Origins of Copyright – Part 3 – Advent of the Public Domain
As copyright protections under Anne began to expire, some printers began manufacturing and selling inexpensive copies of books which no longer enjoyed monopoly protection under the Statute, undercutting the prices being asked by the Company of Stationers member print houses. Company printers and booksellers continued to insist on the existence of a perpetual right to copy despite the limitation period in the Statute of Anne. They argued that while protection might be limited under the Statute, some species of eternal common law copyright must exist, and that the Statute did not function to extinguish that right…