In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law.
Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction.
Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence.
With:
Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge
Will Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris
Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Producer: Eliane Glaser
Reading list:
Isabella Alexander, Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Hart Publishing, 2010)
Isabella Alexander and H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui (eds), Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016)
David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns this Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Mountain Leopard Press, 2024)
Oren Bracha, Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Elena Cooper, Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain, 1695–1775 (Hart Publishing, 2004)
Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)
Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds.), Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright (Open Book Publishers, 2010)
Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter (eds.), Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century (Open Book Publishers, 2021)
Melissa Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1993)
Mark Rose, Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Catherine Seville, Internationalisation of Copyright: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Will Slauter, Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford University Press, 2019)
Robert Spoo, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing and the Public Domain (Oxford University Press, 2013)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production