Libervis: Copyright… Copywrong

“The first copyright law, in the modern sense, was the English
Statute of Anne, enacted in 1709. It granted exclusive rights to
authors, rather than publishers, and it included protections for
consumers of printed works, ensuring that publishers could not
control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such
exclusive rights to 28 years (14 years with an optional renewal),
after which all works would pass into the public domain.

“The purpose of the Statute of Anne, from the text itself, was
to protect the author from unscrupulous publishers who would
reprint and profit from the author’s work without consent or
compensation and thus lead ‘too often to the Ruin of them and their
Families…'”

Complete
Story