V. A Note on English Copyright Records
England was the first country to institute statutory copyright, in the
famous Statute of Anne of 4 April 1710 (8 Anne, ch. 19). Before that time
the closest counterpart to copyright was the control which the Stationers'
Company exercised over the printing of books by its members, but this
regulation did not resemble the modern concept of copyright, since it was
designed as protection for the printer rather than the author. Nevertheless,
the requirement of entering titles in an official register maintained by the
Stationers' Company has resulted in records of great bibliographical value
similar to those which are produced by a system of copyright registration.
The registers covering the years 1554 through 1708 were transcribed and
published many years ago[41] and are
well known to bibliographers, as are the published records of the Court of
the Stationers' Company between 1576 and 1640.[42] The bibliographical importance of
these materials has long been recognized, and extracts from them were
published by J. P. Collier as early as 1853;[43] since that time several important
bibliographical
publications relating to the period before 1710, by such scholars as Rollins,
Greg, and McKenzie, have been based on records at Stationers' Hall.
[44] Anyone interested in pursuing the
complications of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English copyright
should acquaint himself with the papers available in Stationers' Hall, as
listed in the
Library, 4th ser., VI (1925-26), 349-57,
[45] as well as with certain basic work
in this
area: Harry Ransom has recounted, in historical terms, the operation of
English copyright before the act of 1710;
[46] Leo Kirschbaum has described
"The
Stationers' Company in Operation" and has helped to clarify the difficult
relationship of registration to both license and copyright;
[47] and W. W. Greg has taken up in
detail
the bibliographical implications of the records of the Stationers'
Company.
[48] Although
problems remain to be solved, it is clear that the essential researches of
these and a few other scholars
[49] have
provided a
fuller treatment, from a bibliographical and literary point of view, of this
period than of any other in Anglo-American copyright history.
The act of 1710 is the principal dividing line in the story of English
copyright: it provided for a copyright term of fourteen years, renewable for
14 more (but not clearly established as author's, rather than printer's,
copyright until 1769 in Millar v. Taylor); it
made
prepublication title entry in the register of the Stationers' Company a
statutory requirement; and it stipulated that nine deposit copies be furnished
upon demand (for the Royal Library [later the British Museum], the
university libraries at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St.
Andrews, the Library of the King's and Marischal Colleges Aberdeen, Sion
College London, and the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh).
Although the force of the Stationers' Company declined after the lapsing of
the Printing (or Licensing) Act in 1695,[50] the stationers continued, even after
the
1710 act, to turn copyright to their own advantage, through trade boycotts
and
court injunctions. Their contention that common-law copyright still obtained
for any work after the expiration of its term of statutory protection was
finally invalidated in the case of Donaldson v.
Becket (1774), and a stream of cheap reprints followed.[51] The upshot of this situation for
bibliographers in search of records is that the "Entry Books of Copies" at
Stationers' Hall for the eighteenth century[52] (with a printed index 1710-73, a
manuscript index thereafter) are even less full than those for the earlier
years: stationers before 1774 considered their copyrights perpetual by
common law; after 1798 (Beckford v. Hood)
they
saw that failure to register prevented only suits for the statutory penalties,
not the more important suits for damages; and, in addition, they felt that by
not registering they were not obligated to provide copies for the depository
libraries, even though the
Universities Copyright Act of 1775 (15 Geo. III, ch. 53) emphasized the
requirement of prepublication registration and deposit. The records at
Stationers' Hall from 1814 through 1841 have a slightly different
significance for bibliographers: because the 1814 amendment to the
copyright law (54 Geo. III, ch. 156) required that entry be made within one
month after publication (rather than before publication), only works actually
published are listed during this time.
