Feather's Right to Copyright - Jones

January, 18 2012        

John Feather’s “Rights in Copies to Copyright” focuses on the evolution of copyright laws in England. He follows a trail of documents from the earliest documented patents to the Copyright Act of 1814. Feather’s goal through his paper is to establish whether authors had claim to their works prior to the 1814 act. One topic Feather covers is the patents of “privileged books.” The main goal behind granting patents was to guarantee that the publisher earned money from the books by keeping the market narrow by restricting who could print it (192-193). Printing was also limited by the British monarch; nothing could be published unless it passed through crown appointed censors (195). The reason for this is clear, the government wanted to control what was printed to control what the people were reading, a perfectly normal practice back then and is still implemented in some countries today. This practice makes me wonder, how many authors back then created a manuscript only to have it rejected by the censors and so it was never read by the people. Is there a piece of literary genius that this world has missed out on because the crown wanted to control what types of things their citizens read?

In order for a text to be considered protected in the 16^th and 17^th century, each copy someone wanted protected had to be entered in the Register that was recorded and kept by the Company of Stationers. This signified that the person who registered it had sole rights to the document(s) he/she registered (198). Towards the end of his paper, Feather claims, “It would be perverse to claim that authors’ rights were widely recognized in pre-revolutionary England; it would be more accurate, although still perhaps a slight exaggeration, to suggest that they were dimly perceived” (208). Given the documents that Feather presents as a means of showing a timeline of patents and copyrights from this time periods, Feather is accurate in this assertion. Most of the patents and copyrights did not directly include the authors, but the printing companies. The printing companies did pay the authors for their manuscripts, and as Feather points out, this does show in some form a passing of ownership. But clearly, copyrights in this time period were to protect the printing companies’ sole right to print the texts. I like to think that modern copyrights authors have to protect their texts are to protect the integrity and quality of the work, no for mere profit.