Revisiting the Royal Commission on Copyright

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jwip.12019
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Date: 01 March 2014
• Author: Barbara Lauriat

Revisiting the Royal Commission on Copyright

Barbara Lauriat

King’s College London

The Royal Commission on Copyright, which reported in 1878, had the formidable task of scrutinizing the existing

copyright regime from fundamental principles to minor details—on an international scale as well as on a domestic.

The resulting Report and Minutes informed copyright debates in their time and decades after; they are now valuable

resources for today’s copyright scholars and book historians. This article addresses some modern accounts of the

Commission in the academic literature on copyright and publishing history. In particular, it analyses the contribution

of Sir Louis Mallet, placing it in the context of his broader economic views and free trade ideology in order to consider

critically the uses that recent works of copyright history have made of Mallet’s Dissent and the Commission Report.

Keywords copyright history; publishing history; free trade; nineteenth century

The Royal Commission on Copyright

We have a commission, appointed by a Conservative Government and presided over by a

Conservative peer, recommending a form of legislation with regard to literary property which

is denounced as the most pernicious communism when applied to land; and, while the

measure of our earlier history, concerning “forestallers and regraters,” and fixing the price of

bread and other material necessaries, are considered as monuments of the obsolete errors of

our less enlightened ancestors, we find the same commission in effect advising that the price

of literary commodities should be fixed by the state. (Scrutton, 1883, pp. 1–2).

The novelist Anthony Trollope’s autobiography, written in 1875, though published posthumously in

1883, warned: “Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away

from England her authors” (Trollope, 1883, p. 107). In hindsight, one might find his concern about the

survival of English copyright misplaced. Statutory copyright had existed in England since 1710; the

concept of literary property was of an even older vintage. The scope and duration of the copyright regime

had increased during the intervening years rather than otherwise. In fact, as intellectual property scholars

regularly observe, the reach of statutory copyright has tended to increase since its inception. In the middle

of what we view from our contemporary position as the steady, inexorable growth of a copyright regime

over the course of several hundred years, why was Trollope worried about copyright abolition? So worried

that he included a posthumous plea for the existence of copyright law in his autobiography?

The simple answer is that Trollope was worried because he believed that the greatness of the English

literature of his day was dependent on the law of copyright, and he was aware from having served on the

Royal Commission on Copyright that in the 1870s there existed a concerted effort, largely from within the

Civil Service, to alter the face of British copyright law as it was known.

The Government appointed the Royal Commission in 1876 to inquire into the British law of

copyright.

1

It was composed of prominent men from varied backgrounds; its membership included

politician Lord John Manners, civil servant Sir Louis Mallet, composer Sir Julius Benedict, jurist,

philosopher, and journalist James Fitzjames Stephen, and historian and biographer James Anthony

Froude. Thomas Henry Farrer, Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade had long been the Board of

Trade’s copyright expert; he was appointed to the first Commission, withdrawing from participation in the

©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 47

The Journal of World Intellectual Property (2014) Vol. 17, no. 1–2, pp. 47–59

doi: 10.1002/jwip.12019