The next major revision of the copyright law, the act of 1842 (5
&
6 Vict., ch. 45), made the copyright term 42 years (or the life of the author
plus seven years, whichever was longer), and it reenforced the requirement
of registration at Stationers' Hall. The copyright registers and related
documents which accumulated in the administration of this act, covering the
period 1842-1923, are now in the Public Record Office, not Stationers'
Hall. The entries in them fall far short of constituting a national
bibliography, for understandably many publishers still did not bother with
registration; it was not a condition of copyright, and, in case of a suit for
infringement, it need be performed only before the actual court
proceedings. But the records are worth checking, for American as well as
English books, if one keeps in mind the fact that the entry may occur long
after the date of publication. Indexes exist for the entire period, in seven
segments, giving the date of entry and the
date of publication for each work registered. The first five volumes,
covering 1842-1907, have been published as the Index of
Entries (1896-1907) and are available in many reference libraries;
the
remaining years, 1907-23, are covered in six unpublished manuscript
volumes in the Public Record Office. All eleven are listed here with the
index numbers assigned them by the Public Record Office:
- 1842-1884 (literary): Ind 16908 (titles)
- 1842-1884 (commercial): Ind 16915 (titles)
- 1884-1897: Ind 16909 (titles, with author-publisher
index)
- 1897-1902: Ind 16910 (titles, with author-publisher
index)
- 1902-1907: Ind 16911 (titles, with author-publisher
index)
- 1907-1911: Ind 16912 (titles), 16913 (authors), 16914
(publishers)
- 1911-1923: Ind 20293 (titles), 20294 (authors), 20295
(publishers)
These indexes furnish the same information that is available in the original
registers; but if one wishes to check the original entries, the next step is to
ask at the Assistant's desk in the Long Room for the typewritten
Guide to the Records of the Copyright Office (classified as
ff.
78), which indicates the dates covered by each of the registers (Ind 5791
through 5869).
[53] It is also possible
to send for the original copyright entry forms, stored at Ashridge (classified
as Copyright 1/567
through 887, and designated by year in the
Guide.) After 2
July
1883 copyright assignments are entered separately (Ind 5870-5872, indexed
by Ind 6005-6007), as are certain foreign entries after 1854.
[54] Other materials from this period
in the
Public Record Office, particularly papers relating to copyright suits, can
furnish publication data of value to bibliographers. By checking the bills of
complaint (in C.14) and the cause books (C.32) — as well as the
depositions (C.24) and affidavits (C.31) at Ashridge — one can
discover,
for example, the publication dates of the Routledge piracies of Melville and
Irving.
The act of 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. V, ch. 46), which made the term
of
copyright (for unpublished as well as published works) the lifetime of the
author plus fifty years, abolished the statutory requirement for registration,
although this requirement remained in force in some parts of the United
Kingdom (e.g., Canada) through 1923. Voluntary registration was still
possible, however, and entries made on this basis since 1 January 1924 are
in registers at Stationers' Hall. But the new law retained a provision for
deposit, emphasizing the split between registration and deposit which had
prevailed throughout English copyright history. A sort of deposit system
had existed as early as 1610 in an arrangement Thomas Bodley had made
with the Stationers' Company, and the Printing Act of 1662 had required
the deposit of three copies (for the Royal Library and the universities at
Oxford and Cambridge). The list of nine copies established by the 1710 act
was increased by two in 1801 (41 Geo. III,
ch. 107), with the addition of Trinity College and the Society of the King's
Inns, Dublin; then in 1836 (6 & 7 Will. IV, ch. 110) the four Scottish
universities were removed from the list; and in 1842 (followed by the 1911
act) only six depository libraries were designated: the British Museum,
Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin, the Library of the Faculty of
Advocates in Edinburgh (after 1925 the National Library of Scotland), and
the National Library of Wales. The number of places to look for deposit
copies thus varies with the period and, in addition, with the requirements
of particular libraries, since copies were to be deposited upon request by the
libraries. The necessity of depositing on demand, however, was not limited
to registered books; after 1812 the interpretation of the law was that the
deposit provision applied to
all books published in England, whether or not they were entered at
Stationers' Hall.
[55] Libraries often
mark the date of receipt in books; the British Museum began this practice
in 1833 (the exact day from 1837 forward), stamping copyright deposit
copies in blue and colonial copyright deposits in black.
[56] Since dated deposit copies may
exist for
books which were never registered, both sources — official registers
and
depository libraries — should always be checked. English copyright
records, at least after 1710, are not particularly complex and for much of
the period are conveniently indexed in printed form; at the same time they
are not especially full and represent an unpredictable sampling of the
national literary output.
