The Battle of the Booksellers: the 250th anniversary of Donaldson v Beckett

An event organised by UCL Institute of Brand & Innovation Law with The Stationers' Company
The panel
Professor Sir Robin Jacob (UCL IBIL)
Professor Hector MacQueen CBE (University of Edinburgh)
Catriona MacLeod Stevenson (Publishers Association)
Jaani Riordan (Stationer and a barrister at 8 New Square Chambers)
About this event
The Stationers’ Company played a pivotal role in the enactment of the world’s first copyright legislation in 1710 which is known simply as ‘the Statute of Anne’. Yet, the case of Donaldson v Beckett (1774) was a significant landmark in the protection of literary works and equally deserving of attention as we reach its 250th anniversary.
Although the new copyright act provided a monopoly for up to 28 years, London’s publishers then faced unwelcome competition from Scottish printers, whose trade was largely built upon the re-printing English books, once the statutory protection expired. A thirty-year campaign of litigation ensued - the ‘Battle of the Booksellers’. The London publishers seemed to have triumphed. They persuaded the English courts that the fixed term protection of the Statue of Anne merely supplemented the perpetual ‘common law’ protection that a first publisher already enjoyed. The copyright legislation could have become an irrelevance, but then Donaldson v Beckett turned the tide.
Following a hearing in February 1774, the House of Lords ruled that a Scottish printer, Alexander Donaldson, was entitled to print James Thomson’s The Seasons without requiring Beckett’s permission. The Lords put paid to any notion of ‘common law’ rights in published works. In doing so, they not only underlined that copyright protection is entirely a creature of statute but reminded that its rationale was not to further the commercial interests of publishers (or even authors) but to reflect broader societal goals, such as the ‘encouragement of learning’.
Now, 250 years later, have these lesson been forgotten? The term and scope of copyright protect seems to increase with each new piece of legislation. Have we returned to 'perpetual' copyright again in all but name? While the battles between booksellers may now be confined to history, the debate as to the proper balance between copyright holders and users is far from over. Technological developments continue to place the current law under strain. As the UKIPO consults on how much unauthorised 'text and data mining' copyright holders must tolerate, AI is only one in a long line of threats that now publishers face.
To mark the historic anniversary of Donaldson v Beckett, the UCL Institute of Brand and Innovation Law has joined forces with The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers (‘The Stationers’ Company’) to assemble a distinguished panel. They will reflect on Donaldson, and debate how much, or perhaps how little, the copyright challenges for publishers have changed.