enalties for infringement. The booksellers
thought the terms of years meant no more than that the penalties were
to be limited by way of experiment to those periods.

Many years flew by before the Stationers' Company discovered the
mischief wrought by the statute they had themselves promoted. To cut a
long matter short, it was not until 1774 that the House of Lords
decided that, whether there ever had been a perpetuity in literary
property at common law or not, it was destroyed by the Act of Queen
Anne, and that from and after the passing of that law neither author,
assignee, nor proprietor of 'copy' had any exclusive right of
multiplication, save for and during the periods of time the statute
created.

It was a splendid fight--a Thirty Years' War. Great lawyers were fee'd
in it; luminous and lengthy judgments were delivered. Mansfield was a
booksellers' man; Thurlow ridiculed the pretensions of the Trade. It
can be read about in _Boswell's Johnson_ and in Campbell's _Lives of
the Lord Chancellors_. The authors stood supinely by, not contributing
a farthing towards the expenses. It was a booksellers' battle, and the
booksellers were beaten, as they deserved to be.

All this is past history, in which the modern money-loving, motoring
author takes scant pleasure. Things are on a different footing now.
The Act of 1842 has extended the statutory periods of protection. The
perpetuity craze is over. A right in perpetuity to reprint Frank
Fustian's novel or Tom Tatter's poem would not add a penny to the
present value of the copyright of either of those productions. In
business short views must prevail. An author cannot expect to raise
money on his hope of immortality. Milton's publisher, good Mr.
Symonds, probably thought, if he thought about it at all, that he was
buying _Paradise Lost_ for ever when he registered it as his 'copy' in
the books of his Company; but into the calculations he made to
discover how much he could afford to give the author posterity did not
and could not enter. How was Symonds to know that Milton's fame was to
outlive Cleveland's or Flatman's?

How many of the books published in 1905 would have any copyright cash
value in A.D. 2000? I do not pause for a reply.

The modern author need have no quarrel with the statutory periods
fixed by the Act of 1842,[A] though common-sense has long since
suggested that a single term, the author's life and thirty or forty
years after, should be substituted for t