Page 43 - 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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both the manuscript and copyright from authors. Because a few big publishers dominated
the publishing market, authors (except the most popular ones) had little bargaining power
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over royalties. From the perspective of the subject matter, only ‘books, maps, and charts’
were protected. Other categories of creations, such as music, plays, paintings and sculpture,
were left behind. Even though these creations could also help ‘encourage learning’ , at
the time the Statute of Anne was enacted, publishers only controlled the production and
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dissemination of ‘books, maps and charts’. From the perspective of the substantial term,
the ‘exclusive right to print, publish and vend’ remained essentially the same as the right
under the previous royal privilege and the internal regulations of the Stationers’ Company.
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This term had the same purpose of curbing piracy and preserving the order of the book trade
because ‘printing, publishing and vending’ were the principle means publishers used to
exploit their works.
The intermediary-oriented approach not only characterises the common law copyright
system modelled on the Statute of Anne, it is also manifested in the Continental-European
copyright system. The droit d’auteur tradition introduced French authors to the copyright
arena earlier than their British counterparts. However, it has never ignored the social and
economic dimensions of cultural creation, emphasising the publishers’ exploitation of
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cultural products. As Daniel Gervais observed, ‘it became clear that the purpose of the
droit d’auteur or Urheberrecht, in spite of its roots as a child of the Enlightenment and
its progeny of individual human rights, was to govern use by and between professionals,
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including authors, publishers and other commercial “exploiters” of copyrighted content’.
John Feather also found that publishers played a positive and significant role in French
copyright law, the same as they did in the UK, because both legal systems were derived from
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the mechanism of censorship with the right to copies as a by-product.
4) An intermediary-oriented copyright law to encourage learning
The intermediary-oriented approach of copyright, as a necessary result of the printing
press, does not violate copyright’s purpose of ‘encouraging learning’. Arguably, due to
the commercialisation of cultural production and the growth of the reading market, the
intermediary’s private interests have been in line with the interests of the authors and the

77 Vaidhyanathan (n 1) 11; Patterson and Lindberg (n 1) 113 (authors have never been regarded as the copyright owner by
legislators; otherwise the right to protect the integrity and paternity of work would have been incorporated into the Statute).
78 Feather, ‘Publishing, Piracy and Politics’ (n 48) 56.
79 Michael Landau, ‘Has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Really Created a New Exclusive Right of Access: Attempting to
Reach a Balance between Users' and Content Providers' Rights’ (2001) 49 Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA 277,
281-282.
80 Bracha (n 58) 1438.
81 Feather, ‘Publishing, Piracy and Politics’ (n 48) 3-4.
82 Daniel Gervais, ‘The Tangled Web of UGC: Making Copyright Sense of User-Generated Content’ (2008) 11 Vanderbilt
Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law 841, 847.
83 Feather, ‘Publishing, Piracy and Politics’ (n 48) 151.

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