Page 41 - 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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jurisdiction of parliamentary legislation. The power of the Crown was further ceded to the
Parliament after the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689). The new government, intending to
foster a middle-class reading public, preferred a free press to pre-publication censorship, and
in 1695 it declined to renew the 1662 Printing Act.
The expiration of royal privileges led to both the collapse of the Stationers’ Company
and the secularisation and further commercialisation of the printing industry. Many members
left the Stationers’ Company to work on their own, establishing small enterprises all over
the country, not just in London. However, due to the vast amount of upfront investment, the
publishers with stronger capability in production and financing could easily exclude weaker
61
businesses from the competition. Small businesses were integrated into big publishers, and
provincial publishers became the paid agents of the publishers who were located in central
62
London. The right to make copies was ultimately concentrated in the hands of these newly
formed alliances, which gradually transformed the early modern book trade into a publishing
industry. Meanwhile, spurred by the growing demand from the reading public, unfair
63
competition and piracy became rampant. This forced the publishers to again seek official
recognition of their exclusive right to print and sell books, just as they had done two hundred
years earlier.
3) The origin of the Statute of Anne
The Statute of Anne was the first modern copyright law, and its origins have sparked
heated debates. Lyman Patterson asserted that the Statute came from the Parliament’s desire
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to attack the monopoly of the Stationers’ Company. John Feather credited its emergence to
65
the strategy of the Stationers’ Company to retain its power. Carla Hesse suggested that the
Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne to readjust the balance between the authors, London
stationers, provincial printers and booksellers and the reading public. This position was
66
67
endorsed by Ronan Deazley. This thesis argues that all of these factors were intended to
bring order and stability to the book trade, which were conducive to the origin of the Statue
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of Anne.
The first proposal the publishers introduced was to revive the 1662 Act. Unsurprisingly,
this failed for the same reasons the Parliament had given when it refused to renew it in 1695.

60 Ibid. 46.
61 Ibid. 49-50.
62 Ibid. 62.
63 Ibid. 52.
64 Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (n 51) 5-6.
65 Feather, ‘Publishing, Piracy and Politics’ (n 48) 88.
66 Hesse (n 19) 32.
67 Ronan Deazley, ‘The Myth of Copyright at Common Law’ (2003) 62 Cambridge Law Journal 106, 108.
68 Isabella Alexander, Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury Publishing 2010) 18;
Bracha (n 58) 1431.

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