Revisiting the Royal Commission on Copyright

Abstract

The Royal Commission on Copyright, which reported in 1878, had the formidable task of scrutinizing the copyright regime from fundamental principles to minor details — on an international scale as well as on a domestic. The resulting Report and Minutes informed copyright debates in their time and decades after; they are now valuable resources for today’s copyright scholars and book historians. This article addresses some modern accounts of the Commission in the academic literature on copyright and publishing history. In particular, it analyzes the contribution of Sir Louis Mallet, placing it in the context of his broader economic views and free trade ideology in order to consider critically the uses that recent works of copyright history have made of Mallet’s Dissent and the Commission Report. (This piece won the 2013 ATRIP Essay Competition).

Keywords: legal history; copyright; royal commission; copyright history; intellectual property; free trade; Cobden