Among the many scraps that have broken out on these shores, one that never seems to get the air time it deserves is a historic tussle that took place over a period of three decades of the mid-18th century, known as The Battle of the Booksellers. While it’s enticing to imagine that this was a war fought by grey-haired men in half-moon spectacles, firing copies of Paradise Lost at each other across the High Street and dropping heavy, leather-bound volumes of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language on each other’s heads from a great height, it was actually a battle fought mostly in the courts and the bounty at stake was copyright.
The spark that lit the blue touchpaper was a law passed in 1710 called The Statute of Anne, after the incumbent monarch, who reigned from 1702 to 1714. Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, succeeded William and Mary, her sister, with whom she had fallen out previously over her wild spending, choice of friends. There is no record of broken necklaces but we can assume.
Anyway, the Statute of Anne was passed to sort out the mess that had arisen over copyright ever since William Caxton introduced the printing press to Britain a century and a half earlier. In order to control the spread of heretical literature and anti-royal propaganda, the Crown had assigned the Stationers’ Company to control the censorship and copyright of all published literature, with the result that authors were routinely diddled out of their dues.
The Statute of Anne – ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’ – assigned copyright to the author rather than the publisher for the first time in history. Over the next century, it was expanded to encompass other creative types, such as engravers, cloth designers, sculptors, artists and playwrights.
By the way, did you know that if you were to go digging in your garden – say you were preparing the ground for potatoes or burying the dog – and you happened to discover gold or silver, it wouldn’t be yours? (I mean the gold or silver, not the dog). All the gold and silver mined in the UK belongs to the Crown. I know! Like they haven’t got enough.
This has been the state of play since Henry VI was on the throne. A law passed in six hundred years ago decrees that anyone who finds gold or silver on their land has to make a payment to the Crown for the right to mine it. Hence ‘royalty payment’. After the Statute of Anne and the ensuing Battle of the Booksellers, the storm that had ravaged the publishing industry abated and the term ‘royalty’ was adopted for the fair payments made to authors for their works. Thanks to the battles fought among the bookshelves all those years ago, authors today can receive huge royalty payments, even when they are no longer royalty.
