing discourse of copyright law in the century before.…”

“…Tainted as their claim was by a history of associations with monopoly privileges, censorship, and the absolutist conceptions of royal power that had supported both, successive requests between 1695 and 1703 for a restoration of the traditional controls administered by the Stationers' Company met with the increasingly trenchant resistance of Whigs and moderate Tories in both Houses of Parliament (Feather, 1980). The House of Commons elected in 1705 finally acceded to the demand for regulation of the trade, but insisted that exclusive printing rights be vested in authors, not publishers, in order to prevent the perpetuation of the established publishers' monopoly of valuable old 'copies' such as the works of Shakespeare and Milton (Rose, 1988). The publishers in their turn acquiesced, knowing that transferable authorial rights would simply be the means by which the first publisher of an author's text could acquire the right to prevent the printing and publication of cheaper identical copies by trade rivals.…”

“…Much more problematic than the analogy between physical and mental labour, however, was the conceptual leap from the notion of property in tangibles to that of property in texts: the leap to regarding texts as 'things' (Rose, 1988(Rose, , 1993Sherman and Bently, 1999: 25-8). Indeed, the really intractable obstacle to the notion that the labourer's entitlement was proprietary rather than merely personal was not the nature of the authorial input, but the character of the output: the text's apparent lack of the quality of 'thing-ness'.…”

Special Issue: ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty‐First Century’– A Conclusion

“…If patentable, literary texts could be seen as machines which, once the patent expires, others could adapt and remodel. Yet for another 50 years, until 1774 Donaldson versus Becket, all the booksellers and printers in the business continued to buy and sell copyrights as if they were perpetual, operating according to the model of literature as property rather than patent (Rose). Writing in this liminal moment, Pope could in fact see his own work more as a patented machine than territory staked out in perpetuity.…”

Copyright, Culture and Private Power

“…T he tran sition from th e book licensing system ope ra ting in Tudor En gland, which conferre d extensive power on th e Co mpany of Stationers, to the C op yright Act of 1709 aim ed ostensibly to restrike th e ba lance of pow er between aut ho rs and publishers.f The reality seems to have been that the Act was intended to resolve th e co nflict which eru pted between the members of th e Company of Stationers and th e provincial bo oksellers after th e abando nme nt of th e system of press licen sing. 23 C ert ainly in a number of respects the Act codified longstanding practices involvin g th e C ompan y of Stationer s.f" In any case, even ifi t can be argue d that th e Act was primarily abo ut adj usting th e balance betw een publishers and autho rs, it is arguable that an y balan ce whi ch was achieved has been gradually ero ded.…”