Page 40 - A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law：An Intermediary-oriented Approach

A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law: Chapter 2 Copyright in the Pre-Internet Age: An Intermediary-oriented Approach
An Intermediary-oriented Approach

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control over speech remained in the hands of reliable publishers. Knowledge has always
been a weapon for social change. By enabling the large-scale dissemination of knowledge
and printing, the power of knowledge as a social influence intensified. That is why Elizabeth
Eisenstein said the Protestant Reformation could not have succeeded without the printing
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press. To prevent the dissemination of religious and political books that might undermine
the legitimacy of the existing regime, Henry VII placed censorship in the hands of a loyal
entity who received ownership of the copies (i.e. books) in exchange. William Facques, the
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first person in Britain to receive the grant, was appointed the King’s Printer in 1504 who had
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the right to print royal proclamations and statutes.
Later, the rapid growth of the middle-class reading market increased the demand for
secular books that the privilege system could not cover. Further, the granting of privileges to
individual publishers was likely to create competition among them. This could be harmful
to the newly emerging book publishing industry. To provide a comprehensive list of books
under privilege and patents, to encourage members of the trade to act collectively and to
diminish the influence of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Queen Mary and King
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Philip granted the trade guild, the Stationers’ Company, a Royal Charter in 1557. This
conferred the exclusive right of ‘printing any book or anything for sale or traffic’ on the
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Stationers’ Company. The 1557 Charter revived the 150-year-old trade guild, which was
again revitalised by the 1586 Star Chamber that entrusted the guild to give its members the
licence to print and sell particular books or categories of books.
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The prerogative and monopoly were undermined by the Civil War and the Interregnum.
Although the Stationers’ Company ultimately regained power under the 1662 Printing Act
(sometimes called the Licensing Act), the 1662 Act required the licencing arrangement
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to be governed by the Secretary of State rather than the Crown. This was the first time the
right to make copies was excluded from the royal prerogative system and fell under the

52 Ibid. 6.
53 Elizabeth L Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Change in Early-Modern
Europe (Cambridge University Press 1980).
54 Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 11.
55 Ibid.
56 Though the Company monopolised the British publishing industry during the golden age of the printing culture, the Company
was actually a product of the manuscript book trade formed several decades before Gutenberg printing. See Cyprian Blagden,
The Stationers’ Company: A History. 1403–1959 (Allen and Unwin 1960). The book trade was developed in Britain in
the fourteenth century and a trade guild, the Stationers’ Company, was formed to regulate the players, including scribes,
illuminators, book binders and booksellers. After the invention of typographic printing, printers replaced scribes and became
the major figures in the guild. Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 23-24.
57 Royal Charter of the Company of Stationers (1557) Queen Mary I of England <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Royal_
Charter_of_the_Company_of_Stationers> accessed 4 November 2018.
58 Oren Bracha, ‘The Adventures of the Statute of Anne in the Land of Unlimited Possibilities: The Life of a Legal Transplant’
(2010) 25 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1427, 1433.
59 Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 45.

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