The Original Bargain

8 Anne c. 19 · 1710 · Full text (UK National Archives)

Before the Statute

The Stationers' Company held a royal monopoly on printing in England. The Crown granted the monopoly; the Stationers enforced it. Copyright was not a right of authors. It was a mechanism of censorship. The Crown controlled what could be published, and the Stationers controlled who could publish it. Authors had no legal claim to their own work. A printer who bought a manuscript owned it forever.

The system worked for the Crown and for the Stationers. It did not work for authors, and it did not work for the public. Books were expensive. Reprints were suppressed not because they violated an author's rights but because they undercut a printer's monopoly. Knowledge circulated slowly, and the bottleneck was legal, not technological.

The deal

The Statute of Anne transferred copyright from publishers to authors and made it temporary. The terms were explicit: fourteen years of exclusive rights, renewable once for another fourteen if the author was still alive. After that, the work entered the public domain. No extensions. No exceptions.

The preamble states the purpose directly: "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books." The monopoly is not the point. The monopoly is the incentive. The point is the books, and the point of the books is that they eventually become free.

This is a bargain, not a gift. The public grants authors a temporary monopoly. In return, authors create works that the public will eventually own outright. Both sides give something up. Both sides gain. The fourteen-year term was the framers' answer to a specific question: how much monopoly is enough to incentivize creation without starving the public domain?

The fourteen-year term

Deliberately short. The framers understood something that later legislators chose to forget: knowledge has diminishing private value and increasing public value over time. A new book is worth the most to its author in the first years after publication. A book that has been read, discussed, and built upon for a generation is worth the most to the public. The fourteen-year term was a compromise calibrated to this asymmetry. Enough incentive to write. Not enough to hoard.

Twenty-eight years at most. Then the work is free. The public domain was not a side effect of the Statute. It was the destination. The temporary monopoly was the road.

What happened next

The term has been extended repeatedly. Fourteen years became twenty-eight. Twenty-eight became forty-two. Then life of the author plus fifty years. Then, in 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act pushed it to life plus seventy. For corporate works, ninety-five years from publication.

Each extension renegotiated the bargain in favor of rights holders. The logic was always the same: authors need more incentive. But the original framers had already answered that question. Fourteen years was enough. The extensions did not create more books. They kept existing books out of the public domain longer. The public's side of the bargain -- eventual ownership -- receded with every revision.

Nothing entered the US public domain between 1998 and 2019. Twenty-one years of enclosure. The explicit purpose of the original deal -- that knowledge returns to the commons -- was suspended for a generation.

The arc

Every subsequent paper in the collection breaks, defends, or renegotiates this bargain. Berners-Lee built a commons that made it urgent again. Brin and Page indexed it. Boyle named the enclosure. Lessig traced how fourteen years became forever.

Blog connection: Prometheus gave fire; the Statute of Anne gave a fourteen-year candle. The original bargain said knowledge returns to the commons. Copyleft says it never leaves. Free as in Fire