| Millar v Taylor | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Decided | 20 April 1769 |
| Citation(s) | 4 Burr. 2303, 98 ER 201 |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | Lord Mansfield, Aston J, Willes J, Sir Joseph Yates |
| Keywords | |
| copyright, monopolies | |
Millar v Taylor (1769) 4 Burr. 2303, 98 ER 201 [1] is an English court decision that held there is a perpetual common law copyright and that no works ever enter the public domain. It represented a major victory for the bookseller monopolies.
Andrew Millar was a bookseller who in 1729 had purchased the publishing rights to James Thomson's poem The Seasons . After the term of the exclusive rights granted under the Statute of Anne expired, Robert Taylor began publishing his own competing publication, which contained Thomson's poem.
Following the creation of the first statutory copyright law in 1710 (via the Statute of Anne), as rights belonging to an author (rather than to printers or publishers), the lapse of the Licensing Act 1662 in 1695 and Parliament's refusal to renew the licensing regime (1695), the practice of the English publishing oligopoly had not changed much. Though the purpose of the new law was to break up the monopolies that had been created by the English Crown – which had served, in part, as a basis for the previous English Civil War – there had been relatively little success in weakening the hold of the Stationers' Company over the publishing industry. Despite the Statute of Anne's changes to the statutory law, some publishers continued to claim perpetual publishing rights under common law. Starting in the 1740s, London booksellers presented that argument in a series of court cases, after they had failed to convince Parliament to extend the statutory term of copyright.
The Court of the King's Bench, led by Lord Mansfield (with Aston and Willes JJ concurring in judgment, Sir Joseph Yates dissenting), sided with the publishers, finding that common law rights were not extinguished by the Statute of Anne. Under Mansfield's ruling, the publishers had a perpetual common law right to publish a work for which they had acquired the rights. Thus, no amount of time would cause the work to pass to the public. The ruling essentially found that some works would have a perpetual term of copyright, by holding that when the statutory rights granted by the statute expired, the publisher was still left with common law rights to the work. Although this would greatly extend the control of the rights holder this would not extinguish the public domain since there would still be works unaffected by the ruling, and the public domain extends to unprotected elements in protected works. Millar died shortly after the ruling and it was never appealed.
As an English court, however, the court's decision did not extend to Scotland, where a reprint industry continued to thrive. The existence of a common-law copyright, however, was later rejected by a Scottish court in Hinton v Donaldson . Perpetual copyright was ultimately resolved against the London publishing monopolies in the landmark case of Donaldson v Beckett . Despite being overturned, the case of Millar v Taylor remains an important case in the development and history of copyright law.
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
The Statute of Anne, also known as the Copyright Act 1710, was an act of the Parliament of Great Britain passed in 1710, which was the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties.
The history of copyright starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books. Over time other uses such as translations and derivative works were made subject to copyright and copyright now covers a wide range of works, including maps, performances, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, motion pictures and computer programs.
The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
Copyright misuse is an equitable defence to copyright infringement in the United States based upon the doctrine of unclean hands. The misuse doctrine provides that the copyright holder engaged in abusive or improper conduct in exploiting or enforcing the copyright will be precluded from enforcing his rights against the infringer. Copyright misuse is often comparable to and draws from the older and more established doctrine of patent misuse, which bars a patentee from obtaining relief for infringement when he extends his patent rights beyond the limited monopoly conferred by the law.
Common law copyright is the legal doctrine that grants copyright protection based on common law of various jurisdictions, rather than through protection of statutory law.
Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 591 (1834), was the first United States Supreme Court ruling on copyright. The case upheld the power of Congress to make a grant of copyright protection subject to conditions and rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright in published works. The Court also declared that there could be no copyright in the Court's own judicial decisions.
Donaldson v Becket (1774) 2 Brown's Parl. Cases 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257; 17 Cobbett's Parl. Hist. 953 is the ruling by the British House of Lords that held that copyright in published works was not perpetual but was subject to statutory limits. Some scholars disagree on the reasoning behind the decision.
Perpetual copyright can refer to a copyright without a finite term, or to a copyright whose finite term is perpetually extended. Perpetual copyright in the former sense is highly uncommon, as the current laws of all countries with copyright statutes set a standard limit on the duration, based either on the date of creation/publication, or on the date of the creator's death. Exceptions have sometimes been made, however, for unpublished works. Usually, special legislation is required, granting a perpetual copyright to a specific work.
Andrew Millar was a British publisher in the eighteenth century.
The Licensing of the Press Act 1662 was an Act of the Parliament of England with the long title "An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses". Having expired in 1695, it was officially repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 1863, which repealed a large set of superseded acts.
Motte v Faulkner was a copyright lawsuit between Benjamin Motte and George Faulkner over who had the legal rights to publish the works of Jonathan Swift in London. This trial was one of the first to test the Statute of Anne copyright law in regards to Irish publishing independence. Although neither held the copyright to all of Swift's works, the suit became a legal struggle over Irish rights, which were eventually denied by the English courts. Faulkner, in 1735, published the Works of Jonathan Swift in Dublin. However, a few of the works were under Motte's copyright within the Kingdom of Great Britain, and when Faulkner sought to sell his book in London, Motte issued a formal complaint to Jonathan Swift and then proceeded to sue Faulkner. An injunction was issued in Motte's favor, and the book was prohibited from being sold on British soil. The basis of the law protected the rights of the author, and not the publisher, of the works, and Swift was unwilling to support a lawsuit against Faulkner. With Swift's reaction used as a basis, the lawsuit was later seen as a struggle between the rights of Irishmen to print material that were denied under English law.
The Booksellers's Bill was a 1774 bill introduced into the Parliament of Great Britain in the wake of the important copyright case of Donaldson v. Beckett.
Gyles v Wilcox (1740) 26 ER 489 was a decision of the Court of Chancery of England that established the doctrine of fair abridgement, which would later evolve into the concept of fair use. The case was heard and the opinion written by Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, and concerned Fletcher Gyles, a bookseller who had published a copy of Matthew Hale's Pleas of the Crown. Soon after the initial publication, the publishers Wilcox and Nutt hired a writer named Barrow to abridge the book, and repackaged it as Modern Crown Law. Gyles sued for a stay on the book's publishing, claiming his rights under the Statute of Anne had been infringed.
Alexander Donaldson was a Scottish bookseller, publisher, and printer. Donaldson was the founding publisher of the weekly newspaper, the Edinburgh Advertiser. He was also known for selling cheap copies of books after their copyright had expired in disregard to London booksellers' opinions on literary property.
Thomas Osborne was an English publisher and bookseller noted for his association with author Samuel Johnson and his purchase of the library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford.
The copyright law of the United States has a long and complicated history, dating back to colonial times. It was established as federal law with the Copyright Act of 1790. This act was updated many times, including a major revision in 1976.
Hinton v Donaldson was a case by which the Court of Session rejected the claim that copyright in Scots law existed beyond the limited term which had been introduced under the Statute of Anne.
Paige v. Banks, 80 U.S. 608 (1872), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held an agreement that transfers a copyright from the original author to a second party for perpetuity does not end with the statutory limit of copyright at the time the parties made the deal. If a later act of Congress extends copyright and the extension is available to the work, the second party still controls the copyright or perpetual license to that copyright.