Statute of Anne (1710): The First Copyright Law in Britain

The Statute of Anne was a British law, passed in 1710 and in force from 10 April that year, that is generally recognised as the world’s first copyright statute. Formally titled “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning”, it gave authors, and those to whom they sold their rights, the exclusive right to print their books for a fixed number of years. It replaced a system in which a guild of London printers and booksellers had controlled the trade, and it established the principle that copyright should be limited in time.

Background: licensing and the Stationers’ Company

Since the sixteenth century, printing in England had been regulated through the Stationers’ Company, the London guild of printers and booksellers. Members recorded their claim to a book in the Company’s register at Stationers’ Hall, which gave them, in practice, a perpetual right to print it. This system was tied to government censorship: the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 required books to be approved before publication.

In 1695 Parliament allowed the Licensing Act to lapse. The booksellers lost the legal backing for their monopoly, and cheap reprints, often from Scotland and Ireland, multiplied. Over the following years the Stationers petitioned Parliament repeatedly for new protection. Writers such as Daniel Defoe, in his Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704), argued that authors deserved a property in their own work.

The Act and its terms

The bill was introduced in the House of Commons in January 1710. During its passage it was reshaped to emphasise the encouragement of learning and the rights of authors, rather than the booksellers’ interests. It received royal assent on 5 April 1710 and came into effect on 10 April.

Its main provisions were:

• Books already printed: the owners of existing rights received a single term of 21 years from 10 April 1710.
• New books: the author or the author’s assignee received the sole right of printing for 14 years from publication.
• Renewal: if the author was still living when the first term ended, the right returned to the author for a further 14 years.
• Registration: a title had to be entered in the register at Stationers’ Hall before publication for an action to be brought.
• Penalties: infringing copies were forfeited and destroyed, and the offender paid a penny for every sheet, half to the Crown and half to the person suing.
• Deposit: nine copies of each book were to be delivered for the use of the royal library, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Scottish universities, Sion College in London and the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh.
• Prices: a procedure allowed complaints about unreasonably high book prices to be heard by senior officials.

The Act applied to the new Kingdom of Great Britain, created by the Acts of Union of 1707, and so covered both England and Scotland.

The battle of the booksellers

When the 21-year terms for old books expired in 1731, the leading London booksellers claimed that authors had always held a perpetual right at common law, which the statute had merely supplemented. Scottish and provincial publishers who reprinted classic works challenged this view.

In Millar v Taylor (1769) the Court of King’s Bench sided with perpetual copyright. Five years later, in Donaldson v Beckett (1774), the House of Lords overturned that position and confirmed that, once the statutory term ended, a published work could be freely reprinted. This created what we now call the public domain.

Legacy

The Statute of Anne changed the idea of copyright from a printer’s trade privilege into a right originating with authors, although in practice most authors sold their rights to booksellers. It also introduced the lasting principle that copyright should be limited so that works eventually become available to all.

Later British acts extended the term, and the statute was repealed by the Copyright Act of 1842. Its influence, however, crossed the Atlantic: the first United States Copyright Act of 1790 followed its model of a 14-year term with a 14-year renewal. In a sense it completed a process that began with the printing press, which first made the mass copying of books possible.

Timeline

• 1662: The Licensing of the Press Act ties printing rights to censorship.
• 1695: The Licensing Act lapses.
• 1704: Daniel Defoe argues for authors’ property in his Essay on the Regulation of the Press.
• 1710, January: The bill is introduced in the House of Commons.
• 1710, 5 April: The Act receives royal assent.
• 1710, 10 April: The Statute of Anne comes into force.
• 1731: The 21-year terms for older books expire.
• 1774: Donaldson v Beckett rejects perpetual copyright.
• 1790: The United States adopts a copyright act modelled on the statute.

Why it matters

The Statute of Anne laid down the basic bargain of modern copyright: a temporary monopoly for creators to encourage new work, followed by free public use. Debates today about copyright terms, publishers’ power and access to knowledge still return to the questions it raised in 1710.