Page 42 - 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

The pre-publication censorship and the monopolistic powers bestowed on the Stationers’
Company were opposed to the Parliament’s desire to foster a well-educated middle class
buttressed by sufficiently incentivised authors with freedom of speech that would lead to
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adequate cultural creation. The commercialisation of printing encouraged the publishers to
produce a proposal in line with the considerations of the Parliament and all other parties.
The censorship barrier was easy to surmount because publishers wanted to have the
ownership to copies, not censorship. The problem was that the royal privilege system
regarded the right to own copies as a by-product of censorship. However, given that the
privilege system had been abandoned, it was time for the publishers to drop this historical
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burden. The concern over monopoly was addressed by the publishers’ strategy of portraying
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the authors as copyright owners who could transfer the copyright to any publisher. This
strategy recognised the authors’ growing ideological value, arising from the increased
demand for new books from the rapidly developing reading market. Importantly, it did not
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substantially harm the interests of the publishers. Shortly after the invention of the printing
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press, publishers had begun to purchase original manuscripts from authors. The passage
of the proposed solution would merely require the publisher to obtain the manuscript along
with its copyright. Given the strong bargaining power publishers had over authors, the new
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practice would not substantially generate additional cost for the publishers. Although an
author could determine the publisher to whom she/he wanted to transfer his/her copyright,
big publishers with a stronger ability to mass-produce and self-finance could propose terms
that were more appealing to authors and thus continue to dominate the publishing market.
The proposed solution quickly gained support from the Parliament, which passed a bill
formally titled ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning by Vesting the Copies of Printed
Books in the Authors or Purchasers of Copies, during the Times therein mentioned’. This
became known as the Statute of Anne or the Copyright Act 1710.
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Despite its claim that it encouraged learning, the Statute of Anne was underpinned by
a publishing intermediary-oriented approach. As the pre-emption claimed, the Statute ‘was
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essentially the booksellers’ law’ with the purpose of bringing order to the book trade.
From the perspective of rights holders, although authors were written into the statute as the
copyright owners, to a large extent they were ‘strawmen’ for the publishers who obtained

69 Bracha (n 58) 1435.
70 Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 55.
71 II, 8 Anne, c. 19 (1710).
72 Bracha (n 58) 1431.
73 Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 27.
74 Arthur Simons Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being A Study of the Relation between Author, Patron, Publisher,
and Public, 1726-1780 (London, Holden 1927) 39.
75 Statute of Anne - Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne> (accessed March 24, 2019); 8 Ann. c. 21; or 8
Ann. c. 19.
76 Feather, ‘A History of British Publishing’ (n 34) 76.

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