Copyright
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.
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Guests
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Lionel Bently No other episodes
Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge -
Will Slauter No other episodes
Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris - Katie McGettigan
2 episodes
Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London
Reading list
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Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century
Isabella Alexander (Hart Publishing, 2010) Google Books → -
Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law
Isabella Alexander and H. Tomas Gomez-Arostegui (eds) (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) Google Books → -
Who Owns this Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu (Mountain Leopard Press, 2024) Google Books → -
Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909
Oren Bracha (Cambridge University Press, 2016) Google Books → -
Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image
Elena Cooper (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Google Books → -
On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain, 1695-1775
Ronan Deazley (Hart Publishing, 2004) Google Books → -
Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language
Ronan Deazley (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006) Google Books → -
Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright
Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds.) (Open Book Publishers, 2010) Google Books → -
Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century
Marie-Stephanie Delamaire and Will Slauter (eds.) (Open Book Publishers, 2021) Google Books → -
American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869
Melissa Homestead (Cambridge University Press, 2005) Google Books → -
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Adrian Johns (University of Chicago Press, 2009) Google Books → -
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
Meredith L. McGill (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) Google Books → -
Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright
Mark Rose (Harvard University Press, 1993) Google Books → -
Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright
Mark Rose (Harvard University Press, 2018) -
Internationalisation of Copyright: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century
Catherine Seville (Cambridge University Press, 2006) -
The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law
Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Books → -
Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright
Will Slauter (Stanford University Press, 2019) Google Books → -
Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing and the Public Domain
Robert Spoo (Oxford University Press, 2013) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m002c3bm
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002c3bm
Auto-category: 346.0482 (Intellectual property law)