Donaldson v Becket
Donaldson v Beckett, 2 Brown's Parl. Cases 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257 (1774); 17 Cobbett's Parl. Hist. 953 (1813) is the ruling by the British House of Lords that denied the continued existence of a perpetual common law copyright and held that copyright was a creation of statute and could be limited in its duration.
Facts
The first copyright statute was the Statute of Anne, 8 Anne c. 19 (1710), in which Parliament granted a fourteen year term for a copyright, renewable once. Parliament also provided a special grandfather clause allowing those works already published to enjoy twenty-one years of protection. When the twenty-one years were up, the booksellers--for copyrights were held by publishers and booksellers, not authors--asked for an extension. Parliament declined to grant it.
Thwarted by Parliament, the booksellers turned to the courts for relief. They attempted to secure a ruling that there was a natural right to ownership of the copyright under the common law. The booksellers arranged a collusive lawsuit, Tonson v Collins, but the courts threw it out. A real lawsuit was brought, Millar v Taylor 4 Burr. 2303, 98 Eng. Rep. 201 (K.B. 1769), concerning infringement of the copyright on James Thomson's poem "The Seasons" by Robert Taylor, and the booksellers won a favorable judgment. (It helped that Lord Mansfield, the chief judge on the case, had previously been counsel to the booksellers.) An appeal was brought to the Lords, but the booksellers, fearing an adverse judgement there, settled.
Donaldson v Beckett was brought regarding the same poem at issue in Millar and an injunction was granted by the Court of Chancery on the precedent of Millar v. Taylor. An appeal from the Chancery decree was carried to the House of Lords, which functions as the United Kingdom's court of final appeal, in February 1774. Lord Camden was scathing in his ruling in the Lords.
The arguments attempted to be maintained on the side of the respondents, were founded on patents, privileges, Star Chamber decrees, and the bye (sic) laws of the Stationers' Company; all of them the effects of the grossest tyranny and usurpation; the very last places in which I should have dreamt of finding the least trace of the common law of this kingdom; and yet, by a variety of subtle reasoning and metaphysical refinements, have they endeavored to squeeze out the spirit of the common law from premises in which it could not possibly have existence.
Seven months previously, in the case of Hinton v. Donaldson, the Scots Court of Session had ruled that copyright did not exist in the common law of Scotland, so that Alexander Donaldson might publish Thomas Stackhouse's New History of the Holy Bible. Attorney General Thurlow referred to the Scottish case during the consideration of Donaldson v. Beckett:
[Attorney-General Thurlow] concluded his speech with a compliment to his learned coadjutor, and a hope, that as the lords of session in Scotland had freed that country from a monopoly which took its rise from the chimerical idea of the actuality of literary property, their lordships, whom he addressed, would likewise, by a decree of a similar nature, rescue the cause of literature and authorship from the hands of a few monopolizing booksellers.
Legal issues
Thus the Lords rejected the notice of a perpetual copyright and held that it had not previously existed before the Statute of Anne and older works fall into the public domain and are available to everyone when the copyright term expires. "Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated," wrote Camden.
In the course of their consideration of the case, the Lords addressed to the judges of the King's Bench the following questions for their comment:
1. "Whether, at common law, an author of any book or literary composition, had the sole right of first printing and publishing the same for sale, and might bring an action against any person who printed, published, and sold the same, without his consent?[1]
The judges answered this question in the affirmative with a vote of ten to one.
2. "If the author had such right originally, did the law take it away upon his printing and publishing such book or literary composition, and might any person afterward reprint and sell, for his own benefit, such book or literary composition, against the will of the author?[1]
The judges answered this question in the negative with a vote of seven to four.
3. "If such action would have lain at common law, is it taken away by the statute of 8th Anne: and is an author, by the said statute, precluded from every remedy except on the foundation of the said statute, and on the terms and conditions prescribed thereby?"[1]
According to Burrow's report of the case, this question was answered affirmatively, six to five. However, some historians believe that the tallies in Burrow's report are incorrect, and that a majority of the judges held that a common-law copyright was not "taken away" by the statute.[2]
The opinions of the judges were advisory only, whether they favored a common-law right of literary property or not. In the end, the full house voted to dissolve the injunction against Donaldson. But because only a few of the lords spoke, and because of the confusion over the opinions of the judges of the King's Bench, the resulting decision was able to be interpreted as consistent with the view that a common law perpetual copyright may have existed before the Statute of Anne was passed, but that any such right was entirely precluded by the statute, though some of the lords (such as Lord Camden) clearly believed that no such common-law right had ever existed. In any case, perpetual copyright was effectively ended as a legal concept in Britain.
Influence
Later that year, UK booksellers sought to extend their statutory copyright to 14 years through the Booksellers' Bill but, having passed the House of Commons, the bill was defeated in the Lords.[3] In 1834, the United States Supreme Court essentially followed the House of Lords' decision in Donaldson with Wheaton v. Peters, rejecting any perpetual common law copyright in favor of the statutory instrument still in existence today..
References
Bibliography
- Paul Goldstein. Copyright's Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
- Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
- Lyman Ray Patterson. Copyright in Historical Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
- Lyman Ray Patterson and Stanley W. Lindberg. The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991
- Rose, M. (1988). "The author as proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the genealogy of modern authorship". Representations. 23: 51–85.