Re: Thomas Jefferson's copyright term

On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> I am not sure if the above description is correct. According to
> Wheaton v. Peters in 1834, there were only twelve judges in the
> English court. In the case of Donaldson v. Beckett with one judge
> abstaining, there were several questions:
>
> 1) Whether an author has the right by the common law to first
> printing and publishing of his book? 10 said yes, 1 said no.
>
> 2) Whether the statute of Anne took away the author's right in
> printing and publishing his book? 7 said no, 4 said yes.
>
> These two questions suggests that an author has the perpetual
> right in printing and publishing by the common law. However:
>
> 3) Did the statute of Anne take away the author's right to bring
> an action to anyone (that is, to sue anyone) at the common law?
> 6 said yes, 5 said no. (For those who do not understand this,
> there are two different kinds of laws like in the U.S. One is
> called common law and other is called statutory law. In this
> case, the majority of judges ruled that the statute of Anne
> superseded the common law only in respect of the remedy.)

Just to confuse matters further, according to John Feather's authoritative book "Publishing Piracy and Politics", (Mansell, 1995) FIVE questions were put to the twelve judges in the House of Lords, and the figures for voting are not as Riolo reported.

Professor Charles Oppenheim
Dept of Information Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leics LE11 3TU

Tel 01509-223065
Fax 01509-223053
<c.oppenheim[_at_]lboro.ac.uk> Received on Mon Feb 15 1999 - 12:47:56 GMT