The Accommodation of intellectual property law to the introduction of new technologies; Copyright and new technology; The Impact on the Law of Privacy, Antitrust and Free Speech Page: 38
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clause denies Congress the power to make any law to prohibit the
dissemination of ideas for political, that is for any, purpose.
The copyright clause and the free speech clause are thus
complementary, not conflicting.
Reason here is supported also by precedent in the creation
of statutory copyright in England, which was the progenitor of
the American copyright. The stationers' copyright in England was
a device of both monopoly and censorship, the latter because it
received its legal support only in decrees and acts of
censorship. For present purposes, the most important of these was
the Licensing Act of 1662.45 For it was the final demise of this
statute in 1694 that led to the enactment of the Statute of Anne
in 1709.46
As discussed above, the Statute of Anne was designed to
destroy and prevent the recurrence of the booksellers' monopoly
established by booksellers utilizing the stationers' copyright.
Whether by design or otherwise, the Statute of Anne also negated
the use of copyright for purposes of censorship. The point has
seldom been recognized, but the effect could hardly have been
otherwise, since the monopoly and censorship aspects of copyright
were too closely interrelated to be separated.
This point is made clearer when one realizes that the
provisions of the Statute of Anne were based on provisions in the
Licensing Act. And there are two sections of the Statute of Anne
that can be said to be anti-censorship provisions, section V and
section VII. Section V provided that nine copies of newly
copyrighted books were to be provided to various libraries, "the
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Patterson, L. R. The Accommodation of intellectual property law to the introduction of new technologies; Copyright and new technology; The Impact on the Law of Privacy, Antitrust and Free Speech, report, 1984; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc97422/m1/38/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.