Donaldson V Beckett - Facts

Facts

The first copyright statute was the Statute of Anne, 8 Anne c. 19 (1710), in which Parliament granted a fourteen-year term for a copyright, renewable once. Parliament also provided a special grandfather clause allowing those works already published to enjoy twenty-one years of protection. When the twenty-one years were up, the booksellers--for copyrights were held by publishers and booksellers, not authors--asked for an extension. Parliament declined to grant it.

Thwarted by Parliament, the booksellers turned to the courts for relief. They attempted to secure a ruling that there was a natural right to ownership of the copyright under the common law. The booksellers arranged a collusive lawsuit, Tonson v Collins, but the courts threw it out. A real lawsuit was brought, Millar v Taylor 4 Burr. 2303, 98 Eng. Rep. 201 (K.B. 1769), concerning infringement of the copyright on James Thomson's poem "The Seasons" by Robert Taylor, and the booksellers won a favourable judgement. (It helped that Lord Mansfield, the chief judge on the case, had previously been counsel to the booksellers.) An appeal was brought to the Lords, but the booksellers, fearing an adverse judgement there, settled.

Donaldson v Beckett was brought regarding the same poem at issue in Millar and an injunction was granted by the Court of Chancery on the precedent of Millar v. Taylor. An appeal from the Chancery decree was carried to the House of Lords, which at that time functioned as the United Kingdom's court of final appeal, in February 1774.