Statute of Anne

The Statute of Anne received royal assent on 5 April 1710 and took effect on 10 April that year, and it is recognized as the first statute anywhere to provide for copyright regulated by government and the courts rather than by the private rules of a trade guild, ending the Stationers' Company's long-standing monopoly over the printing trade. It vested copyright in authors rather than publishers for the first time, granting a term of fourteen years for works published after its commencement, renewable for a further fourteen years if the author was still living, with a twenty-one year term for works already in print, and it provided that works would enter the public domain once their copyright expired. It applied across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Historians describe it as a watershed in Anglo-American copyright history, the moment copyright shifted from a publishers' private-law monopoly into a public-law grant, and its underlying utilitarian rationale is still cited by courts and scholars today.